Bridging the future can be, and has been an amorphous task. For many the future is something that is “out there”; something that we can’t control; something that we can’t even influence. For many, the future is something that happens to us. For Fisher/Israel, we see the future as a reality that is both nonlinear and nondeterministic. The future, rather than being determined by the past emerges out of the contexts, structures and meanings we bring to our lives as individuals and as members of community. In short, the emerging future is bridged by our consciousness. The different orders of consciousness each of us has becomes our bridge to where we want to go, and sometimes a bridge to where we don’t want to go. For some, that consciousness may even be a bridge to nowhere!
The Bridge may be viewed from different approaches: it may be the practices we engage in that brings meaning (or lack thereof) to our world; it may be the contexts of our lives on which the current and future structures of our lives is grounded; our Bridge may be that which allows us to change our conventional ways of knowing through mindful practices – but whatever approach we take to our Bridge, we are all on one.
Crossing ones Bridge to the future is a mindful engagement of ones everyday circumstances – the surrounds of our lives out of which a myriad of possibilities emerge. The possibilities that become evident because our view of living is seen through the frame of the context, structure and emergent meanings and not through the frame of the past events in our lives; it is our radical decisions to act on new and emerging possibilities that are different from conventional expectations that allow us to progress over our Bridge to the Future.
Bridging the Future through conscious decisions helps us to become the humans we want to become by providing the possibilities of affecting positive changes in the world and in our relationships through changing our inner conditions and patterns of thought. In short, consciousness not only frames the questions that provide the possibilities but is also the bridge to an emergent future that is ripe with new possibilities and potentialities.
