I’ve felt a kindred spirit with Madeleine L’Engle since the moment I met Meg Murry in third grade, and I have a shelf full of (almost) all of her books in my bedroom. The quotes posted by the FB page devoted to her this past week are, like A Wrinkle in Time in grade school, making me feel un-alone. This one maybe especially so: I pray for the courage to mourn so that I may be strengthened.

My friend, futurist Juli Rush, works in this space, teaching and researching the art of properly grieving unfulfilled futures so that we can be open to the work of intervening in the present systems to pull the next preferred future into the present. I wish I’d had her framework and vocabulary for framing in 2016 because my refusal to properly grieve exacerbated anxiety and made me far less effective (and sane) than I might have been with better tools.

I was in a meeting yesterday where the convening futurist described the present moment as one of “epistemological rupture” and it resonated deeply. The ways of knowing from before Tuesday are gone and we find ourselves in a liminal space where we get to help determine the new ways. We can leave that to the new administration, or we can gird up and grieve properly, and thus have the strength and freedom imagine novelty, worlds in which…. inequity is vanquished, women are people, preserving the sanctity of the environment is paramount, borders are open, everyone, but everyone, is guaranteed a home and health care and education and the tools to thrive doing what they love and loving whomever they love.

I’m still learning how to use signals from today to cast visions of possible futures, but it’s not a skill that is siloed up in the marbled halls of academia, and this is the thread of hope that I can send out today…. mourn the loss of the immediate future that we imagined with a different election outcome. Grieve fully, because we have lost an immeasurable amount of security and our intrinsic rights to be fully human are absolutely diminished. But then begin to imagine again. Look for signals of change in the present that might be harbingers of even better, more free and integrated futures. Spin stories. Live a new narrative, one that weaves the crisis of the present into beautiful life-giving futures.

I’ve been saying for the past eight years that it feels like we’re living in adjacent and see-through/hear-through but clearly separate realities, where what I know to be true and what the other half of the country knows to be true are at absolute odds, and it’s been confusing and my inability to understand it made it fury-inducing. But looking at that phenomenon as an epistemological rupture gives me a way to look at it as a lost present-future, one which I can choose to grieve, and then use as fertile (?) ground to imagine and share and work like hell to bring better narratives of preferred futures into the squishy present. The reframing doesn’t make the present easier. This is going to be a horrifying time. But grabbing onto the kite tails of signals of change and pulling those promised better futures into the present… that feels better than screaming into the void, better than screaming at christians who lied to me for decades (yes, still working on properly grieving all of that), better than screaming at narcissists and people driven by fear and hate.

Foresight is a really weird pool in which to find myself swimming. Most futurists seem to be realistic optimists, and I’m pretty sure my overall demeanor has never been described as any sort of optimist. But I’m always surprised by the depths of my grief when things my Eeyore/shadow self has been Cassandra-ing come to pass, which means I have depths of hope that I apparently hide from myself. There’s a term coined by Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future , Urgent Optimists, that I love because it allows for hope in the face of an urgent and real and unvarnished present. That’s my present ethos, one that allows me to acknowledge a horrific present, grieve the hope of a future that has been excised, and then do the hard work of identifying and amplifying hopeful signals of the best possible futures AND work to pull those futures into the present by fitting them into the intervention points of the systems that govern us. This is how I choose to #resist this time.