Day 40 - 9th Feb
GET IN THE DELOREAN
To live
As though experience was firsthand
Gull-wing opens
What compels me to go?
Forward and outward?
Curiosity competes
With the pantheon
Of higher-order things
No end of strife does it bring
Grow
Everything is just trying to grow
Should I go? They say
I don't know
Truly
I don't know
"It might open up a can of worms."
Tip the can on soil and let ravens pick them
Something minuscule will turn now
Above and below us
We are loam
For trees not yet conceived
Niall Campbell
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I once had a client who came to me to stop smoking. He was very hypnotically gifted, so when he was well and truly under—his mind plastic and playful enough—I introduced my main therapeutic tool.
He was about my age, so I knew the Back to the Future reference would land without much qualifier. I even made a little whoosh sound as the gull-wing door rose up.
"I'm in, Doc! Let's fuckin' go!"
I am not a doctor, so I knew he was under when he said that—I had become Doc, the bumbling sidekick.
I gunned the DeLorean up High Street, and we hit 88 mph moments before the wall of the clock tower. The flux capacitor kicked in, and we were on our way.
When we got there, I said, "Where are we?"
(Whenever I open the door to the future for my clients, I never really know the exact destination).
"At my daughter's wedding."
I quickly did the maths—his daughter was a toddler, so we must have jumped a few decades at least.
"A proud day. Are you walking her down the aisle?"
Then, unannounced and primordial, his tears came. And came. And came.
I waited. He would speak next, and he could take as long as he needed.
"It's her dad. It's her dad!" he said. "Her dad is walking her down the aisle."
"Why? Where are you?"
"I'm watching from the balcony. I'm a fuckin' ghost, Doc!"
I told him to tell me when he wanted to leave. He indicated, and I brought the car around. I reoriented him to the present moment, time, and space—into which he now emerged…
…as a non-smoker.
"Habit hacks" and behavioural strategies and all the rest of it are for the birds, unless they are subordinated to some deeply aligned future, that comes from the heart - not the head.
To truly change your trajectory, you need to dream the future so hard that you feel it in your bones. You can intellectually guess at the future, but when you viscerally feel it, lasting change occurs.
If you think this is all a bit far-fetched and spooky, you do not need to leverage non-ordinary states like the dream state of the Ghost of Christmas Future or a hypnotherapist with a time-travelling sports car.
There are three words that even the most talentless and underwhelming of GPs can say to almost any woman to immediately break the cycle of supposed chemical addiction to cigarettes:
You. Are. Pregnant.
All but the most chaotic and intractable addict will then adhere to abstinence for the duration of the pregnancy.
This is borne out of the singular capacity that makes us, the pink and pathetic specimens we are, kings of the jungle and lords over all the fitter, faster, and stronger beasts. We can imagine the future and then coordinate our behaviour with others who can do the same.
This is our blessing and our curse. It undergirds no less than our fall from paradise.- from a type of timelessness of the animals. Your golden retriever is not lying awake at 3 am on a Tuesday worrying about the stock market. We can dream, but we also, of late, seem to asymmetrically catastrophise.
This is driving our societies, it would seem, towards the edge.
Much better to accept you have no control over the grand and the distal, and focus on the promxinal, personal hell you may be incrementally cultivating in your back garden. This is too hard to see without the perspective afforded by your future-oriented imagination.
In my coaching practice, I am developing a new style of treatment called Future-Oriented Resistance Training—FORT. The goal is to leverage hypnosis, future oriented journalling and age progressed AI to ostensibly ‘meet’ your future self. Being prompted by a well intentioned nephew to think about his future self didn't move the needle for Ebeneezer Scrooge. Being forced to feel it by the Ghost of Christmas future was what constituted minimum effective dose.
Maybe what moves the needle isn’t more pontification from a psychologist or more medication from a psychiatrist—it’s a visitation from your future self.
It knows you better than anyone because, in some deep, metaphysical sense, it is you. It will offer encouragement when you need it and warnings you can’t ignore.
A cosmic pat on the back - a well-timed kick up the ass. Spooky, personal,
and effective.
Projecting into the future is, at this stage, a revolutionary feature—not a bug. Unless you are a reincarnated lama, chances are you will not be perfectly stabilised within the present moment.
The present moment is the only real portal for change, but what incentivises that change is paradoxically something that does not exist.
The future.
Get back to it.