The need for Long Vision
“I can trace my family history back at least 35 generations,” says Congresswoman Deb Haaland (D - New Mexico). Haaland and Kansas senator Sharice Davids share the distinction of being the first Native American people elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (both were elected in 2018). She is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, which has lived on the same land for at least 1000 years. Before the pilgrims. Before Christopher Columbus. Before Leif Erikson. The string of her history and genealogy stretches back at least this far in time. It is not hard to imagine that her vision of future history can stretch at least 1000 years into the future as well.
***
At the Canary Wharf docks on the Thames River in London sits a very unusual musical installation, called the “Longplayer.” It began playing at midnight on 31st of December, 1999 and will continue to play without repetition until the last minute of 2099. You can listen to its livestream here. This is an instrument and a work of art meant to last generations longer than any of us. What’s the point, you may ask. Why would anyone spend their time creating and supporting this?
We live in the most short-termed of times. Our societies, tastes, and economies are all built not to last, but to be disposed of and replaced. This era is about change and our viewpoints may be sculpted to accommodate what we see as an inevitable dynamic. Nothing lasts forever. A binary world pits tomorrow against forever, with a dash in between: tomorrow-forever. The problem with this vision is that there is a lot of space contained within that dash. Here’s where the need for long vision comes in.
Some sports metaphors may be in order here. Say we are a football team, and our entire playbook is “three yards and a cloud of dust.” We have never considered using the rest of the field, running long-pass plays down the field to stretch out our offense, and making the other team defend a much wider range of options and actions. Or, perhaps we are golfers and our total game consists of chip shots and putts. Without the skill to make magnificent long drives down the fairway, we are likely to settle for 10 shots on every hole, rather than the three or four shots we might achieve with a long game to add to our short game.
***
Let’s return to the two examples mentioned earlier. Rep. Deb Haaland is a living example of someone who’s culture has survived the worst and lived, right here in America, for 1,000 years or more. There are many reasons why the Laguna Pueblo people may have been able to achieve this incredible cultural feat, but part of the reason is the Laguna Pueblo people have designed their living, livelihood, eco-system, and community to last. It would be interesting to ask them how they believe they did it. In addition to a sheer determination to survive, I suspect their answers would revolve around balance, community support, moderation, respect for the land, and a belief in something larger than themselves. These are all hallmarks of sustainability.
So, the first answer to my question as to why one should spend a little time thinking about what can last and have a positive effect after 1000 years or more, is that to do this, one begins to consider the base question: What is sustainable?
What’s Longplayer all about? Surely the inventor is not just trying to prove that one song can be played for 1000 years. I have sat through a few concerts which felt like they might go on for 1000 years, so surely this is not such a worthy goal. Rather, perhaps the long-vision effect of Longplayer is to stretch our field of vision and imagination in the same way that winning football team adds a few long passes to its playbook to stretch the field and challenge the defense. We have this notion of how long a piece of music should last. Nowadays, its about 3-5 minutes. I remember when the Beatles first came out, everybody was amazed how concisely they could present a song in about 90-120 seconds. Mozart liked to go for about 60 minutes, and some of Wagner’s operas last hours (those were the ones which felt like 1000 years for me).
Another stretch of one’s imagination is the question of what is a composition? Is it a prewritten piece which is later performed? Or maybe it’s an improvised piece, made up at the time it’s played? In any event, it’s conceived and performed by human beings, right? Longplayer follows none of these rules. Even the notion of what is an instrument, how long it should last, and who “makes” that instrument is challenged by Longplayer, because it and the music derived from it are designed to change and evolve as time goes on. The music and the instrument playing 980 years from now will not be the same as what is playing today. The very thought of this stretches not only my imagination, but my comprehension of the reality of things.
This “stretch” is an essential feature of long vision. Just as you should stretch your muscles to maintain speed, agility, and strength, so it should be with your vision and imagination. Long vision is about being forced out of your comfort zone, made to reconsider your assumptions and straight-line projections. I am convinced that the future will not be a straight line projection from the present. There will be gaps and leaps, fits and starts, rather than just an accumulation of past activity. Our actual future will not be that popular illusion that the past just repeats itself, time and again. Long vision is an exercise designed to exorcise that fallacy.
***
Is long vision a waste of your time, time which could better be spent addressing the immediate needs of the short term? The effect of long vision on your short-term life is surprising. It’s hard to be so transactional when practicing long vision. Our society, like the algorithms of our social media , encourages instant gratification. This is an individual, societal, and global mass addiction; by design and baked in. One of the main effects of this mass addition is the extreme prevalence of impatience in our world. I feel impatient all the time, with all sorts of things. Living in a world which promises instant answers, instant solutions, and instant gratification cannot be healthy—for us as individuals or collectively as a species mutually inhabiting this planet.
We need long vision because by its very nature, it demands delayed gratification. Is something valuable if you must wait 20 years to see it come to fruition? It certainly can be. When we plant a tree, we must wait for it to grow. Contemplating when might be the best time to plant a tree is an exercise in long vision. For the impatient, it’s always better to have somebody plant the tree 20 years ago, and then you amble on to the scene to enjoy the shade.
Long vision helps you to change your own perspective as well as your own role on the continuum. Perhaps you are not on the receiving end of the 20-year wait, but rather on the giving end. Maybe you are the planter, without concern about whether you’re around to see the tree reach its full maturity. Will it matter? Would that stop you from planting a tree? Can you put aside your own selfish and immediate interests to contribute to something which lives beyond you? I submit that the world will be a better place if we reserve a small bit of our own hearts and minds to go to the place which long vision cultivates—that which is beyond ourselves.
This is a legacy, your legacy, something which is naturally passed along to future generations. Why should you spend any time doing this? If you believe that a goal should be to leave the world a slightly better place than when you came into it, you need long vision.
What other things in each of our lives require some long vision? Certainly, our families and family heritages. In the case of family heritage long vision can actually move in both directions, backwards and forwards in time. The awareness of visioning the long path of your family history and your genetics has both a spiritual and practical effect. You may come to understand yourself better through this process, even to the extent that you are able to more ably diagnose health conditions and tendencies. But in addition, you can create knowledge and awareness which can be passed down to future generations, which may better put as passing “up.” Those who come after your time here will benefit from the foundations you establish through your long visioning. Future generations’ sense of “self” will be more well grounded in the roots of lineage and perspective.
We have all become painfully aware of another piece of our collective legacy which requires our immediate and intense long visioning: the planetary effects of human activities on climate change. This issue will not be addressed with short term thinking, yet one of the structural issues we have as we approach the growing catastrophe is that we seem to only know how to react in a transactional, short-term manner. The problem with that is many of the root causes of climate change took many years to create, and will no doubt take many more years to lessen, then stop, then work to reverse. Most likely, anything we do now will not show immediate benefits. We must be committed to a long-vision approach to climate change, even though we may not see any results of our strategies in our own lifetimes.
The last example I will give which requires long visioning is education. What if we only approach education—both that of our own family and also of our communities—as a short-term activity and obligation? Or even as something that had a finite beginning and ending. You start at 5 years old and end at 18 years or 22 years, depending on whether you stop at high school graduation or go through undergraduate college degree. This is short-term vision, and it’s the way our system tends to support and fund education. Long vision allows us to see things with more perspective and creativity. Let’s go backwards first. What if education starts at 3 years old with more robust pre-school? Let’s go forwards. What if education never ends and humans need and want to learn for their entire lives? Further still, what if there is a way to encapsulate each of our own individual educations so that they may be most efficiently passed along to future generations? This already takes place and is part of the heritage and legacy of countless people across the world.
If you were to spend even more time on long-visioning this process, stretching out your field of view to 1,000 years, where might all of this lead, what might you change today and tomorrow to build the foundations for an educational bridge which lasts 1000 years? It’s all a bit metaphorically heady, I know. Nevertheless, it can be a bit alchemic as well. We CAN create a new long arc of history. You don’t have to spend all of your time dreaming about this, but why not give it a tiny fraction of your mind space, such as 1%? Who knows where that might lead?
Sometimes people only become aware of long vision toward the end of their own lives when their earthly existence suddenly seems even more finite. Wouldn’t it be better if humans practiced long vision at earlier ages so they could see and benefit from the effects of their efforts? This is the irony of it all: long vision is not just about your own life, because many of the things you will initiate will bring you no personal benefit while you are living. How fabulous to realize it’s not all about you! Long vision forces you to exit from the center of your world, and perhaps become a whirling planet around the sun of mankind’s shared imagination. It is the ultimate play forward, past the arc of your own horizon, toward futures still untold.
Original calligraphy work, made for me by a friend.