Coming up against the limits of my own imagination
We're all just a work in progress
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but I’ve learned fairly recently that despite being a generally audacious person, sometimes when I have a really big dream or idea, I unconsciously find myself waiting for permission to act on it.
Permission from who? I’m not sure, the Universe perhaps?
Or an invitation from someone that confirms that it’s the right next thing to do.
Or maybe even just to affirm that someone somewhere thinks it’s worthwhile and will receive it well.
When you’re charting paths through previously uncharted territory—like alternate realities and parallel timelines, or even just a new idea or project in your personal or work life, it can be overwhelming to figure out where exactly is safest or most impactful to place your next step forward.
In my creative life here building The Climateverse, what helps me most is setting up creative constraints. These are rules or guidelines that are externally placed or self-imposed, that allow for creative expression to flow more freely.
Paradoxically, unchecked creative freedom can make it too difficult to focus on the task at hand amidst a deluge of ideas and possibilities.
Thus innovation and creativity require a balance of freedom and constraint.
The primary constraint I’ve self-imposed when creating stories in The Climateverse is that the root of every story must grow out of our present day reality.
So you’ll never read a story about how we acted on climate in the 1980’s to secure climate resilience and a 1.5 target by 2005 here.
I don’t think dreaming up different pasts is particularly helpful in helping us navigate our present realities and the futures that are still possible.
You also won’t typically read stories set in the future in this particular channel (though we are interested in these, and will explore them through other avenues like workshops and longer form “cli-fi” writing and production).
No, this news dispatch from parallel dimensions is all about holding the reality of everything that has happened in the real world up until we went to bed last night, and dreaming up the new decisions that we could make today to chart new paths to other futures that may seem “unfeasible,” but aren’t actually impossible.
But self-imposed creative constraints are only useful as long as they are useful.
The problem
The challenge for me showed up in last week’s dispatch about housing as a human right:
What I really wanted to imagine was that the US Supreme Court in the real world had issued a different opinion than the one they did, where instead of issuing cities’ the right to charge and even imprison the unhoused for sleeping outside on public property, they instead affirmed the right to housing as a human right and the responsibility of cities and states to provide to all.
The problem was that the decision was already made at the end of June in the real world and it was too late to publish a piece that diverted so far from reality, if I followed my own creative constraint.
So first, I started drafting a version of the story where Congress “packed” the Supreme Court, increasing the number of justices from nine to 13. This newly packed court would then see a different but similar case brought up through the circuit between a homeless person and housing rights advocacy org, and another city or state. Their decision would effectively shift the precedent from the June ruling to affirm the right of housing to all.
[Supreme Court decisions cannot be appealed. I checked. That would have been a much simpler story].
But this is a flash fiction channel, and that would have been too long-winded a story to contrive, right? In fact, it would have been two stories in one:
Packing the Supreme Court
Delivering a new opinion on housing rights
Definitely too much to “reasonably” occur between last night and today.
But there I go, limiting myself by “reasonableness.”
I didn’t think I had permission to shake my own self-imposed creative constraint, and so I didn’t.
Instead I modelled what it might look like if Canada, who has a National Housing Strategy Act that infers a right to housing but does not hold the state accountable to ensuring it—what if the advocacy paid off in such a heightened political landscape, and the House finally took it a step further to enshrine it, and hold itself, as well as provinces and cities to account?
And I do think it was a decent story that still got to the spirit of the change I wanted to see and model in the world.
But I felt it lacked some of the dramatic flair I love so much.
So below, I’m creating a tiny micro-fiction version of the story I originally wanted to tell, while I leave you with this reflection for yourself:
In what ways might you be artificially constraining yourself and your belief in what is possible?
The world as it is today has conditioned us all, creating censors in our subconsciousness, and restricting what we believe to be possible.
The oft-quoted:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”
comes to mind.
Much of this isn’t our own fault; the systems and structures that be have actually been altering our consciousness and our ways of seeing ourselves to condition us to self-impose these constraints, to keep the wheels of capitalist expansion and the ideal of “modernity” churning along.
[Sidenote: I finally started reading Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Andreotti this weekend and I’m mind blown. If you want to geek out more on this theme, please get it and let’s bookclub!!]
But we can reclaim our power over our own imaginations, over our own consciousnesses. This is the personal journey I’m on in building the Climateverse, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride.
How else do we change the world, if we don’t remove all limits on what we believe to be possible?
From now on, I’ll be sticking to our Manifesto as my only hard line creative constraint:
Washington, D.C.—after a controversial yet successful “packing” of the Supreme Court yesterday, the new crew of thirteen Justices presided today over the case Right to the City v. Los Angeles. With a 7-3 split, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Right to the City, setting a new precedent for the right to housing across the United States.
Latest News
I’ll send a separate announcement later this week, but you are the first to know that The Climateverse is preparing to publish a special edition digital zine in honour of the upcoming UN Summit of the Future!
This is a community project on imagining the future, so submissions are open!
Feel free to share far and wide, as we welcome submissions from “anyone, anywhere.”
All details, including a free virtual visioning workshop in the guidelines here.