A STORY OF YOUR FUTURE
Have you ever wondered where you will be five or ten years from now? Would you like a safe way to look into the future? I’m sure that you have occasionally had a fantasy about some future possibility–or maybe even a nightmare. What if you can look into several futures so that you can choose from among them.
You are invited to try fiction as a way to explore possible futures. You don’t have to be a great writer to engage in putting possibilities into a story form. Just choose either a pen and paper or more likely a computer and paint a picture of one or more possible futures.
DON’T TAKE YOUR TIME
The two biggest excuses for not doing this are:
I don’t know how to write fiction.
I don’t have time to do this.
Don’t allow either of these excuses to prevent you from having an enjoyable adventure. You’ve told stories before–not all of them accurate–and this time you don’t even have to feel guilty. Since you are the primary audience of your account, you don’t need to worry about writing skills.
With respect to the issue of time, I would suggest both short and long possibilities. My guess is that once you get started, you may find time to extend your effort, but even short stories have an impact. Look how powerful some of the parables are.
So find an hour and be prepared for some enlightening fun.
“WHAT IF” IS ALL YOU NEED
The scene for your story is a meeting ten years in the future with two close friends who are meeting you for a leisurely dinner and good conversatopn. You can try it either way, but it might be interesting to have one male and one female friend for this conversation. If you do, try to be conscious how the perspective is affected by being either a male or a female.
It is ten years in the future, and you are looking back on the significant events over the last ten years and your current physical condition. I think you will find it easiest if you write this as a dialogue. Allow your companions to raise questions and probe your story.
Begin by describing your physical health–good or bad, maybe even in crisis mode. In conversation with your friends, describe what behavior, decisions, events beyond your control, etc. have resulted in both your physical and emotional health.
Describe three significant decisions that you think now had a significant effect on your current health condition. Don’t overthink this. Just begin writing and try not to stop for at least a half-hour. I think you will be surprised at what unfolds.
In short, you are telling stories about possible futures that might occur for you. By writing them down, they become a more concrete way of exploring potential consequences of decisions you make in your life.
By beginning your dialogue with your fictional friends by describing your physical and emotional health and the decisions about lifestyle, behavior, and relationships that have led you to this condition in your life, you are exploring consequences. By writing them down in a dialogue with fictional friends, it makes the decisions more real.
You may find it fun to choose several scenarios where you have arrived at different conditions.
Now begin to explain to your fictional friends how these decisions in the last ten years have had a significant impact on how your life evolved. Help them understand why you made these decisions and how these decisions affected you. You can explore what you now see as bad or even foolish choices, or you can choose to describe wise or intelligent decisions. Whatever you choose, try to be realistic regarding the people who surround you and how they would react. Don’t just explain the end results but tell how different people reacted and perhaps why they responded that way.
GOOD FRIENDS LOVE STORIES
Once you have tried this a couple of times, you might want to invite a couple of good friends to engage in a similar process and then share and talk about your stories. Listening to their stories might stimulate some alternative possibilities for you as well.
