Imagining the Impossible: An Act of Radical Hope

Our assumptions of the future are being challenged: even what we took for granted now seems uncertain. And instead of asking: how did we get here? We are left with the question: what made us think we would never get here? If the unimaginable suddenly becomes a reality, then what is left to imagine? Is it still worth being hopeful? It appears that w

Dominant narratives are keeping us hostage. By freeing up our imagination to what is impossible, we can break ourselves free as well. Just as much as we should not colonize the possible future, we should not colonize the so-called impossible future either.

“Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists”—Rebecca Solnit *“Any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous”–Jim Dator*

After all: who gets to decide what is impossible anyway? If the future only exists in our imagination, then who gets to say what belongs between or outside the boundaries of the Futures cone?

as Akomolafe (2022) puts it: the way we respond to a problem might become part of the problem. To escape this pattern, we need new ways of doing, being, thinking. Stretching our imagination beyond the boundaries of what is possible might turn out to be crucial to get unstuck from dominant narratives

Consequently, when we think about possibilities it’s not as much about what we do in the present that shapes the future, but more about how we use the future to shape the present (Damhof, 2022).

These might trigger a new sense of agency, finding a balance between “doing and not-doing” (Damhof, 2021) through grasping emergence as it happens and taking advantage of changes in the conditions of change (Miller, 2015a).

To truly find new narratives (and therefore new ways of being, doing, thinking) it is not a question of simply imagining these narratives per se, since that is almost an impossible task on its own. Instead we need to understand what is keeping us from taking a look at the impossible in the first place. What are the blind spots or voices of reason t

In order to see more diverse possibilities in the world around us, one needs to widen the lens of perception, and imagining multiple futures attribute to that. When we imagine more, when we explore multiple futures, we perceive more in the present.