Future be scary, amirite? It’s hard not to feel trepidation for what lies ahead, which is why I hoovered up Rob Hopkins’ How to Fall in Love with the Future, because who doesn’t want to have a love story awaiting them, just around the bend. Here’s what I learned.

1. You must travel to the future, frequently. That way, you build a map in your mind, and don’t have to rely on Google Maps (which will no longer exist in the future, so you’ll need your own innate orientation to help you know up from down and left from right.) The more often you go there, the more at home you will be when you eventually get there, because the future when it arrives will match your memories of it, instead of being like the latest dystopian zombie flick version that doesn’t seem like home at all.

2. Don’t worry so much about naysayers. The ones who say “it can’t be done, it’s too expensive, we’ve already tried that, we need to wait until we know more, we should go more slowly.” Nobody remembers them, in the end, anyway. When I was in the future, they were the ones saying, “well, it was inevitable, really,” which is what they say about everything, not realizing that all inevitabilities had seed points and gardeners.

3. Let the cynical sceptical grouch who patrols the borders of your imagination have a night off. Trust your longing. You might have to peel off a few layers of armour to find it again, but your longing is there, deep down, quietly singing to herself. 

“Longing is different can desire. Desire is an itch that wants to be scratched, but longing is the ache that accompanies a deep love that lives in your heart.” Grant Faulkner

4. Feed your longing. Take offerings to her. Feed her with poetry, images, songs, smells – things that delight you, land you in your body, make you feel alive, young again. (Birdsong and the smell of exuberant blooms and the whir of a thousand wheels at bicycle rush hour.) She is a very true guide and she will talk to you, the more you nourish her.

5. When you’re in the future, behave as if you’re on a first date that you want to go really really well. Don’t talk too much. Listen. Ask generative questions. Pay attention to what you see. Do not past-splain! 

6. Realize that the future is not a far-off place, because time is fluid, and it’s all unfolding and morphing and becoming and unbecoming all the time. Let loose your mind’s grip on the future as something fixed and far-away. You can fall in love with the future right now. You don’t have to wait. If you close your eyes you can catch a whiff of it, just about to appear.

7. Be on the look-out, because the future sends clues back to you, in the here and now, ALL THE TIME. We’re surrounded by proof of the possibilities: little seeds and notes and nuggets dropped like messages in bottles, for you to pick up, collect, collage with, and do everything you can to nurture. Solar powered restaurants, car-free neighbourhoods, local food systems, de-paved neighbourhoods – real things that people have already imagined into existence.

8. Be open-hearted. Put on your rose-lensed glasses everywhere you go, and scan for clues and messages on what to do now. You’ll see them – glimpses of scrappy seedlings that will become orchards and old-growth forests.

9. Look for the other time-travellers (with their helmets tucked under their arms) watching you. You are powerful in this moment that everything depends on. Future descendants are thanking you for thinking of them, loving them, preceding them.

10. Summon the future of your longing, and do it with friends and colleagues, do it out loud, do it with music and food and an air of celebration and festival and ceremony. Bring an orchestra or a marching band or balloons. Make invitations. This has been done before. You won’t be the first. And yes, it takes a great heart-open vulnerability, but so does any love story. So does any great moment. And after that initial panic flare of “oh gosh, why did I do this, will anyone even come?”, you will be swept up in the vibrance of it, because that, is what the future does. It sweeps you up. So why on earth would you settle for anything less than a future you could fall in love with, with all your heart?

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Out now in the UK (June 17), and coming this fall to Canada and the US, from Chelsea Green Publishing, Rob Hopkins’ lovely tome How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World is playful and practical, rousing and urgent.

Activism to address the climate crisis, he says, isn’t working, and maybe the reason we’ve failed has something to do with our relationship to the future.

(I just edited this now, to clarify that Rob is talking about climate activism, because I realise that extreme-right , misogynistic activism actually has been very effective of late, flooding the zone, stacking school boards and Supreme Courts, hijacking democratic process and public health… and maybe their effectiveness is because it’s easier for them to imagine the small, mean, sad futures, the regressive return to racist good ole days and back alley abortions? because we’ve already been there?)

Right now, our future has been hijacked – “colonized by megalomaniacal billionaires, crushed by precariousness” – and that’s not cool. We need to fight back and we need to fight back on a temporal scale. 

This little book, with its interviews and examples and hints of what’s possible and admiration for those who’ve practiced this kind of thinking for a long time now (the futurist-pioneers!), is all the blueprint you need to start tinkering and time-travelling yourself. Take friends with you! The future need all the time travelling imagination warriors we can get.

Rob Hopkins sums up the thrutopian endeavour of writing FOR what you want rather than against what you don’t with this quote:

“We must be able to envision the future we actually want to the extent that we muster the will to do what needs to be done in order to make that vision a reality – to the degree that it becomes our magnificent new North Star and we can’t imagine doing anything else. In other words, maybe slamming the brakes on this juggernaut of self-destruction needs to be more about imagining the future we actually want and bringing that alive in people’s hearts, minds and bones, than it is about parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and banners reading, ‘We’re Fucked’?”

I wrote this piece for Bending the Arc Thrutopian Magazine, after raving about the book on a Thrutopian community thread, which poet and founding editor Alice Willits jumped on, with an invitation to expand… Rob subsequently shared it in his newsletter, the Time Traveller’s Gazette, and if you want to stay in touch with his time travel adventures, subscribe by following the link at his website. Welcome to Thrutopia also shared it at https://thrutopia.substack.com/p/rob-hopkins-new-book-how-to-fall, and it may appear in the launch issue of Meander magazine.