Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (6 page)

O
N OUR
morning walks to his elementary school, my son Parrish and I do lots of
nexting.
We talk about his next basketball game, the next movie we’ll watch, our next family trip. Nexting comes naturally to kids. It seems to pique their curiosity and give them little boosts of joy.

Nexting is my way of practicing hope with Parrish, a seven-year-old. By encouraging him to talk about the future, I find out what he is excited about. I learn about his plots and plans, and I help him come up with lots of ideas for how to make things happen. We explore his “wonderfully horrible ideas,” discuss why some of his strategies may not be appropriate, and then pivot to another idea.

Talking about the next important event in Parrish’s life also lets me gauge whether he is confident, nervous, joyful, fearful, or downright giddy. When he is feeling positive, his mom, Alli, and I do our best to “fluff him up” even more. We know the emotional lift helps him think about ways to make his performance better, the best it can be. When we see that he is nervous or fearful, we try to figure out why, and whether we need to intervene or let him work it out. In all this, Alli and I avoid
automatic cheerleading and easy reassurances. If we see obstacles and pitfalls, we address them together, and sometimes we work with him to
regoal.

On a good day of nexting, Parrish and I talk about his dreams, plans, and feelings, and we both enjoy practicing the how of hope. He gets better at thinking about the future, and I get more excited about what lies ahead for our family.

Hope is a miracle of the human mind, a miracle we all share. In this chapter, I want to tell you about our mind’s unique capacity to think about the future, the complex language that helps us craft an evolving life story, our deep awareness that we will one day die, and the neurobiology of prospecting, all of which makes hope possible.

When I was a little kid, I had two superpowers (at least I thought I did). Every morning I climbed our bathroom wall, just like Spider-Man on TV. I’d get a running start, jump as high as I could, and then try to stick to the wall. I’d frantically flail and slap against the wall to propel myself toward the ceiling. Every now and again, I got close, but never all the way up. I finally quit throwing myself against the wall when I was about ten.

My other superpower was time travel. Mentally, I traveled into the future and saw my friends and myself as older kids—riding bigger bikes, playing baseball (instead of tee-ball), and talking to girls. These images were so vivid that they helped me learn how to be a big kid. As I grew a bit older, I started imagining that I was a teenager—driving to school, competing on a bigger field, and kissing girls. This time travel superpower never let me down and got stronger as I got older.

For years, I thought I was the only person on the planet who could travel into the future. Was I wrong!
Everyone
can do it. But I don’t think that makes the power any less super, because we are the only animals who think about the future in a very complex way and who act on those
thoughts. To understand how we got this way, we need to take a trip back in time . . .

The story begins 1.6 million years ago, when one of our human ancestors,
Homo erectus,
first made a simple distinction between what he needed in the present and what he needed in the future.
Standing man,
by dissociating a bit, basically uncoupled the present from the future in his mind.
This cognitive leap led our kin to fashion a pear-shaped hand ax that was beautiful and effective in its symmetry and a vast improvement over the one-sided rock scrapers of old. This invention suggests that early humans saw into the future and realized that they would need tools for many jobs over time—so they invested time and energy into crafting a tool that would last. That investment paid off every time they used a hand ax to skin a mammoth or to fashion another tool.

Fast-forward 1.5 million plus years. Somewhere around one hundred thousand years ago, our cousins,
Homo neanderthalensis,
started practicing burial rituals.
They dedicated a special site for the burial and seemed to carefully position the bodies. In some cases, they adorned the dead or prepared them for future battles by placing antlers or other objects, such as panther paws, in the graves. According to some archeologists, an offering of flowers was placed next to some of the corpses.
These practices are an early sign that a bipedal primate thought about a future that went beyond life on earth. Future thinking transcended the earthly body, and this vision of an afterlife became a foundational belief for many of the religions that guide our behavior today.

About thirty-five thousand years ago, Neanderthals began to die out and a new animal appeared on the scene,
Homo sapiens.
With big brains characterized by frontal lobes that had grown sixfold in a short evolutionary span,
knowing man
developed imagination, the ability to symbolically represent thoughts and experiences. Later, he was able to link imagination with an increasingly refined sense of time. Eventually, we
Homo sapiens
labeled natural phenomena with minutes, hours, days, weeks, years,
and decades. This combination of imagination and time sensitivity gives all humans the power of mental time travel, the capacity to think of ourselves experiencing any and all instants of the past and future.

Imagination and time sensitivity also gave us a unique evolutionary advantage, setting us apart from all other animals.
According to psychology’s Bischof-Köhler hypothesis, only humans can put the needs and demands of the present aside, anticipate future needs, and take action to secure them. Our hominid ancestors looked ahead and crafted new, improved, long-lasting tools. Today we stock the freezer during a sale, accrue vacation days to spend all at once, and set aside money for college and retirement. So whenever someone poses the question “What’s unique about humans?” feel free to skip the traditional answers about opposable thumbs, tool use, and language, and instead answer, “Hope.”

In December 1994, during a hike in the hills of southern France, Jean-Marie Chauvet noticed a draft of air coming from a cleft in the rocks. He recruited two friends and, with their help, moved heavy rock and opened a small tunnel that led into a series of chambers. With their flashlights, they saw what is now believed to be one of the first cave drawings ever made, a red ochre mammoth painted on a rock hanging from the ceiling. Subsequent trips into the caves revealed more art depicting horses galloping, rhinos battling, and hundreds of other paintings and engravings.

The thirty-thousand-year-old
art in Chauvet Cave is now preserved by the French Ministry of Culture. The walls of the cave “talk” to us through humanity’s oldest known drawings. All but one of the images is of animals. The exception is a Venus-like human figure, a woman swollen with fertility. On the floor are bones of all types. In one part of the cave, a cave bear skull is placed precisely in the center of a large stone, possibly serving as an altar for rituals. These scenes were created by storytellers documenting their lives and possibly their futures.

Like our French cave-painting ancestors, modern-day humans are compelled to tell stories. With the help of our complex language, we have gotten quite good at it. I learned the art of storytelling growing up in south Louisiana, where Cajun stories are a social currency and people get richer by the day. Most of the stories that my parents and their friends told at crawfish boils and family barbecues were about the good old days. Yet the stories that may be even more captivating are the ones we have only imagined.

You don’t need to be a novelist or screenwriter to craft fantastic tales. We all seem to share the need to embellish day-to-day reality.
Neuroscientist Tali Sharot of University College London discovered this in the course of exploring what she calls the “optimism bias,” the inherent tendency of the human brain to see things in a positive light. Her study focused on the brain function of people who were asked to imagine future events in their everyday lives. She presented the most innocuous of prompts to her participants: your next haircut, a trip on public transportation, a plane ride. But her subjects made the mundane magical. A haircut became an opportunity to donate hair to Locks of Love, an organization that creates hairpieces for young people who have lost their hair to cancer treatment. A ride on a ferry became a setting for romance. The flight was the beginning of a great adventure.

Even more surprising is how creative we are about our past. “You’re constantly rearranging the narrative of your life,” says Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California. “And you’re rearranging as a function of the experiences that you have had and as what you imagine your experiences in the future ought to be.” Each time we retrieve a memory, we tend to revise or edit it, adding some new elements to the story and taking away others. In time, we decide that certain stories are representative of who we are and who we want to become. We rehearse them and we may share them with others. And we look to these stories for emotional guidance.

Little by little, we choose to make our stories less hopeful or more so. Hopeful narratives steeped with meaning provide survival tools for
the storyteller and for the audience gathered around the campfire. The most hopeful stories trigger positive emotions in others, making them feel lifted up, joyful, or curious, and ultimately drawing them closer to us. These positive emotions also inspire others to think more expansively about their own life stories.

Reliving previous experiences through hopeful stories also makes it likely that we will
prelive
a future experience with a hopeful bent. Right now, I am thinking about a speech I have to give to a large group of youth development experts in Omaha, Nebraska. I am preliving the event in vivid detail . . . and it is stressing me out. So I decide to relive one of my best public-speaking performances—March 2011 in Fairfax, Virginia. The story starts with my friend, Nance, telling me that I had done a great job and thanking me. She was so kind and generous in her praise; I can still see her bright smile. Then I see mental snapshots of me sharing ideas, playing a video that made the audience cry (in a good way), and giving folks a good laugh. Phew! Now I am less stressed and more positive about my yet-to-be talk in Omaha.

Reliving and preliving help shape our lives. The stories of our past don’t predict the future, but they do help us find paths to where we want to go. By focusing on the what, when, and where of our experience, we can learn how to exercise the modicum of control we have over our future.

Our capacity to look over the horizon has a downside—a big one. I alluded to it when I described Neanderthal funeral rituals.
Our special awareness of the future gives us the unsettling knowledge that we will one day die. I will die. You will die.

Why am I emphasizing this in a book about hope? Because genuine hope incorporates
an unvarnished assessment of all of life’s limits,
including the limits of life itself. And because we can’t understand hope without understanding our quest for purpose and meaning—a quest fueled by our awareness that one day our lives will end.

The promise of death was made real to me when my first and best friend, Jared, died. At six years old we had been friends for a lifetime, playing cowboys, chasing after a football, and watching cartoons. My recollections of the first day he did not feel well enough to play are sharp. My mother and I drove over to Jared’s house. His mom answered the door and I bounced into the living room looking for my buddy. The moms sat down and started talking in low voices. I walked over to Jared’s room and found a closed door. His mom told me he was too tired to come out. Even at six, I knew that was bad and sat quietly in a corner with Jared’s toys. After a short while, my mom hugged Jared’s mom and we left. I never got to play with Jared again.

My understanding of Jared’s illness and death was limited, but his passing told me that I might not necessarily live to be an old man. For a while, I lost my superpower to see into the future. Why bother visiting the future if I was going to die? But weeks or months later—I can’t remember how long—something shifted, and those thoughts of big-kid fun began to draw me again. And I began to chase them a little faster, just in case I was running out of time.

As our time horizons shrink, most people become increasingly selective about the goals they pursue. Dinners with close friends replace late nights at the office. Vacation with the grandchildren takes priority over a business conference. My patient John certainly knew he was mortal, but he faced his mortality only when his kidneys began to fail. When he learned that treatment could mean losing his farm, he was ready to foreclose on his future, but when he realized that he had some life left to spend, he rebuilt his relationship with his son, and the farm became a legacy they could share. When we perceive that time is short, we invest in people and in our most meaningful goals.

Facing death seems to bring us more to life.

Before I give you a glimpse of how your brain on hope works, I’d like you to try a thought experiment: I want you to hope for something. Specifically, I want you to think of the really good job you will have about a year from now. (If you like your current job, make the new one even better—your dream job.) What would be the best way to spend your time during the week? Picture where you would be and what you would be doing. Now add details. Who is working with you? How do you feel at the beginning of the day? At the end? Give yourself a minute or two to make that image as vivid as possible. (Need help? Go to the
makinghopehappennow.com
website for a guided imagery that walks you through this exercise.)