It was a foggy day at Tilden Park’s beautiful redwood-lined driving range. My brother-in-law had been giving my son Izzy lessons for years and I finally decided to tag along and get some pointers myself.

See the Ball, Be the Ball

After I sent balls flying this way and that for a while, Nate stepped up to the tee to show me how it was done. “You have to see it before you do it,” he said, pointing out to the green. “See where the ball will land. Then aim and swing.”  He whacked the ball, turning it immediately into a white pinhead traveling far out on the horizon.  “Now you,” he said, as he handed me the club.

I shrugged, and tried to conjure up a vision of the ball landing firmly on the green, but I came up blank. The vision system wasn’t working. I swung, and sliced the ball so far to the right it was almost behind me—if it were baseball I would have hit the popcorn guy. The next hour was more of the same.

I just couldn’t SEE the ball going in. My mind was too busy with the wide variety of details. Shoulders, wrist, hand, stance. Foot, shoes, eyes, pants. It was all too new.  My vision channel was jammed; all that came up was white noise and squiggly screen…much like when I was 12 and I used to try to watch the “R” rated movies on ON-TV. My rational mind was so busy thinking, it was short-circuiting what my imagination could actually envision.

Then this past week, one conversation made it all clear, my row-mate on a flight to Chicago downed many Bloody Marys and shared moderately boring stories of being a fiber optics technician. Through a mouth full of chewing tobacco, Tim told me about a recent conversation with his father, a retired Air Force pilot, about oil in the Gulf.

“He said to me, Tim, I know we’re going to have to change our ways. We just don’t know which way to change them.”

Then it occurred to me. As with golf, so with oil in the Gulf.

It’s one thing to be able to see the ball landing on the green. Or to to envision ten million dollars in the bank.  But it’s another thing altogether to have a vision of a world beyond oil.

That’s a ball that is just damn hard to see on the green.

One might say we need a charismatic leader to do the bold visioning for us (evoke moon landing here). Or the world’s smartest people to have a Manhattan Project for energy. Then of course one may also say we need “a crisis” (I quote this because it has no further definition in these conversations) for people to change their ways.

Even so, the crisis is just the catalyst; we still need to be able to see the ball on the green.

Al talks serious business

In the past decade since I’ve been paying attention, I’ve seen a huge shift in environmental awareness, such as ecological products, green energy investments, political will, car fuels, and even in the natural food content in my mother-in-law’s kitchen. An Inconvenient Truth told millions how bad things might get. Wall-E showed still more millions how bad things might get after that.

But there’s been one critical area where we have been lacking, an opportunity I feel is just below the surface, and it’s ready to burst out. In order to hold a vision and work towards it, we need to not only be educated and entertained: we need to be inspired. We need transformative stories that bring us from anger into solutions. Stories that can be repeated again and again by everyday people, stories that tantalize dreams and propagate technologies and propel college students into new careers and new inventions. We need stories that serve our need for overcoming conflict and quest and feed our dreams for a new way of living.

Lonely Robotic Futures

Stories that illuminate that you don’t have to go back to living in a cave in order for society to survive.

These stories will help our society look forward several generations from now and see our ball on the green. A few balls might be thriving rainforests, clean rivers, a prison population dwindled as our economy is strengthened, vastly re-localized food, flourishing farmers, oceans free of plastics and oil rigs, and thriving with salmon and pelicans flying overhead. And no, these aren’t just a liberal stories. They can’t be.

These stories will be written or performed, in many shapes and sizes.  Some may be Avatar sized, others Lorax-sized. Some may be alternate reality games like World Without Oil or like Heroes creator Tim Krieg’s new Conspiracy for Good–and some might be board games. Many will be tied in with creative actions, incentives and social networks. Some may be told by Buckminster Fuller types, others by Steve Martin types.

Some may be stories belted out streetside, by mad nouveau beat poets riffing their rhymes that just happen to have flip cams. Some will be real life stories of adventure, others nearly unfathomable fiction. Some will be sponsored. Some of these future-stories may come from Hollywood, at least from Participant. Some will be told from the future working backwards, like the Free Range oldie Climate: A Crisis Averted.

Future Flick by Free Range

Others might come from you.

The challenge is for the storytellers to take to the course, to tell enough stories from enough angles that a meta-narrative evolves…and so that we, too, begin to see these possible futures. And adopt one or two as our own. And see ourselves in them.

I believe these stories are brewing. Believe it if you want to; I believe it because I have to.