Where Is Tomorrow?
By Rebecca Elderkin
Tomorrow, where are you? I can’t see you, not past the brambles of right now. But you must be here, somewhere? What if your location – this very moment – decides what you will bring? Don’t I ask a good question?
When I was a child, I remember adults telling me, “There is no such thing as a bad question.” I was reassured. For children, all wondering is welcome.
These days, though, it’s not so often I am put at ease. Between adults, it’s just that questions don’t seem as appreciated. We do our speaking in many ways. It’s almost like there’s this skinny hanging bridge that walks a shaky line of appropriate questioning. It stretches unsteadily across a great chasm of what questions are silly, ridiculous, unproductive, or even threatening. To know already is good. Leave the question-asking to the knowers. Do not stir up trouble. But what about tomorrow, also hanging in the balance?
One of the greatest knowers did indeed ask grandiose, risible, and challenging questions: What is time? What would happen if I rode a beam of light? Are we sure we have our idea about gravity, correct? He wondered at the biggest questions even into his old age: Could a single theory unite all the cosmos? The psychologist, Erik Erikson, called him “a perpetual child.” And, indeed, Albert Einstein was childlike - cheerfully mischievous, doggedly curious, careless at times, and stubbornly refusing to march at any except his own beat. He wrote verses to celebrate the glorious forces behind the universe, and he was known for repeating an elegant saying, “Authority gone to one’s head is the greatest enemy of truth.”
Cheerfully mischievous, doggedly curious, careless at times, and stubborn. With these virtues and their lavish questions, don’t children act as our great undo’ers? (You know, for us, adults.) Yet, just as asking the right questions precede discovery and invention – progress, too, needs a good deal of un-doing. It is my thought that these children’s virtues are exactly what’s necessary to find the whereabouts of tomorrow. We’ll first need, of course, to undo any idea that they aren’t virtues at all.
One way to think about what a virtue is, is to think of it as a gift or an ability. Take patience, for example. It earns from painstaking discipline and impressive brawn, mastery over time and timing. It gives immunity to conditions of noise or silence, of crowdedness or vast emptiness.
Likewise, cheerful mischief offers its own special powers and insights. It needs a good deal of courage and a fresh idea of what’s possible. Cheerful mischief looks around the corner of formidable odds and notices an opportunity. When properly cultivated, it delights in knowing there’s always something it can do, and it matters neither how small nor slight. Follow the keen eye it gives and hone it. Mischief is creativity well-marinated with defiance. There’s never defeat. There’s no ending the possibilities.
The realm of possibilities need only be defined by the perimeters of the universe. For Einstein, curiosity found the limits of all time, matter, and space. For children, it’s also about finding limits. Curiosity propels a certain ‘must,’ and children must find the limits. They may use schematics of their own making: shouting, tantrum, daring another step, doing exactly the thing you said not to do – they must figure them out on their own terms. Further, curiosity does not take the significance of “breakable” for granted – nor, any other seemingly ordinary or obvious thing. Curiosity restructures the ‘what’ it sees into a question. It tests information received with scientific rigor to see whether it’s true, or if it will be true every time. Are the limits true? Are the limits true every time? Curiosity pinky-swears there are only good questions. Maybe the asking is more important than the answering. No takebacks.
Sometimes, though, the pressure for an answer feels overwhelming. And it feels like I will never find tomorrow. Right now, there’s too much of what’s in the way. I feel burdened. It’s cloudy. I get worried.
Carelessness doesn’t mean not caring. Rather, it’s the gift of not being weighed down. It’s the gift of levity and the power to laugh through our tears. (When I laugh through my tears, I feel like a child again.) Sometimes, carelessness can seem aloof, bad-mannered, distracted, or downright foolish. It tends toward saying exactly what it feels. Carelessness, however, still cares about the problem of tomorrow. It simply does not let worry overtake it. Rather, as a virtue, its gift is unyoking and, with this, carelessness sees to it we spare time to take pleasure, marvel, behold beauty, and feel enchantment. For carelessness, there’s no precaution when it comes to faith and hope. It preserves the twinkle in my eye. It decides, I’m better off a gardener amid battle than to be a warrior in a garden since the odds are still higher for the gardener to experience all the pure sweetness of even a single flower.
I won’t change my mind about the flower.
In the area of stubbornness, children’s reign is supreme. They are heel-digging experts whose boundaries can prove intractable. With bursts of spontaneous reinvigoration, stubbornness gives capacity to hold the line. It’s the tenacity to get up, and try, try again. That inner well of strength voicing, “I can do it,” pours forth a spirit of stubbornness to prove exactly that. If it needs, it will be defiant even against its own expectations. Immovability acts right in the face of the impossible challenge.
The problem that challenges us today is our inability to see tomorrow, hear tomorrow, taste, smell, or touch it. It could even be right here, in front of us or all around. Right now, tomorrow is difficult to imagine. It’s far easier to forget the future, after all, than the past. But if I cannot find tomorrow, if I do not recognize it, how can I preserve or protect it?
Einstein believed that the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, yet on the opposite side of a profound truth there could very well be another profound truth. Wherever tomorrow be, the trouble of ‘right now’ in finding it, blocks the way, or it could very well guide the way. What can I do – or undo – for tomorrow right now?
As I think of all the places I’ve searched, as I consider the places I’ve been and spots I haven’t yet rummaged, let’s make sure authority never goes to my head. Rather, let me be reminded the lessons taught by children – those virtues all too often called ‘bad’ or ‘unruly’ and all too often missed instead recognized for their powers and insights. Let’s take action for tomorrow wielding these virtues – and along the work of their implementation – it’s likely best we consult a child.
If a butterfly can transform itself, why can’t anything?
This letter was collected as part of DearTomorrow Missoula, a partnership between Families for a Livable Climate and Climate Smart Missoula with DearTomorrow, an award-winning climate storytelling project where people write messages to loved ones living in the future. Messages are shared now at deartomorrow.org and through social media, public talks, community events, and public art to inspire deep thinking and bold action on climate.
