A Letter to the Future: Time is Running Out
To all those who will come after the clock runs out,
My daughter and I were walking through Union Square when she saw the climate clock counting down: two years and some change before the world crosses the 1.5°C threshold. She asked what it meant. I looked it up, then tried to answer the way I answer most hard things, truthfully, but not without hope.
We continued on to the Farmer’s Market and a bookstore, enjoying the rest of the day.
That night, after a few minutes with her new book, she came to me in tears. She cried for hours, her body catching up to what her mind had understood that afternoon. When I asked what was wrong, she said, “Pa, you know what’s wrong. Everyone knows what’s wrong.”
Everyone knows.
She was carrying the whole weight of that clock.
I told her about our people who have survived world-changing events before. We are survivors of genocide. I gave her what my Christian faith and Indigenous memory have given me: ancestors, land, prayer, and a story larger than either of us. We walked through the places our family has called home and remembered how our people have not only survived the desert, but learned to live, pray, and thrive there.
I named the people I know who are already working: scientists refusing despair, organizers building coalitions, elders teaching relationship to land as ceremony, and young people marching, suing, and seeding a future. I said their names because hope is not abstract. Hope has fam, familia, neighbors, teachers, and friends.
My daughter’s future depends on our collective effort. We need each other. No person, family, congregation, or generation was meant to carry the future alone. Our traditions teach us that the load is shared, or the load breaks us.
We can’t promise that the number will stop. But we can offer an introduction, speak the names, and remember that somewhere tonight, someone is awake working on the exact thing that is breaking your heart. And if you find them, and they find you, the weight gets lighter for both of you.
Dachner Keltner’s research and book on awe confirms this. We experience awe when we see “moral beauty.” Moral beauty just might be the thing that you, future creators, have held better than any of us.
When the number frightens you—and it will, because it should—do not carry it by yourself in the dark. Say it out loud to somebody. Let them help you find moral beauty. Let their names become your comfort, the way my friends' names became my daughter's comfort.
A prayer for the end of time:
God who made us for one another and not for solitude, remind us tonight that we were never meant to carry the world alone.
Be with the children who learn the truth of this moment before they are ready, and let them find arms to hold them and names to comfort them.
Be with the scientists, the organizers, the elders, and the young ones already in motion, and multiply their strength with the strength of one another.
Teach us to say the names of the people doing the work, so that fear has somewhere to go besides despair.
Knit us to each other so that no single heart holds what was always meant for many.
And when the night is long and the tears do not stop, send us someone to tell us we are not the only ones awake.
Amen.
We need each other as the clock runs out.
In faith, love, and hope,
Patrick