S2E3: The Future Is Ours To Determine

Is our future pre-determined?  Is there only one story possible–just the extension of what happened in the past, and what is happening right now? What are the stories in our head and heart that tell us what we should do today? How we should act, who we should be?

In this episode, Norma and guest Ariel Jacobson trace those questions from the family dinner table to a lifelong question of what it means to “do your part” — and ask what it takes to write a different story about the future: one that isn't waiting for someone else to decide who we become.

In this episode: 

• A different perspective on karma
• Norma's relationship with the U.S., and how "ambivalent" stopped being enough
• The habitual traps that compress the possibility of new futures
• Every day practices for staying engaged without being consumed
• An important lesson that 3-7 year olds can teach adults about telling stories

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Aloha. Is our future predetermined? Is there only one story that is possible in any given person's life, any generation's life? Is everything that is happening right now and everything that's going to happen just an extension of the future? Extension of the past. That's the inquiry of this episode. Welcome back to the Horizon Story. Yeah, in the uh Eastern traditions, that there is a concept called karma. And many people, especially people who are just reading about the concept, think about karma as being, well, it's all the things that happened in the past, and they basically, that's what you have to live with. But I learned about karma differently from my teacher. And the way he described it is that karma is the habit energy of all the things that happened in the past, which is different than just the accumulation of all the things. It's that if your people went through periods in which they were in warfare, or they went through periods in which they were in celebration, or they had momentous things that occurred, or they lived a boring life, whatever the case might be, that generations after generations, along with everything else that was happening in the world, through those generations, as they impacted the people who are your people, that all of that just creates energy over time. And that's what comes to you. The energy and the habits of that energy, the way in which people became accustomed to it, became used to it. And so there is this part about what then is karma and how does it impact us right now? And from how what it is that I've learned about karma, how I've come to know it, it's that it is the habit energy that you are born with that accumulated before you were born. But what happens after that is not a predetermination by any of that. You're not born in a way in which it's like, okay, guaranteed, this is the way your life is going to extend, because that's the way that your parents' life extended, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, your great-great-grandparents, all the way before, all before the migration, and before that, and before that, before that. Nothing actually would change. And that obviously is not true. It's just not true. So the question is, how do we move from a more active state of karma to karma as a fate, right? As a fate. Because there's no doubt that all those things that happened actually impact us today. But so do the stories. What are the stories that we have in our head, in our heart, that tell us how it is we should act today, what it is we should do, how we should be. There's that instinctual part where it's the story and the karma, and then there's like the grievances that we might have, either as individuals or as groups of people. And we may be inclined to not take anything on the chin, right? Not to take anything without fighting back. That might be like built into us. You know, we have a, my sister and I have a cousin and who uh didn't grow up in the advocacy movements or anything of that sort. But now he and his partner find themselves on most days uh getting up, packing their backpack with water, uh, a flask of milk in case of pepper spray or something else. And uh they have their whistle and they have their little bit of instruction in terms of uh who to call or who to tell other people to call. They have their phone and an extra battery pack so they can be in communication and you know, and their energy bar, and that's how they spend their day. They have chosen to spend the days in which they have retired from work essentially out on the streets in companionship with people. That's basically what they intend to do. And so it's like they are doubling down in many ways, and they're doing it every morning and coming home every night, and they're writing exhilarating texts and posts to my sister about the adventures of their lives and how it is that they feel like this was a moment that they were born for, that the entirety of their life was born for this, and that they were lucky in life. They're lucky in life to find themselves to be people who are in, you know, considered in this country to be people of color, meaning they're not white, but they were lucky to be people who did not actually suffer from a lot of discrimination in their life and who had gains in their life. They had professions, they had good incomes, they owned the house that they live in. And they feel lucky about that. And they feel upset about other people who have other situations that are coming upon them just because of their identity or whether they have this kind of paper rather than that kind of paper. Or they might have the right kind of paper, but they're gonna get stopped and detained and questioned anyway because of how they look, or maybe the accent that they have. And so it's that part about what you're gonna do about the circumstances that actually feed into the stories that we have and what we're gonna do about it. So we could also like decide that the way that we've always been doing things, that what we're gonna do is we're just gonna keep doing those things. We're gonna keep believing those things. We don't care what anybody else is thinking, and actually we have a grievance about what other people are thinking. You know, it's like we're coming upon our 250th celebration this year in this country called America. And, you know, it occurs to me that I'm gonna have to tell a story about my relationship with this place called America. Can you remind me about that? Okay, just hold on to that thought and remind me, I need to make that point about my relationship with this country. But we could have a story about what the country is about, and no matter what may be happening, whether or not it feels like it's opening up or closing down, or changing course, or the decisions that have been made over 30 or 50 or 75 or 100 years are things you agree with, and then you have all the people who the changes that were made over the 30, the 50, the 7500 years are not what it is that you thought this country was going to be. And now you're a people divided, and you're gonna stay in your respective corners, and you're gonna double down, just double down. And this whole thing, right, where you might have just an ongoing grievance. It could even be within your own family, right? That could be the case. They say that that holiday that in America is called Thanksgiving, is the thanks that you give when you pow with the family dinner, because you argued so much over the family dinner that you go, thank goodness, we're pow, we're finished, we're done with this holiday called Thanksgiving. We give thanks that we no longer have to be in the same room with each other because you know we can't choose family, but we also can't choose whether family disagrees with you about what you think would be fundamental things. Fundamental things. And there you'll be over whatever meal it is that you have, and you'll just be like, you know, like you can't believe it, you can't believe that this is your fill in the blank, your brother, your cousin, your uncle, your auntie, your tutu. You cannot believe that that is what it is that they think. And you just sit there and you just like kind of take it, especially if you're a junior member in cultures where junior members of families, you know, are not supposed to like talk up, let alone talk back. And so you stay in your respective corners without coming to a different understanding. And there's that way in which all of that may mean that you would just try to get along. And you know that things are not going well, but you will hide wherever it is that you can, just you know, like, okay, this too will pass. That is the story that you tell yourself. So you leave the dinner, that thing, and you go back to your life, and in the back of your mind, you hear the story that your uncle was telling you, that you gave like a scroll at that moment, but you know that there are pieces of truth in it, but it isn't truth that you want to think about a lot, and you just park it in a corner and you get on with your life. You just get on with it, and you get on with it. Until you reach the day where that is no longer sustainable, where you get up and you go, I am really tired, but maybe I'm really tired because I am not doing my part. I'm not doing the lift. But what should my lift be? Should it be packing my water and my milk and my whistle and my extra batteries for my phone, you know, and that bandage and, you know, like the towel to wipe my brow. Is that what I should be doing? Should I go and talk to my uncle? Should I ask him why he thinks that way? What are his hopes? What would he want for my children? Maybe too late for me. But what would he want for his grandnieces and his grandnephews? Does he see a different possibility? And maybe look for the opening where I could say what it is that he is saying that rubs me in an inconvenient and hard way, you know? Like, you know, when you get too much sand in your swimsuit, you know, like that. You know, it's like, especially if it's in the bottoms, you know, like not so good that feeling. And so that notion of do we sit with a grit in our pants or do we begin to do something else? All the stories, but also all the choices we have, because the past is not a predeterminant of the present, let alone the future. We have other possibilities, if we so choose. Friends, we'll be back to talk about this in as much detail as my guest Ariel Jacobson wants to talk about. And remember, you have to remind me to tell the story. We'll be back. Hello friends. We're back at the Horizon story with my friend Ariel. Hi, thanks for coming back.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

I'm so happy to be back. And um, you know, Norma, I am squarely in middle age now, so I think when you said, hold that thought, let me tell a story, I thought, let's do that now because I will forget to ask you to tell that story. So tell us the story of your relationship to this country called America.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Okay, all right. Well, you know, my story is about being a person who lives in a place that uh, you know, and being of the age in which I was born in the territory of Hawaii, and I, you know, and then uh became the state of Hawaii in a time in which I was too young to basically uh do much about it, right? Okay, so I was born in 1956 and in 1959, right, which is when we became a state. And then there's the part of uh the story of my migration, uh, which would mean that, you know, as a native Hawaiian, right, that uh I would, my peoples would have been here in this place uh for a very, very long time, you know, from the year 400, you know, to the 1700s, and we would have been here and we would have prospered and we would have fought and we would have celebrated and we would have invented and created, and we had our own governance. And we were right at that stage where we were uh moving into our own indigenous modernity at the moment that uh people who are not used came to these shores. And from then uh to the point where that upward trajectory was cut off, right? Uh would would mean that there is like an incomplete story that's there, right? It's totally incomplete. It's like in lots of ways, it's like the story that is complete for me is that uh when the Hakka Chinese came to work in the plantations, uh, that they uh would have found common peoples with the Native peoples, right? Which is how I came about, but also how many people in Hawaii came about. We found each other even if we were not of the same identity, um, because uh we had common ways of looking at the place that we were in and wanting to forge our future in this place. Okay. So I've staked my ground, as many people in Hawaii I know have, and particularly people who are of native Hawai ancestry, in this place, and we don't mean America. We mean Hawaii. And we mean if we're talking about our larger territory and obligation, it would be to the people of the Pacific, right? All of the string of islands and all of the peoples who are on the other side of the Pacific whose ancestors migrated, right, and came to be with us. The Chinese, the Filipinos, or the Okinawans, right, the Japanese, right? We feel that particular bind, right, that usefully binds us. Uh, and we feel much closer to that than we do to this the country called America. We'd say that, um, I would say I would have described my relationship uh not very long ago as being uh ambivalent, okay? Which would mean that I wouldn't be angry. Okay. So I certainly have grown up with people who are angry in their relationship with this thing called America, okay. And uh we have people uh who served in the armed forces of the country, okay, and uh are patriotic to the country, but have as their first allegiance this place called Hawaii, okay. And then you have people like me who essentially are ambivalent, okay. And this is especially so because when I get on a plane and I go uh from Hawaii to the nearest place in that place called America, which we are a part of, uh, but I cross the pond and in five hours, five and a half hours, and I land, it feels entirely different. It feels entirely different, right? Uh that's just the nature of how it is that a place that is predominantly a continent, right, would become. And a place that is very much an island, five miles, five hours away from anywhere, would become. Okay. It's it's just a thing. You could almost describe it as math and science, right? Right? Okay. Okay, so uh and this long story is long because I realized I could no longer be ambivalent. I realized that all the things that are happening in the country called America, that we in Hawaii cannot escape the circumstances, the impacts, right? That all of those types of things, right? What happens in the country will reach our shores.

unknown 21:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

That vast miles of ocean and that many hours of air travel will not keep us isolated from all of that. It will it will not. And so therefore, I have to care.

SPEAKER_02 21:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Now, I would say I have to care about this place called America. Okay. Um that doesn't mean in any shape or form, right, that that means that there would need to be a relationship that is unconditional. Okay. This I understand to be part of the experiment of this country, right? That change will not occur if we are unconditional about how it is that we think about a place. But it's useful not to be angry. Because if we are just angry, then we're in that place in our uh chemistry, right, in our body, uh, where we've we've compressed all possibility out, and all we can do is just to reflexively fight back. Okay. And reflexively fighting back, okay, um, we essentially become the useful aggressor to people who are hoping for a big fight. Actually hopeful for a big fight. Okay. And no one can say whether or not that would mean that on the other side of the fight that there will be something better. So that's my long story about my relationship with this country. Uh, you know, maybe three or four other chapters in the evolved, but we won't take that up right now.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Well, I think it's all connected, and it's really interesting that you started this conversation talking about karma as a habit pattern, a habit energy through the expanses of time, and even in the story that you just told, um, you know, that the place um in all its complexity called Hawai'i, um, you know, that there was an incomplete story, yet obviously there's also many threads of that story that were kept alive, very much alive and continued. And those even that had maybe become more um softened over time in terms of how folks could really connect to them and hear them brought back, right? And so I think there's this question of um, you know, with all the influences of this country that we that we call America, um, you know, I think about the collection of stories that we're bombarded with on a daily basis, um, not only that we've inherited from previous generations, but that are being generated on a real-time basis all the time. Um, so what are some of the ways that we can, you know, connect to the stories that do lead us toward a more fruitful place than the one where we're just doubling down in our separate corners?

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah, so they're the stories of things that are happening right now or that happened in the past that are hugely inspirational, right? And those are stories that are useful for us to hear about, read about, uh, spread about, right? And then there's also the story that is not yet written, okay. And uh I believe, right, that we're in a moment where there's a lot of potency around the story that is not yet written. If, okay, we just don't find ourselves like in a well, you know, this too shall pass, or no, it will not pass, and I'll fight until we've overcome everybody and everything, okay. If we're not in those two, you know, basic tracks around who it is we um believe we are, and uh the stories that are going to animate us on a daily basis. Or in the case of when you drift, this you know, the fact that you have no story animating you. Okay, all right, which to me is among the most difficult things to overcome, right? It means that you're not paying attention to what's going on, and there's a part of you that has decided not to care. Okay, and to me that is among the most difficult things to overcome, right? In all of this, right, it's like what is a story that has not yet been written about who we are and who we might become. Okay, and in this case, right, uh I certainly have felt uh for the entirety of my life the potency of who it is uh the people in Hawaii and the Pacific could become. And having actually uh not been totally extinguished by those who uh had a desire to possess us. Right? Okay. You know, I remember uh uh at one point, well, so Naalehu used to go to like these estate, I don't know if he does that now. We'll ask him when he comes out. He used to go to these estate sales to buy, to look for things that might be useful, you know, to be um part of what he might put uh like on a table uh when he's shooting something like this. Something that Auntie just had on the shelf. Yeah, you know, Auntie had on the shelf and all that other type of stuff. And I remember uh uh he had just come back from one and he showed it to me. It was a tabletop book, you know, one of those big books with lots of pictures and not too many words, okay. And it had a truthful and disturbing title, okay. It talked about Hawaii, the latest possession of the United States of America. Right? The latest possession to understand that the place you live and that maybe you too may be thought of as just being something that has been acquired, right? Um and and for it to be proudly put on a tabletop book, right? In pictures, and pictures and all of that type of stuff, right? And you know, and all of that, right. And to also know, right, at least in terms of the way that uh I've come up through the ways that uh I've lived my life and that I've learned from my teachers, is that even that not a predetermined conclusion, right? So that may be what some group of people thought, but will we become that is a lot to do with us, okay? All right, and so that whole thing, right? What do you do with that? When you know that some people have a story not only about themselves, but about you and your place, right? That plays itself out like all the time, right? All over the world, it plays itself out. But this notion of um standing in your own collective determination means that you have to write your own story of the future, and then who do you include? What do you say? Right? Will you truly interrupt all the things?

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

All the things.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

I want to come back to that, but before we get to that, because I think we should come back to this question of how you write your own story as individually and as collective peoples. But um before we get to that, I want to just kind of tease out a little bit more about what we were saying about the drift. You know, when when folks are maybe a little adrift, disconnected from this sense of, I think really what it is a sense of possibility and a connection to our own agency to create that future. Um, but who can blame us? I mean, there's a lot of shit has not been going all that great for a long time. And so I think um it's really important to think about what are the even just like daily practices that we can do to kind of connect to that sense of possibility. Um and what do you maybe even yourself in your own practices, when you feel that sense of agency maybe getting a little eroded, how do you notice it and how do you create space for that possibility again?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Well, uh part of what I do is I uh I bring myself out of leaning into um the narratives that I'm attracted to because they're not the narratives I want. You know, you know how you can do that, right? Basically, like you hear like what it is that people are saying and you really disagree. And so what you do is you double down and you listen to it five times, and then you listen to another three people that are talking about that same thing. Engage in the comment section. Well, you know, not so much if you have a flip phone, right? And you know, but you're you're like you get you get called into the into like a black hole, right, around uh around that which you don't want, right? You don't want. Now you cannot ignore, or you should not ignore. But the question is, am I observing it from a place of agency, or am I am I getting sucked in, right? Okay, and so literally it's it's about like you when you get sucked in, you literally find yourself like leaning in like this, right? Okay, you know, about to you know eat the microphone. And so you basically just want to like pull yourself out into you know a posture that is more sustainable, right? That's the deal, okay? Which means there's some strategic disconnection.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

Yeah. Strategic distance, right, from the turmoil of all of that. And uh how do you know whether you're doing that or whether or not you're getting unusefully disconnected? Is you know, it's like, okay, um I I heard that story, that story, that story, that story on the news feed, but I do not need to hear the 40 iterations of that, all the comments, all the analysis, right, all the grievances with respect to X, Y, and Z, right, right? Okay. So it's like knowing but not getting sucked in, right? I think that that's really important. But the other thing is to exercise um every day, right? My uh not only my curiosity, but a part of my practical doingness around, you know, around like okay, um I wonder if I pull the weeds out of that section, will it make a difference? You know, like you know, like just change your environment, right? You know, just change your environment a little bit. Okay, okay, like or okay, I'm very cheap, but that, you know, that uh that rubbish container over there, like it's seen its day, and you know, and certainly I could get one, even though I am inclined to get a secondhand one. This one is beyond being 450th hand. So like let me release it and let me just put something that is, you know, like that when I look at it, it doesn't always remind me about how things are falling apart.

unknown 34:19

Right?

SPEAKER_01 34:19

It's like can you build an environment around you? It doesn't have to be expensive, right? But doesn't look like it's about ready to fall apart. Okay, remember remembering I live in a place where we're counting on the termites holding the next. Right, yeah, right. Right? Okay. Okay, all right. So that whole thing, right, about building the future in small increments by improving your situation right now. And even if it's in the tiniest degrees, in the tiny degrees, take that stuff that's moldy out of your refrigerator.

unknown 35:01

Right?

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Just get started. Just just get rid of it right now. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Oh, remind me to tell you a story about that. Okay. Okay. Oh, that's good, because I was gonna go there later.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Um but before we go there, I wanted to ask you a little bit about this. What was coming into focus for me when you were talking about kind of leaning into the thing that we don't want to be, um, was this maybe it's a habit pattern around defining ourselves in counterpoint to, which I think is another way that we could unpack this idea of othering and belonging and um who we're becoming that is something other than uh what we are in counterpoint to. And I wanted to in particular ask you about um this idea of when we feel maybe it's in some cases this idea of um a possession, right? Where we feel to be um othered in that way, or the other aspect is being invisibilized. I I think this is um particularly in, I happen to work in the field of ending sexual and gender-based violence. And I think in that space there is so much um really intense silence around the pervasiveness of this type of harm and violence that people who have experienced it um both individually but then also at kind of like a um collective level feel this kind of um lack of visibility to other humans. Yes. And and that's a kind of counterpoint in a way too.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

It is a counterpoint, and so that this is really like uh uh like the can we as people who feel that way um uh be in community with each other in such a way that we we build the we build and fill in the hollowness that we feel that we have, right? We fill in the hollowness and um the worthiness that we have with each other in community, because part of this is about isolation, right? And isolation um is a technique, it is a strategy that is used by entities which might even include countries that are that are hoping to have power and control, right? Is basically to isolate you, right? Right. And so the antidote actually is about uh building that uh that possibility um with each other, which by the way is uh among the safest things to do, okay, right, un until it's bursting at its seams. It's bursting at its seams, right? And where more and more people can be brought in because you've invited them in rather than having to be the people to wait to be invited in.

SPEAKER_02 38:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Shall we take that up?

SPEAKER_02 38:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Later on? Yeah, let's take that. All right. Thank you, folks. We'll be right back. Hello friends. If you have a furrowed brow, you want to take your hand and you want to like massage it a little bit, and that'll sort of relax your notion of this understandably difficult subject. But the whole part of this episode is that our future is not predetermined. We do not have to be the people who drift or the people who just go along with whatever's going on. What that tabletop book said about us being a possession does not have to be so. That is not the case. We can actually tell the story of the future and then live into it. And it's really important to tell it because we essentially uh are unable to create things unless we have a story. And if we are waiting for other people to make that story up for us, then that removes a lot of our own agency. So we are the people who can do that. I am I know that for certain. This is not something that I am doubtful about at all. And how do I know that? I know that because every three, four, five, six, seven-year-old in the world has a story, multiple stories to tell. And all their stories have common themes associated with them. That if they were the people who are implementing them, they would have certainty that they would be able to do that. Okay. Now, you know, purple clouds aside, the future that you wish, you can take steps for that today. There's always some small steps that you can take. The people in Maine knew that to be true, and they all gathered together. And over that 25, 30 days, they actuated the story that they hope for their community, and they said, we're not going to wait for 100, 150 years. We're going to begin that today. And the people who are left behind in Detroit said, if we are to be left behind, we are the people who are going to bring life back. Our future is not predetermined as a wasteland that is abandoned. We don't have to be the people that further abandon the land that we feel close to. We can grow vegetables, we can clean up the rubbish, we can call our young people together, and we can say, do work with us. We can sing the songs, we can learn the things, we can become community and build from there, and build from there. So that's the whole point of this moment in which we're talking about like all the things, right? And including the complications about how we might feel about the places that we are in. We may have complicated relationships because they may very well be the places that, although beloved, that they had hard histories. Does that hard history have to be something that continues to play itself out today and into the future? No, not at all. It would take though the collective abilities and collective creation and the collective stories and the sweat equity, right? The hard work and the sweat equity to change the course. But in that, right, know that more than one future is possible. May that future be the one that you're working on right now. Thank you, everyone. We'll be back soon. The Horizon Story Podcast is produced by Bryson Hole and Sarah Demares de Rivera. Hosted and written by me, Norma Waugh. Executive producer, Naaleho Anthony, featuring Ariel Jacobson. For Collective Castellation, Kelly Miller. For OEV TV, Ken Sato, Wesley K. Aloha, Courtney Leon, Jeff Lee, and Ivy Lagabaga. For Pa'akai Communications, Jamila Silver, Diana Hahn, Pearl Thule, Christine Matsuda. Hair and Makeup by Melody Levy. Mahalo to Kalihi, the land of my birth, ancestors, teachers, collaborators and friends. Rosie Abrium for the support. And Scott Nine and Todge James for the encouragement. The Horizon Story is brought to you by OEVTV. Copyright by Collective Acceleration. Follow us on social at The Horizon Story. Questions to hello at thehorizonstory.com. Visit us where you find your favorite podcast or at thehorizonstory.com.