Living as if
What would it look like if you were doing the thing right now?
You know the thing.
That thing.
The dream that haunts you. The one you’ll make real just as soon as you have permission, get answers, and see the stars align.
What if you lived as if?
Consider it, seriously. For leaps like this, it can help to make a list of actions that “a person doing the thing” would do.
Big ambitious things, sure, but also tiny actions, delicious rituals, things to try, games to play, nourishing habits, simple practices, skills to acquire, an ethos, social habits, and anything else that comes to mind.
Seth Godin noted recently that this kind of ambition needs to unhook from external validation. That is never easy, but yes. I agree. Add that to the list.
Your list is probably getting long by now. But don’t worry, there’s no pressure. This is not a to-do list. It’s just an inventory.
Start with just one thing, and…voila, you’re doing it.
Here’s where it gets really cool:
Living as if can also be a means for social transformation—for the dreams that haunt all of us.
Civil rights angel John Lewis spoke of beloved community this way, insisting:
And you live as if you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there…Because in the final analysis, we [in the movement] did become a circle of trust, a band of brothers and sisters…We were one.
—John Lewis, “We Are the Beloved Community”
Harvard professor Brandon Terry teaches that Martin Luther King, Jr. led from a similar framework:
[O]ne way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.
—Brandon Terry, “A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Lost Teachings”
It’s present today when climate leaders like Ayana Elizabeth Johnson dare to ask, “What if we got it right?” Johnson’s commitment to possibility is inspired by both her field of marine science and imaginative work like this incredible poem by youth activist Ayisha Siddiqa:
From individual change, to team goals, to community needs, to global issues, living as if is how we breathe life into the dream.
There are no guarantees of success.
We should not expect perfection (and how boring that would be).
But there is also no certain failure.
What if we lived as if?
What if we were doing the thing?
Whatever the dream, I promise you: there’s an entry point hiding in the messy here and now.
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