Happy new calendar year.
As a Piscean devotee of possibility, I love swimming in the space of dreams and visions. Over the past few weeks, I’ve delighted in hearing friends and family's intentions for the new year. Reading a book each month, doing more dancing, volunteering 40 hours, making more space for rest. These are just some of the visions of 2023 floating in the collective.
Intentions serve an important purpose in our lives regardless of whether we set them on January 1st, the Winter Solstice, our birthdays, or other points in time. An intention is both a compass and a magnet. A compass because it guides us along the way, helping us find our way again when we are lost. A magnet because it draws us forth, motivating us to keep moving toward it despite challenges that may deter us.
In any process of embodied transformation, we form a declaration—a commitment to a future possibility. Declarations are speech acts, or statements that serve to both share information and take an action. By stating a declaration, a person is creating the future through language and embodiment. For example, a person might have a declaration about leading their team with wisdom and joy. Each time they practice stating their declaration aloud, they notice the sensations in their body that tell them: This is what it feels like to lead with wisdom and joy. Perhaps they notice their chest feels brighter, their eyes softer, their spine longer. This is their speech act. They are declaring the future reality they are committed to creating and embodying it at the same time.
Intentions and declarations alike are practices of radical imagination. We cannot go somewhere we haven’t already traveled to in our minds and bodies. This is one reason why I love works of visionary fiction (often found in speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and Africanfuturism). These types of stories beckon the reader into worlds where liberation, sustainability, climate repair, and justice are realized. They enable us to imaginatively see, feel, hear, taste, and smell these future worlds, to experience them through our bodies. Storytelling can make seemingly unreachable futures palpable. As Walidah Imarisha writes in her introduction to a brilliant anthology she co-edited with adrienne maree brown, Octavia’s Brood, “Once the the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
The more we practice feeling the sensations of a future we yearn for, the more muscle memory we build. Literally, our body becomes familiar with the sensations of that vision. We begin moving through our daily life as if we are living that future reality right now, and in doing so, we shape the world around us. The nature of complex adaptive systems we live within causes them to self-organize through emergent properties in response to changes occurring within their components and the relationships between components. In other words, as we embody more of our future vision, our world does so as well.
As we settle into the beginning of a new calendar year, I wonder: how might we let our intentions be less of a task to check off the list and more of an organizing principle to shape us? What might we ask of our friends, family, colleagues, and ourselves to make transformation toward these intentions more possible? And how might we attune and contribute to intentions in the collective?
As always, I hope you’ll reach out with reflections, thoughts, and perhaps your own intention for 2023. Hearing from you is one of the greatest gifts.
Warmly,
Em Wright
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