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The Long Now Perspective in Psychotherapy

As a therapist I am always trying to make connections between my work with people in sessions and what is going on in the world. I find that making connections between therapy and social/cultural/artistic movements makes for a vibrant, consistently enriching session. It is in this spirit that I want to creatively borrow an idea I recently encountered – the concept of a Long Now perspective.

One evening while surfing the net for the latest news on a musical hero of mine, Brian Eno, I serendipitously uncovered a link to a San Francisco based non-profit organization, The Long Now Foundation.  The foundation’s aim is to encourage more long-term thinking as a counterweight to our contemporary focus on what we might call the short now.

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Eno puts it this way: “”Now” is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders meeting. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to human interest stories while overlooking longer-term issues – the real human interest.”

As our societies increasingly move down the accelerated path of a short time horizon, a Long Now outlook seems all the more crucial.  Another LNF contributor Stewart Brand, asserts, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span… Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed – some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.”

I suspect all of us, in one way or another, experience this “revving up.” Multi-tasking, the tyranny of the e-mail inbox; a text here; a tweet there; a Facebook status update every 2 minutes; speed dating; speed driving; another and another. Impulsively and compulsively the clicks follow after each other leaving us barely able to focus on the next 10 minutes much less the next 10,000 years. Even the most superficial of engagement with social media can leave one depleted and exhausted. The self-help industry, well-meaning as it can be, sometimes narrows our time horizon even further. It implores us to just “be here now” as if being here now is an endpoint in itself.

Writer Michael Chabon, in an article he wrote for Details, shares how this short now thinking has come to dominate the world today. Chabon contrasts the “enchanting ambiguity” of how we talked about the future a generation ago with our present lack of future talk. Previously, such discussions may have been some mix of promise (idealized utopian splendor, futurist Buckminster Fuller comes to mind) and darker visions (think your favorite dystopian sci-fi movie). But when he asked his eight-year old son to imagine the future, Chabon was met with a blank stare. It seems his son has come to take for granted the Earth’s demise. Chabon senses that the very idea of any future – idealized or frightening – has become outmoded or no longer attainable. A certain resignation has set in. “It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not the last paragraph of a long, strange and bewildering book.”  Wow.

I see all of this talk of a Long Now as having direct implications for how I approach my work counseling couples, families, and individuals. I believe psychotherapy is a compelling way to reorient our lives in the direction of the Long Now.

Not unlike Chabon’s son, the couples and families I see often suffer from a profound cynicism about their future. They struggle to coble together a vision that gets them beyond merely surviving the next day with a spouse with whom they have fallen out of love. Very often I find myself invoking the Long Now in these situations. I sometimes watch the glow of quivering hopefulness arise where there was once only short now despair. The finite time of a 50 minute psychotherapy session unfolds as I share with a couple in distress the possibility of imagining years into an (infinite?) future beyond the reparative successes of their hard work in couples therapy. I tell them I can imagine the moment, maybe twenty years in the future, when their daughter’s fiancé looks at them and says, “I want them to be the grandparents of our children. They struggled. They stuck together through it all. They stayed together for their daughter, my wife to be. I want to impart this legacy to our children so that they can impart it to theirs.” This is the Long Now engaged to its fullness. It invites us to imagine a lineage of unbroken marriages, cohesive families through the generations and across the centuries.

I also frequently invoke the Long Now with individuals. Some may be wrestling with the challenges of finding their ideal job or moving through a rocky life transition. I might ask them “What do you imagine the world most needs?” This ever so small revision of “What makes you happy?” shifts us away from the short now of what I want or what I desire. It expands the time horizon and it opens a space to imagine a better day. For some this may mean a more meaningful job, a richer engagement with their community, or a dive into the creative wellspring of romantic love. I have found over and over again that such a Long Now question can provide an opening step to deeper connection to life itself.

One of the Long Now Foundation’s projects is the building of the 10,000 year clock. This clock, which is now under construction, is designed to chime every year for the next 10,000 years. Its century hand will move every 100 years. Once it reaches its tenth millennium it will let out a sonorous chime. This awe-inspiring mechanism calls us to think about how we can apply Long Now thinking in our own lives. Who might be there 10,000 years in the future when the clock chimes? What might we want to bequeath to future generations between now and then?

I am struck that even with such a symbolically rich clock in motion, there is always the profound chance that this discussion of a Long Now may become just another short now moment to be lost in a sea of other blog articles, tweeted moments, or Facebook likes. So what might be some practical ways to infuse a Long Now orientation so that it becomes a deeper habit for us all?  Below I have thought of a few seeding steps in the direction of more fully embodying such a perspective.

  • Set a calendar event on our phones, on our computer or our tablet.  Every week, every month, every year create a reminder to the self to reflect on your engagement with the Long Now as a way of living in the world. You can ask yourself, “What things am I doing that take into account the long-term?” I am writing this on Feb. 14, 2014. I just set a weekly recurring event that expires on Feb. 14, 10,000! Yes one’s iPhone calendar goes that far into the future!
  • If you have a meditation practice you can spend part of your practice inhaling an aspect of the past (the memory of your elders, the inspiration of a heroic Long Now oriented figure – Maybe Mahatma Gandi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa?) and on the exhale imagine your breath moving toward an ever expanding future that sees your children aging, your grandchildren being born, their children being born, and so on. How many generations can you imagine with each exhale? If you don’t have children maybe you can imagine a generative action you hope to perpetuate into the future. What might its impacts reveal with each exhale? How can you carry this Long Now energy with you out into the world of interaction? Can you feel in your body how thinking in these terms changes you?
  • If you have a meditation practice you can spend part of your practice inhaling an aspect of the past (the memory of your elders, the inspiration of a heroic Long Now oriented figure – Maybe Mahatma Gandi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa?) and on the exhale imagine your breath moving toward an ever expanding future that sees your children aging, your grandchildren being born, their children being born, and so on. How many generations can you imagine with each exhale? If you don’t have children maybe you can imagine a generative action you hope to perpetuate into the future. What might its impacts reveal with each exhale? How can you carry this Long Now energy with you out into the world of interaction? Can you feel in your body how thinking in these terms changes you?
  •  Join an organization or volunteer for a cause that you believe inspires longer-term thinking.
  • Start a conversation about long term thinking with a friend or loved one.  The seed of your discussion may birth ideas you may have never imagined possible!
  • Any other ideas?  Leave a comment below. I would love to hear your creative input!

To bring this discussion full circle, another recent occurrence got me reflecting on how the past, present, and future of a Long Now perspective co-mingle. Like Eno reminds us, “the Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.”  On February 4th 2014 the mother of my dear friend, Charlie, moved on to the great dance party in the sky.  Barbara Ewing, born October 21, 1931, lived 82 Long Now years of affirming life. 56 years of married partnership. The mother of five children.  The grandmother of two.  Barbara, like all of our elders, reminds us of the importance of a long-term gaze. I imagine her spirit is captured somewhere in the ebbing past-present-future Long Now awe of This Brian Eno composition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It4WxQ6dnn0

Every ending begets a beginning into an uncharted future for us to create.

You can find out more about the Long Now Foundation at www.longnow.org

You can discover the music and art of Brian Eno at Brian-Eno.net

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Andrew Groeschel

Andrew Groeschel

Andrew Groeschel is a licensed marriage family therapist in California and Texas. You might just catch him on a Virgin America flight between the Silicon Valley and the Silcon Hills of Austin, Texas where he does teletherapy and in person therapy with busy professional individuals, couples, and their families. If you do, please introduce yourself. He loves to talk about the interface of technology and psychotherapy. Alternately, you can e-mail him at agtherapy@me.com and set up a free video or phone consultation to see if teletherapy through Psyched in San Francisco is the right fit for you.

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