We Interrupt This Doom's Day Story With…

Asked what a story is, the room offers memory of where we come from, a lens that simplifies reality, and energy that is either stored or expansive. Lamb can hear when people are still inside a story, telling their childhood as if they never left it. For years she taught story as an operating system that sets our beliefs, our values and what we think is possible. On a walk in Topanga Canyon, she says, the trees called that description grotesque and offered another: a library of the soul. Stories let us time travel and access wisdom beyond ourselves. Her best ones, she says, come from deep listening rather than from her smart little brain.

A metaphor is a fixed point, Lamb says, and a story is a string of them. She calls metaphor the language of spirit, which makes story a Rosetta Stone: whatever language we speak, the other world can reach us through it. We can also cast spells with the stories we tell. In southern Mexico, by her account, one group's stories take twelve hours and must be told word for word each year, and a teller who misplaces a word starts over. For myth she takes Sean Kane's definition: the earth speaking out loud. Creation stories are the operating system for how to live in the right way on Earth. Many were filed as fiction, and scientists now find some of them accurate.

Papic opens the topic with the Greek meta, as in metamorphosis: change as the structure under everything. Asked for the first word that comes to mind, the room says inevitability, nature's way, seasons, disruption, transmutation, terrifying, the only constant. Lamb absorbed a negative association with change from hearing it cast as the bad guy in the climate narrative, so she looked the word up. Its roots mean to exchange or barter, and to bend and twist. Papic follows exchange to Wall Street and asks which exchanges built the city. Broadway, for one, was built with the labor of enslaved people who were never paid. Where, she asks, does that leave us now in change?

Papic interrupts the bad news with good news from the regen·era Times, a newspaper from the future. Today's weather: the future is bright, mostly sunny, with a chance of joy. Carbon dioxide levels are optimal, and life cycles are healthy and vibrant. Shohadaee follows with the slide's question: good news, we made it, so how did we get here? A later bulletin announces a discovery that breaks the old measures of clocks and milestones: your story is your superpower. It may be the only story you have ever told, or one passed to you to hold and give. The last bulletin asks for curiosity all week. Break the frames of the boxes, and your story will make the world.

Shohadaee has focused on change, she says, for twenty years. The loudest narrative about it treats change as something to fear, a thing we no longer control, and it leaves many people apathetic and afraid. She does not dispute the facts under it. We have passed many tipping points, and we are in a dangerous place. We also have the potential to radically redefine the path and the story. People have already lived through changes nobody thought possible: no one believed the world could simply stop, and in 2020 it did. Wild amounts of positive change, she says, can follow on the heels of catastrophe.

Sometimes Shohadaee fears she is wrong. Sometimes she fears that her focus on the possible is not the best use of her energy, and that the looming crisis needs her to make it louder. Sometimes she fears that if she stops tracking what is falling apart, her work will not have enough impact. She keeps directing her attention toward the possible anyway. Her answer to the room's fears is a lesson she was given: gratitude is an infinite resource. Fears have a place, and banishing them fails, because they keep coming up. Be grateful for the information they give, and notice the threshold they bring you to.

Lamb grew up afraid of the word crisis. At its root, she says, it means a choice point, a place where you get to make a decision. She also separates two words people use loosely. A story is a vehicle: it takes you somewhere, and all kinds of things can happen while you are inside it. A narrative already knows where it is going and tells you to go. The climate narrative, in her reading, is a doomsday narrative. Interrupting it begins with a different word for where we stand: a threshold, the liminal place of mystery.

Thresholds and rites of passage have rules, Lamb says. You have to leave something behind. Something must be given or surrendered, or it will be taken. Nobody is guaranteed to reach the other side alive with every part intact: everyone knows someone whose heart broke and shut down instead of breaking open. Her question for pairs: picture yourself on the far side, sitting in a circle eating the freshest oranges and apples from food forests on every city sidewalk, co-writing the regen·era Times. What are you willing to give up to cross? The answers include an expectation of what the outcome would look like, fixed ideas of how change has to happen, and the idea of saving the world.

Long ago a planet lost its constellation and was consumed by bad and broken stories. The grief sliced a hole through the universe, and love came in. An earth planet and a water planet drew close and made something new: a planet with five oceans, trees and flowers. Afraid of what they had made, they threw her to the far edge of the universe, where she sang alone. Jupiter heard her first, then Venus, Mars and Saturn came around, and each taught her a gift. When a lost star ran across the universe toward her song, Earth remembered her mother's words: you were made from love, and anything is possible. She made the star a body from her own flesh and blood.

The star beings found that whatever they spoke changed Earth's shape, and they sang and danced to turn the seasons. Then the story of scarcity arrived uninvited, warning Earth she would run out of water and apples. She listened with more than her ears and told scarcity it was only half itself: it wanted her to value what she had. Seen whole, scarcity called Earth a healer. Each star being who stayed agreed to know one broken story inside out and heal it. What if greed is this visible now, Lamb asks, because we finally have the skills to heal it? She asks pairs to wonder which story they are uniquely placed to heal. Often it is the life lesson that keeps coming back around.

Eyes closed, it is 2080. Bubbles of possible realities drift past. Find the one where you are thriving, loved and well fed, with every animal you adore, and step inside. Each person names, in the present tense, what tells them they are there. Rows of trees are heavy with pears. Water springs up everywhere, and hummingbirds drink from it too. Honey flows, and it is free. The animals are healthy and left alone. Elders are honored in ways nobody imagined. Raccoons and opossums have their own apartment complexes. The hungry people on the street are no longer hungry. We know it is possible, Lamb says, because we just visited.

Now each teller is an elder in 2080, telling a grandchild how lucky they are and naming what had to go. Lamb starts it: we had a word called poverty, and not everyone got the same access to food and resources. Back in the day, profit was the ultimate incentive. People could pile up as much wealth as they liked while others died without their basic needs met. We were in a sixth mass extinction until a coordinated global effort ended it. They said the transition would be hard. It turned out simple. All we had to do was put care at the center, dance every day, work together, laugh, and come back into relationship with the elementals, our ancestors and our descendants.

Lamb went to Kalani Souza, one of her elders, at a low point in leading the Whale Council, after taking in staggering statistics about what is happening to whales. She wanted to invigorate people and felt too low to do it. He told her not to give people hope. Give them possibility. She says she found it here, in people's imagination, creativity, love, connection, ideas and hearts.

The Design Science Studio teaches a tool it calls WIBEFU, for will, being and function. Will is the force that governs both our doing and our being. Being is what a person is at a point in time, the spirit and energies resident in them. Function is everything observable that we do. In practice, take the thing you care about most, the story you are here to heal, and make it your will. Then ask who it invites you to become, and which capacities and qualities you get to cultivate to meet that motivation. From there you move forward and act, always in relationship to all of your relations. Anything we care about, Shohadaee says, invites us into our becoming.