The Future is Coming

By Emma Håkansson, January 29, 2020

Read time: 4 Mins

The Future is Coming Image

I don’t have any idea what my future looks like.

On a lot of days, I hope I end up living a bit farther out from the city. I have a few rescued sheep and other animal friends living freely. I live with someone who loves me, and we’re happy.

Maybe I have an adopted human child. I have a veggie patch, some fruit trees. I lie on a rug in the grass and read a book, I eat fresh cherries and music drifts through sunbeams that soak into my skin.

I find joy in the everyday, I feel so incredibly happy to live the life I do. It’s sort of funny that when I think about the future that would make me happiest, my work isn’t involved in it at all. Today, my work is mostly all I think about. Maybe that’s because what would make me happiest is exactly that, about me. My work isn’t about me. Mostly, it’s about animals. I sort of hate my work. I hate that I have to do it. I hate that what is normal is what is violent. I hate that it’s radical to think animals deserve to live and be free.

I hate that people either don’t care enough to learn or then don’t care enough to change. I hate that the people I love that surround me and that work for the same goal are tired. I hate that they’re hurting. I hate that our hurting is absolutely nothing in comparison to those we work for – the animals incarcerated and slaughtered every second of every day.

I think I’d be a poet. I think I’d be a sculptural artist; I miss having clay on my hands, and that they’d be too dirty for me to touch or use my phone. I miss the catharsis of turning my feelings into objects. I think I’d sleep in without feeling bad about myself. I think I’d turn cooking into a form of meditation, instead of wishing I could be fed through a drip because I ‘don’t have time’.

I’m scared about the future because I don’t know if it could ever happen the way I wish it could. Beyond the everyday worries people have – will I find someone who loves me, will I be happy, will I have financial security.

There’s also the burning world worry. I don’t think there’s going to be an apocalypse in that there will be one or a few days that ends it all, I think we’re going to live through a new normal, one that is terrifying and which involves me needing to use the tinned beans I recently considered collecting for my future survival.

What if I want to live in the forest, but I only could if I were willing to accept everything I love and cherish burning to ash every elongated summer? What if I want to rescue sheep from slaughter, but there won’t be enough food for them to live anyway?

What if someone I love dies with black smoke burning in their eyes and their throat? What if the heat becomes too much and my imaginary adopted child can’t live through it? What if I’m left with nothing but a sense of responsibility to continue on trying to make things a little more okay for others?

The future is coming, it’s the end of this sentence, it’s five minutes after that. I should probably work out a way to work both for others and for myself. I probably deserve a future that I enjoy. A present, too. If we’re all working for a better world but in doing so push away all the happiness in our life, what are we really working for?

If I want those around me, human and non-human to feel happiness, shouldn’t I want it for me too? Shouldn’t we find the cross roads between activism and joy, in community gardens, in food accessibility and justice, in sunshine and fresh water on our skin?

In the natural world we try to protect, in the animals and people we love and fight for? I think I’m going to try really hard to have a happy future. I’m not sure when, it feels a little like empty promises to myself right now, but I
promise myself I will.

My future will be for others, but it will also be for myself. Is self-sacrifice egotistical or necessary for the greater good? I’m not sure. But I’ll try to be some beautiful full cup of water that is able to help and feed others because I’m never thirsty myself.

Return to issues