Krista Tippett: When Joy Harjo speaks of “seven generations” and “the whole of time,” she feels that in her bones. It is not an abstraction. It is an existential reality, and it is part and parcel of her hope.

I don’t have that feeling in my bones from my family, and I think many of us in the West don’t. We’ve been separated from that sensibility. So I want to offer you an image to carry around, a thought exercise to cultivate a reality-based, longer sense of time and ancestry and the possibility that comes with that. This is called the “200-year present.” And it was an idea, an offering of the Quaker sociologist Elise Boulding. Now, I learned about her and about this exercise from John Paul Lederach, the peacebuilder who we’ve mentioned before. And she was one of his teachers and mentors.

So ponder this. First of all, when Elise Boulding spoke of the present, she meant “present” as “past, present, and future” — the way this really works. And the exercise is to take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and see who was the oldest person who held you, and then just calculate back to their birthdate, roughly. Second, think about the youngest member of your extended family right now. And then imagine a robust life — to what decade might this young person live? That’s kind of an amazing thought in our time, because there are projections that people born in this century will live for a century. ??

Most people end up calculating a 200-year span in which, as Elise Boulding would say, you were held and touched, and you will touch the lives of people that cover that 200-year present. See how this opens your imagination and your sense of the possibilities of your lifetime.

And this: consider these words of Joy Harjo. “There are many different realities. I think about all of these different realities. I think about all of those different realities. I travel a lot. I’ll be in a car or a bus or van or whatever, looking at the houses and the windows and all the storefronts and thinking about all the different realms, all the different story realms. Every place, every window, every doorway is an opening to a life, a whole different life, a whole series of stories, and it’s multiplied hundreds and thousands of times. Some don’t overlap at all, some are in their very private universes. Other universes are more expansive.”?

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