Ah, the future. We plan for it, rehearse for it, try to outsmart it, and then it shows up from the side, revealing we’d been building it unconsciously the whole time. That’s what this blog has been feeling like recently. Originally these blogs were just a collection of random thoughts, but it has been gradually and almost unintentionally moving to a form I had not envisioned. The themes keep looping back, the mood keeps getting fixed, the way keeps getting clearer. I’ve seen the same thing in my nonprofit work as well: the indirect, slow buildup of decisions that in the end show a path which you were not aware of already walking.

Somewhere along the way, the posts stopped being like totally separate thoughts, and they started acting more like a slowly emerging pattern. One post about observing our surroundings, became a post about communication, which, in turn, became a post about subtle influences, and before I realized it, there was this through-line which I hadn’t planned. It’s actually what I’ve been discovering in nonprofit work. You follow your small instincts, the conversations that stick, the projects you always go back to, and it’s only later that you realize they’ve all been pointing in the same direction.

What really astonishes me is that clarity often comes to us in a reverse way. As a matter of fact, you cannot see the path when you are walking on it but you see it after you turn around. Step by step, the writing has been giving me its shape, the same way the work has, not by making big statements, but by being repeated. By the things I keep doing automatically. By the ideas that keep coming up even when I’m not deliberately looking for them.

The future I’m moving towards wasn’t really a thing I planned. It is something I have been putting together bit by bit. Through the posts that were insignificant at the time, through the nonprofit work that quietly gave a sense of importance, through identification of the instincts after the fact, it all converges into a focal point that remains unseen. It could be possible that direction in reality appears this way. It is not a plan but a gathering of the decisions that in the end clearly indicate an ultimate place that we subconsciously were aiming for. In the end, the only thing you will be figuring out is what the future has in store which you’ve already set in motion.