Making Goals for A Future We Don’t Desire

Time bends very easily, what spells are we casting?

Kara Walker, Untitled, 2016, From a 57-Part Series: Untitled. “For the exhi­bi­tion, A Black Hole is Every­thing a Star Longs to Be, the artist is opening up her exten­sive archive of draw­ings for the first time…providing a comprehensive and exclusive insight into her artistic cosmos.” — Schirn Magazine. Image description: A wash of black watercolor on paper behind white lines illustrating the silhouette of a seemingly older figure with black features using their two fingers to open the mouth of a seemingly younger figure with black features and small breasts.

The spell only works if you want it to. I peeled myself out of bed, pushed my body to Rockaway Avenue and let the C train carry me down its blue river to High Street. I’d arrive to work through the force of nothing but sheer will and the MTA, desperately wanting the spell to work. I was finally there — here — 26 and doing it. The salaried job. The healthcare. The 401k matching. The Brooklyn apartment. The bathroom I didn’t have to share. The floor to ceiling windows large enough to temporarily serve as a daily dose of depression medication. A core memory from childhood takes place in Midtown Manhattan just 16 years prior. I am celebrating my 10th birthday by making my annual pilgrimage to my favorite restaurant of all time, Mars 2112. A couple blocks from the restaurant there is a genderless extraterrestrial on the corner wearing a silver spandex bodysuit covering their head and every limb as they move to “Tom’s Diner” by Susan Vega, dancing in a way that could only be described as a combination of Lester Horton and hip hop. In that moment it occurred to me, “so this is where the weirdos live”. This is where we go to anonymously dance on the corner to our favorite song for no apparent reason beyond ecstasy. In that moment I promised myself, “you’re moving to New York”. Here I was, 16 years later, keeping that promise to that 10 year old girl. So why did it feel like I abandoned her?

To address the cosmic shaped hunger left by Mars 2112 and the non-binary silver shaman on the corner, I began the new year with a list of goals:

1. Master data structures and algorithms 

2. Get promoted as lead software engineering instructor

3. Then get promoted to the curriculum development team to improve my technical writing skills 

4. Dedicate 5 hours a week to professional development in order to transition into a career as a software engineer 

5. Organize weekly coffee dates with other software engineers 

I would spend the last month of every year drawing a map of the next. Casting spells for futures I didn’t want to come to pass. I would spend hours, days, weeks in coffee shops with pen and paper dividing time into quarters. Frantically writing goals as spells for Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Sitting on the floor of an apartment I manifested — no, fought for with my bare nails and teeth — I made vision boards of the life I wanted while doing work I couldn’t stomach. What do you do when you lassoed the exterior world the 10 year old version of you dreamed of but the cost was an interior world she couldn’t survive inside of. 

Van drops a document in the Seeda School Discord titled “READ_WHEN_YOU_NEED.pdf” and my mouth waters remembering its’ truth. It’s an excerpt from Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, by Akwaeke Emezi, specifically “Execution | Dear Nonso”. My tongue was desperately searching for these words in 2019. Taste buds like antennas in my mouth longing for a flavorful truth I could put my cosmic weight behind. A full sentence I could actually believe when I uttered it. The bitterness of the lies kept me hungry and satiation became my obsession. I finally sat down to eat the meal I worked my whole life preparing so why weren’t the hunger pangs going away? The fullness of my power didn’t become clear to me until 2021 when I plucked myself from the dinner table serving nothing but the yeast of whiteness, too inedible to swallow, and collapsed into the soil that knew my ancestors name instead. It turns out Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir was right on time. I might still be at that dinner table, with unending hunger prepared to nibble at my own toes if I didn’t surrender to my longing and let it lead me. When I say desire became my compass, it’s more than a metaphor. Planting seeds of my desire resulted in the only food that could satiate this black feminist lust for self-recognition. You see? Desire became my compass, map and witch doctor, prescribing spells I not only wanted to work but now believe are inevitable. 

This is how I know that it doesn't matter if you think the goals are attainable. They are. What matters is that they are impossible without the work, they cannot happen if you don't make the work. With my spell, I drew a map of the future I wanted, then I took those defined lines and pulled them across time, dragging them into the present. Time bends very easily; you can fold it like this with little trouble. So. The spell is to make that future real, which can be done because you are not powerless, and the only thing that needs to be done in the here and now is to make the work.

— Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (2021), “Execution | Dear Nonso”

You are not powerless. 

You are not powerless.

You are not powerless.

I try to remind myself with the yearly planner almost full before the year even begins. Desperate to “control the controllables” I craft my 12-week year praying it allows me to persist through the hunger for one more spring. Unfortunately, when the work is misaligned with the truth of our desire the energizing force to sustain the spell is critically compromised. Remembering we are more powerful than we can imagine when our tongues are pointed to the ancient coordinates of deep truth, we look at our spells and ask, “do I want this to become truth too?”. Then we ask if the work required to cast this spell is in alignment with our desire, that flaming force that puts us in cosmic collaboration with spirit — allowing us to hibernate with a full stomach and emerge in spring with a conviction that compels the spell. On the flip side, we must also ask if the work requires unacceptable compromise and misalignment with the truth of our desire, the wisdom of our intuition and the pace of our bodies, leaving us with empty stomachs and resenting ourselves in spring for not having the energy to complete the spell we didn’t deeply believe in. Now? I refuse to make goals that require me to abandon that 10 year old girl who dreamed of being governed by nothing but the liberating framework of pure and public ecstasy. If a place, position or person compromises this sacred pact, I now know it’s not for me. But it wasn’t always like this.

I've watched people try to find shortcuts, hacks that avoid the work, and they end up wasting so much energy that could've been put into the work. For storytellers like us, it's hard learning how to give the work the devotion it requires, how to let the rest of the world burn, how to abandon control. It's a little like madness-and people will foam at the mouth to tell you so, as if you don't already know, as if you're not screaming inside from the fear. I don't know what to say to that. I suppose you have to be willing to go mad. Can you lose control of something you never really controlled in the first place? Illusions are the best things to burn, I think, but some people consider such fires to be threats, and those who start them even worse. Maybe this spell is specifically for people who talk to God. I’m sure it can be adapted for others, but its foundation in God is my only point of certainty. I have no reason to believe what I believe without the flame of faith.

— Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (2021), “Execution | Dear Nonso”

On today’s morning walk through the forest I listened to this podcast, Time-Management Tips From the Universe with theoretical physicist and black-hole expert Janna Levin, which framed our conceptual understanding of “time” as the movement “toward greater disorder”. The mysterious open question posed at the end was, “why did the universe begin in such an ordered state?” It’s a question science and religion have been trying to unfold for centuries. All we know is we’re fundamentally made up of the legacy of that primordial order, an ocean of quantum particles also known as our body. This is the only semblance of clarity I need. If we are direct descendants of order trapped in a construct where greater disorder is our only option, how might we use that truth as a creative wayfinder through this unknowable terrain? Put another way, if the laws of the universe require us to make it up, then blow it up and make it up again, what are we choosing to build and what are we deciding to burn with the flame of our faith? 

The number of things we have to unlearn is unquantifiable, but I know the one thing we must set fire to is continuing to allocate an ounce of our power and meaning making to systems that are only satiated by our death. When we slow down we understand the new year goal setting frenzy is connected to our longing to control the chaos and to carve out meaning in the spacetime of the abyss. The gift of acknowledging this craving with compassion, grace and the full awareness of our power is we get to direct this species-wide compulsion toward something much more intentional and aligned with our aliveness. When we tap into our body and intuition as technologies we enter into a conversation at the scale of the cosmos — stars hot and cold, balls of flavor and mold — we’re only recognizable in relation. Existence only becomes evident when we’re colliding into each other to create something science and religion will try to unfold for centuries. The metallic shaman is a mirror reminding us we are a constellation of desire and disorder, assembling at the dinner table with black holes for bellies, only opening wide when life is being served.

Join us next Tuesday, the 16th at 12PM EST and we’ll gather around a dinner table, the shape of our desire, and cast spells we actually want to bloom in spring.

Full faith. Full flame. Full power¹. 

1. Four days ago I reflected on the first Seed A World Retreat in this post on my Instagram. Take a look at the comments to read reflections from fellow worldbuilders! Also, I want to invite you to leave a comment if you too were part of the web of magic that was the Fall 2023 Cohort so we can all follow each other with the intention of continued entanglement. 🕸