Hospicing the Future
Fieldnotes from Three Rooms of Imagination
Three workshops in one week — three rooms, each holding a different kind of exhaustion and a different kind of hope.
In every space, people spoke about what’s not working: movements, systems, institutions, even the strategies they once believed in. The words came quietly at first, then in a rush.
People are buried by the weight of what’s not working. They need to hospice it — a phrase borrowed from scholar Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, author of Hospicing Modernity.
It isn’t just fatigue. It’s the heaviness of carrying practices and programs that have reached the end of their usefulness but haven’t been laid to rest. What they carry isn’t holding them back so much as holding them down — like compacted soil that can’t breathe.
Across all three workshops — a systems-sensing lab with immigrant-rights advocates, a community imagination session in Sharp Leadenhall, and an intergenerational park futures workshop in East Baltimore — the pattern was the same. People could feel that something larger was shifting. The question was no longer how to fix what’s broken, but how to end well — how to sunset what’s run its course so imagination has room to return.
Learning to Winter
Nature knows how to release. In living systems, decay is part of continuity. In social systems, we often resist that truth. We keep running programs, campaigns, and coalitions long after their season has passed, mistaking longevity for legitimacy.
Author Katherine May calls wintering the practice of turning inward when life becomes too heavy to carry. In ecological terms, it’s the pause that allows renewal. Nora Bateson extends that logic to social systems, writing that life depends on “transcontextual composting” — the slow digestion of what no longer fits, so that something wiser can emerge.
Our institutions rarely allow that digestion. We skip the compost pile entirely and wonder why nothing new grows.
Used Futures and Borrowed Tools
In foresight, scholar Sohail Inayatullah describes used futures — inherited visions or practices that once inspired but now constrain. They are the tools we continue to wield because they’re familiar, even when they no longer serve.
Used futures live inside many of our best intentions. The frameworks I inherited from law, philanthropy, and policy promised impact, but many also assumed that control equals care. Those assumptions still shape how we fund, measure, and define success.
They appear in the belief that every initiative must scale, every plan must last, and every idea must prove its worth in perpetuity. When we refuse to let strategies end, we trap imagination in yesterday’s form.
The Futures Triangle
Through the Futures Triangle, the field comes into focus:
Weight of the past: legacy tools, policies, and habits that resist sunset.
Push of the present: acceleration, algorithmic pressure, the demand to demonstrate impact.
Pull of the future: a longing for adaptive, regenerative systems that know when to stop.
Right now, the weight of the past is pressing down on imagination. It’s not pulling us backward; it’s compacting the soil where new possibilities could take root. The work ahead isn’t to scale more solutions. It’s to learn how to end — to hospice the old with respect and return its nutrients to the field.
Composting the System
To compost is to accept that decomposition is creative. Ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls this soil time — the quiet rhythm of transformation beneath the surface. Soil time moves slower than strategy. It demands patience, discernment, and care.
Composting, in practice, might look like:
Sunsetting programs that no longer serve.
Retiring advocacy campaigns when the landscape changes and the work must take a new form.
Letting frameworks rest instead of endlessly repackaging them.
Measuring success in depth, not duration.
Listening for when the work itself asks to be completed.
After this week, I find myself wondering where people will learn the tools for this kind of work — to compost and hospice with skill, not just sentiment. Who will teach us to recognize what’s finished and release it with respect? When will this kind of labor be valued as much as launching something new?
In each of the three workshops, this question surfaced in different forms. Advocates described the immigrant-rights ecosystem as a forest — roots talking to each other underground. Neighbors in Sharp Leadenhall spoke about bridges and continuity. Children in East Baltimore imagined parks filled with peace, fairness, and wonder. Three rooms, one lesson: slow down, acknowledge what’s ending, and make space for what wants to grow.
Why This Matters Now
The speed of change is producing a kind of temporal vertigo. Communities, movements, and cities are living in overlapping timelines — some racing ahead, others still entangled in their past designs. Foresight, at its best, helps us navigate these multiple times with dignity. It asks not just what is coming but what can we release.
Real foresight isn’t about prediction; it’s about perception. It restores our capacity to sense what wants to emerge once the noise quiets.
What might change if we built infrastructures that support graceful endings, not just constant beginnings?
What if we valued the skill of closing cycles as much as opening them?
Hospicing is not hopelessness. It is an act of devotion. It says: this mattered — let’s help it end well so something else can live.
Bridge to Practice: How We Tend the Field
At Point A Studio, foresight is not abstract — it’s regenerative practice. We treat strategy as soil work. In every system, there are three kinds of labor:
sensing what is dying, tending what is composting, and protecting what is sprouting.
This rhythm shapes how we design workshops, coach teams, and build futures labs. It means beginning with sensing, not solutions; creating time for reflection between projects; valuing relationships as infrastructure; and letting imagination guide systems repair.
For me, the question isn’t how to build better strategies, but what we’re building them from.
What assumptions about continuity and success are embedded in our methods?
What would strategy look like if its primary output were renewal rather than endurance?
Closing Reflection: Soil Time
The future isn’t a horizon waiting to be reached. It’s a field unfolding beneath our feet, growing in soil time.
As you plan what’s next, pause and ask:
What needs to be completed?
What needs to be composted?
What deserves a good ending?
The future we long for — the one that’s relational, regenerative, and alive — will only grow from soil that can breathe again.