Imagine the Future | Resnick Aspen Action Forum
A decade later, the number ten contains multitudes.
Ten years ago in a packed Aspen theater, I scribbled Bryan Stevenson’s words into a notebook that would soon collect my doctoral musings: get proximate, change narratives, stay hopeful, and do uncomfortable things.
The message had lingered for years, until stepping into that same theater brought it rushing back.
At The Aspen Institute's 2025 Action Forum, I wasn’t seeking answers so much as orientation. A question itched at me: Can we outrun today’s crises? And the response arrived not in speed, but in the fluency of two vital languages: imagination and proximity.
“Discipline to imagine what’s trying to become,” Dar Vanderbeck offered from Goethe.
“People love and admire problems—how beautiful and insoluble the problem is,” Ambassador Martin Kimani teased, challenging our worship of proximate stuckness.
And so they set the theme: high vision, doused egos.
In a session with Monica Berger Gonzalez, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Michelle Culver, and Ruchi Gupta, we traced the thin line between creativity and chaos. Then came the coffee break turned late-night catharsis with Antionette Carroll, Margaret Seeley, and Gillian Zettler—where professional scar tissue became spark. Staying inspired, I remembered, meant staying grounded.
But the rawest lesson came in surround sound. “Nothing To See Here: Watts,” a documentary scored by Brandon (STIX) Salaam-Bailey, blended pain and possibility. I still don’t have the just-right words, but I’m certain it was fluent imagination and proximity personified.
That final night, we let go like college kids—blessings and burdens alike. A seminar proverb resonated: “Birds sing not because they have answers but because they have songs.”
So we sang anyway.
The last decade taught me this:
Imagination without proximity is theory.
Proximity without imagination is triage.
Sustainable change braids both—vision that ignites, grounding that steadies.
I promise, it won’t take another ten years for me to return.
Originally appeared on LinkedIN.
Photos from Aspen
