The Art of Impermanence: Wayfinding in the Fragile Now
I’ve just returned from the desert, where every year, a group of talented humans co-create towering artworks, monuments to imagination, and then watch them burn.
It is always disarming and sacred to see beauty consumed by flame.
To remember that nothing, no matter how beloved or seemingly indestructible, can escape impermanence. Including us.
Yet, standing in the ashes, there is a strange sense of potential and return, as if new futures are born in ancient remembering: that the present holds traces of the past and seeds of the future all at once.
There is a paradox to an event like AfrikaBurn. On the one hand, the dust and sensory overload can start to feel edgy and long — and yet, it is over in the blink of an eye. Upon reflection, I realised that life is much the same.
We like to imagine we have time: time to begin, to change, to connect, and to dance.
But life is like a single long Burn.
The music is playing now.
The people who matter are here.
The art we make of our lives is fleeting, fragile, and alive.
And before we know it, it will be over.
Thoughts on futures and futuring.
When we think about futuring, we often speak of the need to “navigate uncertainty,” as if a compass and a path are lying somewhere ahead, waiting to be discovered. Even the word WayFinding suggests a path to be found. Perhaps WayMaking would be a better term.
Perhaps futuring is less about what lies ahead and more about what we are weaving and remembering in the thick of now. What if the path is not found but made and remade while walking through cycles of becoming and unbecoming, like a ritual, like the Burn?
In this thick now, the future isn’t a distant destination but a shimmering field of complex potential, alive with possibilities that have yet to take form, asking us to linger in ambiguity and attend to what is quietly emerging.
It is not a solo act, nor a fixed point ahead — it’s a living conversation. I struggle even to speak about “the” future and “it” — as if it is a singular static noun. To me, the future is a verb, not a noun.
Futuring is not just about what we imagine for the world, but what we are called to co-create with each other, the earth, and mystery itself. Wayfinding and futuring are not separate from who we are; they are embodied practices of becoming — relational, rhythmic, alive.
To future well is to loosen our grip on coordinates and certainties and, as Bayo Akomolafe says, to fall into flight. It invites us to trust the wisdom of emergence and remember the wildness at the heart of all that is unfolding.
Wayfinding futures is not a search for solid ground, clear paths or coherent scenarios. It is a practice of presence: attuning to and harmonising with emergence, moving with aliveness, holding both impermanence and potential at once, and co-creating with the unknown.
The fire teaches: in the end, everything burns — and in that transience, futures emerge.
