We are future ancestors
“Before I was six years old, my grandparents and my mother had taught me that if all the green things that grow were taken from the Earth, there could be no life... But if all the human beings were taken away, life on Earth would flourish. That is how insignificant we are. ”
I have been carrying something for years that I can only describe, in emotions as sadness, and in feelings as heaviness. Not depression. Not cynicism. But an unspoken, paralyzing disappointment. A hardness that lives below the surface, that most people would never experience when they met me.
I realized what this was in the wilderness a few weeks ago during a five-day nature based soul initiation retreat in South Africa. It was only there, sitting alone in silence with the Earth, that I was offered a remarkable insight into what I was unwittingly carrying and protecting.
It was grief. The kind that only shows itself in stillness, when there is nothing left to distract us. The grief was for men. And a quiet guilt, as a man, that I should be doing more. I honor the inherent masculine powers we were born with: strength, intellect, the instinct to stand for righteousness, to protect what matters. And yet I grieve what we have chosen to do with them.
The constitutions, institutions, economies and industries we built were once designed with a purpose. To distribute power. To protect the vulnerable. To ensure that what one generation built, the next could inherit and improve. Instead, wealth has concentrated in fewer hands with each passing decade. Institutions built to serve the public increasingly serve those who fund them. Systems designed for protection have become instruments of extraction. The architecture is still standing. What it was built for is not.
I want to be careful here. I love the modern world. The industrial world we have created is extraordinary. I am not anti-capitalist, but I am against capitalism being placed before humanity. Where a few hoard their wealth and power for generations while others suffer. That is where I have a problem.
From a primordial sense, the masculine was built to be a force of stewardship, a protector. Someone who understands that we are all relatives, and that there is no peace when it is selective, and what happens to one of us happens to all of us. He can see beyond his own lifetime. He is gentle because he understands his strength and what is at stake when used carelessly. He is honest, aware that what comes next grows from how he cares for what cannot yet stand on its own. Standing between what he loves and what would destroy it. His soul's purpose is to leave this Earth in a better place than he found it.
That is not the ugly patriarchy that exists today. It is not dominance. It is devotion.
What many men inherited instead was a distorted version of masculinity. Industrial. Removed from anything natural. Men who stopped thinking for themselves. Men who follow without questioning, who consume without discernment, who lack the courage to speak up or build something that outlasts them. The patriarchy created in this form is not natural. It is a wound passed down, generation to generation, by men who were themselves never shown another way.
Most of them were not malicious. It was the only archetype they knew. But inheritance is not destiny. What we do with what we know today is what matters now. One problem is that men are operating from too small a view to even see the choice in front of them. Let me provide an example of what I mean.
When astronauts look back at the Earth from space, something shifts in them. They describe it the same way, almost every time. A fragile blue line. An impossibly thin atmosphere wrapped around a living sphere. A single living, breathing organism that sustains and holds everything at once, interconnected, interdependent and interbeing. They say they cannot look at the Earth and all living beings in it the same way after.
This is known as the Overview Effect. When you see the Earth from the vast blackness of space, the story of separation stops making sense. Borders dissolve. The categories we use to divide ourselves, ethnicity, nation, titles, rank, become what they always were. Lines drawn by people who could only see as far as their own interests.
The Western notion of leadership has arguably never had this view. Evidence can be found everywhere, from modern day imperialism to the failures of colonialism. It operates from inside a frame where accumulation feels rational, where the suffering of the masses is someone else's problem, where the future is an abstraction too far away to emotionally register.
Stewardship requires the capacity to feel responsible for what you cannot fully see, to lead in ways that are considerate of the people who have not yet been born.
I spent years in spiritual circles where the word ancestor carried enormous reverence. The ones who came before us. The sacrifices they made, and whose sacrifices we stand on. The ones we should call on when we need strength.
I hold all of that. I genuinely do.
But I kept coming back to a thought I found uncomfortable at first. That perhaps our ancestors, the ones who actually deserve that reverence, would not want us looking backward at them alone. They would want us looking forward to the people who are coming after us. They would want us asking what we are leaving behind. Which is what made them so revered in the first place.
We are future ancestors.
We are the people who will be judged by those who live with what we leave behind. They will ask what we did with the world we inherited. They will look at this moment, the fracturing of communities, the destruction of ecosystems, the failure of leadership and ask:
Did they know and look away? Did they choose comfort over responsibility? Did they wait for someone else to act? Or did they stand up when it would have been easier to stay quiet?
They are not comfortable questions. But they are the only ones worth carrying into every room, every decision, every day.
We only have one Earth. There is no second chance at this. The choices we make today are not just personal choices. They ripple forward into lives we will never see. That is not a burden. It is the most clarifying truth available to us.
A man who understands this stops asking what he can get and starts asking what is needed from him.
He becomes more awake, and as a result, acts with more intention and care. A benevolent and empty vessel for change. He stops consuming without thinking and starts choosing knowing he will one day be remembered as a future ancestor. He leads with conscientiousness and protects not because others cannot protect themselves, but because care for one another is the gravity that holds our humanity together.
Across almost every organization men are performing leadership rather than embodying it. Protecting position rather than serving life. Extracting rather than giving. And the Earth, all of it, the soil, the water, the plants, the animals and the human fabric, is paying for it.
Embodiment is what we need more of. Not softer men or harder men. Whole men. Men who have woken up to the full weight of what they carry and decided to carry it with intention.
None of us will do this perfectly. That is not the point. The point is simply that when the future looks back, it finds that we tried. That we were awake. That we made choices with something larger than ourselves in mind.
What do you want the future to find when it looks back at you? Not your achievements. Not your title. Not the stubborn ground you held or the battles you won. But what was more alive, more whole, more cared for because you were here.
That shift, from taking to giving forward, is where everything changes. The future is not waiting for heroes. It is waiting for stewards.Written by Asim J. for Enharmony originally posted on the Enharmony Blog.
If any of this resonates, the Enharmony Circle is where this conversation goes deeper. It is free. It is monthly. It is for people who are willing to step up as stewards and to serve what is beyond their own lifetime. Even if that requires sitting with the uncomfortable questions.
You are welcome to drop in without expectations or commitments.
