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Prospecting
    O N OUR morning walks to his elementary school, my son Parrish and I do lots of nexting. We talk about his next basketball game, the next movie we’ll watch, our next family trip. Nexting comes naturally to kids. It seems to pique their curiosity and give them little boosts of joy.
    Nexting is my way of practicing hope with Parrish, a seven-year-old. By encouraging him to talk about the future, I find out what he is excited about. I learn about his plots and plans, and I help him come up with lots of ideas for how to make things happen. We explore his “wonderfully horrible ideas,” discuss why some of his strategies may not be appropriate, and then pivot to another idea.
    Talking about the next important event in Parrish’s life also lets me gauge whether he is confident, nervous, joyful, fearful, or downright giddy. When he is feeling positive, his mom, Alli, and I do our best to “fluff him up” even more. We know the emotional lift helps him think about ways to make his performance better, the best it can be. When we see that he is nervous or fearful, we try to figure out why, and whether we need to intervene or let him work it out. In all this, Alli and I avoidautomatic cheerleading and easy reassurances. If we see obstacles and pitfalls, we address them together, and sometimes we work with him to regoal.
    On a good day of nexting, Parrish and I talk about his dreams, plans, and feelings, and we both enjoy practicing the how of hope. He gets better at thinking about the future, and I get more excited about what lies ahead for our family.
    Hope is a miracle of the human mind, a miracle we all share. In this chapter, I want to tell you about our mind’s unique capacity to think about the future, the complex language that helps us craft an evolving life story, our deep awareness that we will one day die, and the neurobiology of prospecting, all of which makes hope possible.
Hope Comes to Mind
    When I was a little kid, I had two superpowers (at least I thought I did). Every morning I climbed our bathroom wall, just like Spider-Man on TV. I’d get a running start, jump as high as I could, and then try to stick to the wall. I’d frantically flail and slap against the wall to propel myself toward the ceiling. Every now and again, I got close, but never all the way up. I finally quit throwing myself against the wall when I was about ten.
    My other superpower was time travel. Mentally, I traveled into the future and saw my friends and myself as older kids—riding bigger bikes, playing baseball (instead of tee-ball), and talking to girls. These images were so vivid that they helped me learn how to be a big kid. As I grew a bit older, I started imagining that I was a teenager—driving to school, competing on a bigger field, and kissing girls. This time travel superpower never let me down and got stronger as I got older.
    For years, I thought I was the only person on the planet who could travel into the future. Was I wrong! Everyone can do it. But I don’t think that makes the power any less super, because we are the only animals who think about the future in a very complex way and who act on thosethoughts. To understand how we got this way, we need to take a trip back in time . . .
Time Travel
    The story begins 1.6 million years ago, when one of our human ancestors, Homo erectus, first made a simple distinction between what he needed in the present and what he needed in the future. Standing man, by dissociating a bit, basically uncoupled the present from the future in his mind.This cognitive leap led our kin to fashion a pear-shaped hand ax that was beautiful and effective in its symmetry and a vast improvement over the one-sided rock scrapers of old. This invention suggests that early humans saw into the future and realized that they would need tools for many jobs over time—so they invested time and energy into crafting a tool that would last. That investment paid off every time they used a hand ax to