Calculating the Future
When your subconscious knows
July 2013 on an Auckland motorway somewhere Ponsonby-ish.
Driving up to Mount Eden from Manurewa for a supervision session. Being a counselling intern required one hour of paid for supervision for every twenty hours I worked with clients, so I made this run fairly often. Nothing unusual.
Until I saw the new billboard.
Massive thing featuring a young woman in red, with dark hair and flashy white teeth. Confidence like she wanted to burst out of the picture into our reality. Labour Party. Name I’d heard before but only vaguely: Jacinda Ardern.
Zoomed on past.
But something registered. Not a deliberate thought, more like a read. The kind that happens by itself in the back of your brain. You don’t put your face out that large a whole year before the next election unless you’re playing a longer game.
I finished my session, drove home. Eden asked how the trip went.
“Easy drive, traffic was sweet today,” I said. “And I saw the future leader of the Labour Party.”
She looked at me. “What! At your supervisors church?” Hardly. “I doubt she’s ever darkened the door of a church” I replied.
I explained: someone with an unusual name on a big billboard. Young, female, ambitious, everything the media would fawn over. “She’ll be leading the party within four years,” I said. “I guess so” says my wonderful wife.
Jacinda lost her challenge for Auckland Central a year later but made it back into parliament as a list MP.
Life kept moving on. We ended up living near a small rural town in the lower North Island far from Auckland. My prediction forgotten.
By August 2017 the general election was close. Labour’s leader was a bloke called Andrew Little, nearly as charismatic as a dishrag. He’d been plugging away in opposition since taking charge of Labour following their failure in 2014.
By then Jacinda was a well-known face in parliament. Rising fast, but not the leader.
With all the election news frenzy flooding the media my 2013 brain blurt suddenly popped back into mind. Hmm, my timeline about to expire. Oops, my mistake!
Then Little resigned.
Jacinda was voted in boss with a month left of my prediction.
Nice Andrew. Not surprised, more a quiet kind of recognition, where a thing slots into place because it was made to fit. Not the first time I’d called something as accurately from a fair distance. Probably not the last.
Still, there she was. Labour party leader.