midwifing change

good folks are pushing hard across the entire range of human endeavors to find new ways to see, better ways to work. Yet I’ve also heard from these same people, time and again, how hard it is to break out of the professional constraints of convention, common practice and assumed continuity. How hard it is to get those with assets and authority to

Old attitudes and ideas simply aren’t adequate to help us navigate what lies ahead. And pervasive gloom about the future risks being self-fulfilling.

I think a lot of people my age and older have--consciously or not--imagined Trump’s success in 2016 as the commencement of a kind of brief chaotic period through which we merely need to survive, until a new period of stability can commence. This is the logic behind billing every election as “the most important of our lives”: We just need to beat

Death and grief are great forcing functions that collapse all of your false narratives. It’s a vacuum cleaner for a messy mind, especially in a culture where we let nothing die, which means nothing can be reborn. It is a gift for the living in that way.

*“Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.

This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our