Letting Go of the Past, Co-Creating the New

“The greatest barrier to individual (and collective) growth is a slavish devotion to precedence”

Dr. Venice Bloodworth, Psychologist, author of The Key to Yourself



It is hard to let go of the past even though it is obvious that our world is not working. We cling on to what we know rather than what we can create, even if what we know is harmful. We see this played out over and over again – people holding on to their version of the truth even if it destroys them, their loved ones and their communities. We have witnessed this scenario playing out in the “Debt Deal” fight in the US Congress. Democrats and Republicans were willing to putting an entire country at risk to be right.


To create our future we need to learn from our past. In this era where every institution and most organizations and communities are struggling there are compelling reasons for change. We have the opportunity to examine what has worked, what needs to change, and what needs to be abandoned. Only then can we decide what we truly want to create in our lives, families, communities and institutions.  So now is the most important time for us to listen to different stories, different ways of thinking, different ways of organizing work and communities. Then we can shed the past that no longer serves us and create a new healthier way of being, living and working together.


"To be responsible inventors and discoverers, we need the courage to let go of the old world.”

Meg Wheatly author, Leadership and the New Science 

A friend, Debra Jones, told me a wonderful metaphor told to her by a Native American elder. Many indigenous peoples across the globe have “tribal stories” and metaphors to help explain our times. This elder calls our era “the Quickening,” referring to the pace and depth of change we are all experiencing. The metaphor he used is a river moving swiftly down a mountain and people are swept up in the current. Many of us panic and try to hold on to the side of the bank, but by holding on we are bruised and battered by the current and debris in the river. However, when we learn to let go and move with the natural flow of the river, we float buoyantly along, discovering new and wonderful sights, sounds and experiences. Our vision and values becomes our guide to an otherwise uncharted frontier - they show us the way of the future.


“When someone makes a decision, he is really diving
into a strong current that will carry him to places 
he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision”

  Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist

WHY NOT!
Why not transform our world.  We have the capacity to transform into a new, better, lighter, more natural, and sustainable way of life. If we can find the courage to abandon the past that no longer serves us we can dream and create a better world. Our time requires collective thinking, collaboration, risk & experimentation. Most of all, it requires we find the courage to challenge and examine our basic assumptions about everything:  how we have designed our lives, how we work, how we play, and most important our relationship to our environment and one another.

The real hope is with our young people. They are fundamentally different than past generations. Technology has given them access to a plethora of information, the opportunity to learn and grow unfiltered and unencumbered by gatekeepers and boundaries and it has given them the ability to connect with people all over the world.  They understand the power of connections and we see them connecting with likeminded people, making change happen. They are not seeking or following the norm, they are creating it. They share a “can do” attitude and are not afraid to take risk. Most important they are hopeful.


Marshall Ganz, who is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing strategy and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign, believes in the power of young people. This campaign was based on “Distributive Leadership” and used the powerful internet technology. Young people carried the philosophy and taught distributive leadership skills to hundreds of thousands of community people across the United States.  This shared leadership approach is compatible with how many young people think and feel.

Ganz also believes that young people are predisposed to embracing these qualities. I believe they are on course to create a better future.

“Young people have an almost biological destiny to be hopeful”      
Marshall Ganz, Lecturer, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard

Regardless of your politics we all know that we witnessed the seemingly impossible happen in America - the election of the first African American to the office of the President of the United States. It was the young people who organized, advocated and influenced the voters of the US to put their historical prejudgments and stereotypes aside to elect Barak Obama. My daughter Nicole, worked full time in President Obama’s campaign. She quit her job as a financial reporter on Wall Street to go “help change the world”.  They sent her to Ohio and she was part of the team that helped win that battleground state. These young people were a part of a campaign powered by a vision of hope and guided by the campaign’s three core values - Respect, Empower and Include.

A Call For Action:

Changing the world is a daunting task. I use to think that the issues in our world are of such enormous magnitude that only the most optimistic and visionary people could even dream of tackling issues like hate, prejudice, poverty, environmental degradation, and conflict. However, the “pockets of hope” that I have witnessed and written about, have taught me a great deal about what is possible. People and organizations like CDI are living laboratories that are demonstrating that we can change our reality. As a young man in our DreamMakers documentary film put it:


“There are all of these pockets of hope developing all over the world. 
  Pretty soon there will be so many pockets of hope, 
  that they will no longer be pockets – it will just be”

May all your beautiful hopes and dreams come true!

Michele

Transformation Catalyst   

www.dreammakers.org

michelemariehunt@gmail.com 

Author of DreamMakers: Putting Vision & Values To Work,

Foreword by Max De Pree, Former Chairman and CEO of Herman Miller, Inc. and DreamMakers: Agentes de Transformação (Qualitymark)