Rediscover your innocence, your creativity, your wonder.
Please discuss. How does this play out in life?
I’ll start us out. The events of 2020 have shown us much that needs to change. We’ve been awakened to any number of things that simply aren’t working. Being faced with these difficult realities, we’ve responded emotionally—with anger, with fear, with disgust, with shame. Our emotions are a natural and likely justifiable human reaction; they need to be honored and processed as such. But they don’t provide a healthy basis for envisioning and grounding change. As Albert Einstein said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”
If I want to help address things that seem broken, evil or wrong, I need to be guided by my own innocence. Not naivete, which implies not seeing with eyes wide open, but innocence that sees all with a pure and loving heart and acts accordingly. I won’t be able to help solve issues using existing models and methods inherent in the problems themselves, or I’ll simply generate more of the same, in perhaps just a different flavor. Creativity will suggest new patterns and ways of thinking and being. Focusing on the ugly and dysfunctional, I will only recognize things in a similar vein. Approaching life with wonder will allow me to see it all and marvel at beauty, kindness, miracles, and the interconnection between us all. These are the building blocks I’ll want to select and reinforce in promoting change in and around me. It’s time to rise above.
How about you? What principles would you choose to guide change, both personal and larger scale?