Now, I’ll be the first to admit that it takes courage to break from our routines and take the conversation in a different direction — to bring our ideals, hopes, and dreams out into the open.
But I’ll bet you’ve done it before (and probably more often than you might think).
In fact, sometimes I ask people to tell me of a time they stepped out and did something they’d never done before — they took a chance on something new, and they were glad they did.
Everyone has had such experiences. (And I mean everyone, even the 8-year-old me starting third grade in a new school. Seriously, is there anything as daunting as being the new kid in the lunchroom?)
The point is, we can draw from those times when we’ve been at our best. They show us what we’re made of, what we have going for us, even the hidden strength inside us that we tend to overlook.
That works for us as individuals, and at a larger scale, too ...
It’s easy to look back at youthful idealism and wish we could still hold such high hopes for ourselves and for society. (It’s even easier to scoff at youthful “naivete.”)
We can tell ourselves that our hopes have been dashed, and let ourselves feel disappointed and disillusioned. Or we can choose to see a different slice of reality: We have changed the world.
Some might say that of our parents’ generation, indeed of every generation. But I know from personal experience that my own, the baby boomer generation, has indeed done the impossible.
We changed social agreements about the status of women and the meaning of skin color. We stopped a war, drove presidents from office, took responsibility for the health of the planet. We created new beliefs, new ideals, new liberation.
Today, we can see the positive results all around us, despite the chatter of extremists who want to go backwards. (How could candidate Barack Obama have enjoyed such an outpouring of support had we not shifted public values decades ago?)
What’s strange is that we’ve largely forgotten the role that we played.
We usually take all these changes for granted, as if they were somehow the inevitable course of history — instead of noticing how profound they have been and remembering how they came about ... through intentional action by individuals.
We have every right to believe in ourselves and in our ability to create the world we want, in whatever sector of society we might choose.