How to Change the World

The trouble with trying to change our world is that because we are locked inside the prevailing mindset. Our minds find it hard (impossible?) to think outside of the confining social and cultural, and temporal parameters.

The assumptions and concepts and values which we share and accept. Without question and without really knowing they can be questioned.

This is the paradigm and it takes a complete shift of perspective to remove yourself from it. But the tricky thing is how.

How do you get from here, where you are, to there? When you don’t even know there’s a there or a here?

Some of us get to slow travel or live in different countries or regions. The experience helps us question what we thought in light of what we hear from other people about their lives and the now-shared experience.

Notwithstanding that sometimes the words we use are part of the prevailing paradigm and therefore our conceptual but unconscious entrapment.

And there’s media, but that isn’t necessarily what’s real and sometimes completely the opposite, and mediated. Pause here to remember how perfectly apt that term is…

Media is a presentation of something mediated by others) so sharing those assumptions and shared conceptual limits.

But things do change. We live in a different world than the one our grandparents lived in even though things. So many things are the same.

And the reason is partly and inexplicably our intuition that ‘there’ exists even while we are stuck in ‘here’

And stories and music and poetry are the keys to unlocking our access to that intuition.

John Roedel

I read this poem by John Roedel recently and with permission, it is set before you again to read… I hope it gets us to a much better place.

“And [that] we’ll never go back to the terrible normal we have gotten so used to. Because now we have joined the flower legion of marching compassion”

One Act of Kindness at a Time

it’s time for us to start being 
kind to the people who can’t do 
anything to improve our lives


situational kindness isn’t 
actually kindness 
it’s the just the way narcissists 
do business
 
kindness isn’t transactional 
~ it’s meant to be transformative
 
kindness isn’t a contract
~ it’s meant to be a stringless kite


my love, I’ve come to discover that 
kindness is the mother 
to millions of beautiful daughters
 
and she gave every single one of her
children the same name:
Empathy

and now the daughters 
of kindness are marching forward 

and now they have become a movement 

and now the ground is shaking beneath us

and now empathy’s choir is singing 

and now the sky is raining cherry blossoms 

and now it’s our turn to join them

and now we are with them as they march
 
and now we can sense our numbness fade

and now we cry for strangers

and now our fists have become open cups

and now we feel human again 

and now everybody is our neighbor 

and now we can feel 
it coursing through us
~ the desire to forgive our enemies
 
and we’ll never go back
to the terrible normal we
have gotten so used to 

because now we have joined 
the flower legion of marching 
compassion

because now we have let
Empathy and her millions
of sisters become our guides

because now we recognize that 
the season of kindness has only just begun

because now we remember 
that you were created
to be the bringer of light

and now the cherry blossoms
are everywhere 

and now we are a member
of the growing legion of Empathy

and now our day has come 

John roedel

John Roedel – A book of Poety

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