The Concious Society: Something Beginning

It’s the other half of the challenge — building the momentum to move from talk to action — that excites him and keeps him awake at nights. “We have to demonstrate to everyone that Canadians care about this issue and want fundamental change.” Kirby said. “We have to get them to tell decision-makers: It’s time. Let’s do it.”

- Senator Michael Kirby

We can perhaps shoot for a grander goal — a province that provides the best public services, delivered in the most efficient manner, in the world. If this sounds impossibly ambitious, put the question another way: Why not? We goad our business sector to win new customers globally in the face of stiff competition. Why not apply the same standards to our government? Why not give our public servants an objective that can turn the task of transformation — which will at times be a very tough slog — into a project that becomes a source of real pride?

 - Don Drummond

It was the music

Of something beginning,

An era exploding,

A century spinning

In riches and rags

And in rhythm and rhyme."

 - Ragtime

I am an optimistic person.  I'm by no means the only one.  The evidence, the historical trends, the challenges we face today and the only possible solutions to them are mounting, converging, crystallizing.  People are slowly finding that the answers they are looking for lie with each other.  Like a snake shedding it's skin, we just need to shrug off the constraining parts of our outdated systems to allow for the realization of our full, collective potential.

We need to look at our minds as part of our bodies; we do ourselves too much harm and deny each other too much opportunity not to.  That means revisiting some key notions we have about ourselves and our society:

There are no stupid, bad, useless people - there's only the conversation and how much effort we're willing to put into understanding and being understood.

Motivating creativity and collaboration isn't about carrots and sticks - the models we rely on are proven-ineffective for inspiring the kind of behaviours our economy needs today.

Mental health and mental fitness; innovation and productivity; health care costs, service silos, workplace wellness, quality of life, bitter and short-term policy vs more thoughtful, balanced approaches, interpersonal and international relations.

They are all connected. 

People from all sectors are feeling their piece of the elephant, blindly, slowly working there way towards the centre where collectively, they'll realize they've been exploring different facets of the same animal all along.

That animal is us - we are all part of the same, complex, beautiful human social organism.

We can only move forward when we leave no one behind.