"... the world needs people who have come alive."

Greetings - Right upfront I'd like to share the entire quote by Dr. Howard Thurman (author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader), which for the past several years has either been taped up on the wall next to my desk or tucked away in the bible on my nightstand. Here it is: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

I think a lot about this as I feel more alive now than I have for several years. I'm not saying it's all fun, necessarily. And there's in fact been a lot of hardship coupled lockstep with the joy, but to feel alive is truly a gift to treasure. I've felt for a very long time that while our souls exist eternally (i.e., outside the constraints of space and time), we have the opportunity to live on this planet in part to experience a vast range of thoughts, emotions and actions that help us learn, evolve and contribute to something much greater than ourselves. There's nothing new to what I'm saying here, as you can pick most any spiritual or philosophical tradition and find references to this notion.

So coming back to the here and now, the point of this is that I'm briefly stepping off the mental treadmill this Friday for a few moments to note that while the press makes clear our global financial order is collapsing, the earth is about to burn up, and even Best Buy is on its way to a horrible quarterly revenue meltdown, I remain very optimistic and hopeful about where we are going as a society. Why is this?

I look at my recent experience in the realm of sustainability, for example. Today I oversee strategic marketing and sustainability initiatives at StreamServe, a software company that converts very high volumes of paper output (utility bills, financial statements, among other things) from paper to electronic, providing both financial and environmental efficiencies along the way. Three years ago it was hard to find people in the corporate mainstream who would listen this message, or who believed we collectively are really doing anything detrimental to our planet by the lifestyles we live. I think Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 changed that, and today there's a tremendous groundswell of action across both the grassroots on up to the CEO-level of many global corporations. Please see my last blog post from the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) Conference in New York where I elaborate on this.

Perhaps most important is I see an incredible mobilization among the Millenium Generation (mostly kids born roughly between 1978 and 1995, and by some definitions up to 2001), the oldest of whom are getting established in the workforce. This is the first generation whose majority grew up with the Internet, for example, and so the notion of us all being interconnected in one big, realtime matrix is something that is second nature to many people of this cohort. I see this attitude with my own kids who are 18 and 21, respectively, but also among many others I meet in the course of my day. What I find time and time again is these are people who are very aware, active and have "come alive.". The fact these kids are just beginning to hit their stride to me is our best hope for the future.