Wow - Its been too long since my last post!

I have been uber busy starting a business with my four fellow business partners from the ground up. (More to come) It's definitely a lesson in aligning ideals with action. Entreprenuerism is definitly one of the most idealistic and utterly realistic endevours out there. I've been learning a lot and I'd love to share more, but for now... got to keep at it!

Check out this quote from Andrew Cohen's "Quote of the Week":

A Higher Purpose

We are all capable of greatness when we know without any doubt that we are directly connected to a higher purpose.

Andrew Cohen

The new issue of What is Enlightenment? Magazine is out and it is on Utopia! I happened to be in Washington, D.C. last week and attended a crowded and energetic WIE Salon discussing the issue, led by EnlightenNext COO Robert Heinzman.

I hadn’t previously thought much about “utopia” before. Mostly I'd heard it in the phrase "like some utopian fantasy", which is a derisive comment. But as we discovered in the discussion the utopian impulse correlates to the spiritual impulse, the evolutionary impulse, and the impulse to live up to ideals. It seems these are all different words for the same movement.

Not only that, but utopia doesn't always refer to some paradise in heaven. There was a shift at a certain point in the history of the utopian vision from utopia’s being focused on a place of perfection beyond the real world to actually bringing perfection or utopia to the world we live in.

At one point in the discussion, someone brought up a concern that the problem in our conflict-ridden world today is that there are competing visions of utopia being promulgated, leading to violent clashes between opposing groups.

At that point, I realized that to me utopia was more about the impulse itself rather than a defined vision.  It is the desire to live ideally, the stretching forward that is more compelling than arriving at any static point. Anyway, can you imagine a life where we are no longer yearning to create a better future?

Quoting Fritzie Manuel from the Article “The Utopian Propensity” in WIE: “It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without people who dream, who have a vision of what they would like to see. I can’t think of anyone who would say, “We’ve arrived at a perfect existence, so let’s retain it.” There are always things that are distressing and that we think could be bettered, so we imagine improvements. That impulse has not died out, and if it ever does, I don’t think we’ll have human beings on earth any longer. We’ll have some other form of life, which I can’t imagine.”

I got a lot of responses from friends, younger and older, who resonated with the theme of this blog-stream so I am looking forward to continuing the investigation. I encourage people to comment online, so we can really start a conversation!

This past Saturday I attended a seminar titled "Leading by Example: passion for transformation and the strength of character to back it up". Many of the points that the presenter, Jeff Carreira illuminated fit perfectly with this inquiry into living up to our ideals, or as my friend Hector put it, "walking your talk".

To start with, one could say that the degree to which we align our actions with our ultimate vision is the degree to which we will naturally be leading by example. Being an example, in this sense, is being a person who stands with integrity for emergent values on the edge of our collective moral landscape. It is not a small order. But it holds a lot of promise.

We all look for examples, but I have to admit that I spend much less time looking to be an example. At least until recently...now I realize that both are important.  In fact, there is a whole web of interrelatedness out there that we are generally not aware of. People inspire us and we inspire others. That is just how it is. We can't escape affecting other people, so it is very interesting that I spend so much time without that very significant law of nature ever crossing my mind.

Bringing the awareness of our interrelatedness to the forefront makes me realize how important this conversation is. As my friend Katrina said, "...the themes and questions you are touching upon [in this blog] seem to be weighing on us as a generation." I feel their weight and I think that we can bust through them by collective effort!

All blogs begin somewhere:

I’m 27. I grew up believing in ideals. What are ideals? I think at the core, ideals are your vision of what is most positive, a positive relationship to life. What that exact vision is, changes as our perspective changes, but I mean it in a deep, soul-level kind of way.

When I was younger, I assumed that living up to my ideal vision was definitely possible. (Interestingly, upon reflection, there was always an unspoken “in the future” tagged to end of that).

At some point though, one realizes that it isn’t as easy as you expected it to be. Postmodern cynicism, doubt, fear, indecision, and apathy enter the picture.  You start noticing splits between how you are living and how you think you should be/could be (ideally) living.

I have seen in myself and in many of my friends, that while we hold onto our ideals, we struggle to live up to them. It is like looking through two different lenses on the world that don’t match up.

Why? What is preventing us to live up to our ideals? Is it that ideals are always “out there” and what’s here reality? I don’t believe so. I believe that there is a way to truly wed ideals with reality in our lives. I think that if we can manage to do that, we will find ourselves truly leaders, and liberate all our creative potential, which is a lot, as young people especially. We can change the world…

So here, I want to explore what it would mean, and does mean, to really live up to your ideals.

This is not a blog. It is a tool for revolution.  It is a statement, and a challenge to myself and to anyone who wants to join the conversation, to CHANGE.