Change the World?

At yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, something came up about the nature of our present circumstances, and the necessity to "change the world." In recent years, I've had little cause to reflect much here on "the world" and our role in it. That may seem incongruous, given the number of posts I've written about "the world." But few of those, that I can recall anyway, had anything to do with "our role" in particular. And we do have a role. It's just not what most people probably think of when they think about it, which is why most people think about "changing the world." The epiphany that came to me many years ago, grappling with my own "existential crisis," is this: We are not here to change the world. The world is here that we may learn to change ourselves. This realization came as a consequence of shedding the illusions of "magical thinking." That external factors were responsible for my suffering or happiness. For much of my first marriage, I was profoundly unhappy. But I would cling to…