You may know this blog has a history.  It started January 21, 2009 – the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated for his first term as President of the United States.  It was a time when the ragged red underlining of word processing programs – the marks used to flag misspellings – showed up without fail beneath the two words, Barack and Obama.

The blog first followed my road trip around the country to ask everyday Americans what the word change meant to them.  You’ll likely remember it was a big word back then.  You may or may not remember that it didn’t matter who people voted for, by the time the election was happening everyone was using that word.

So the first iteration of this blog served as a trip journal.  It went dormant around the time the first 100 days of that Presidential Administration were done.  But, by the time January 21, 2010 rolled around, fans of the project persuaded me to keep writing about change – and more specifically about exchange between people who live in and understand the world differently.  With the help of more tech savvy people I transferred to the WordPress blog platform and started what became a four-year run of weekly musings via blog.  Lots of them were as varied as those represented in the book holding the 2009 journey – 100 Voices – Americans Talk about Change.

The blog also covered a second trip in 2012 – the year I got on the road, again on January 21, to take the book to living rooms, libraries, churches, classrooms and a few bookstores strewn around the continental U.S.  Talking with and listening to groups provided just as rich a collection of stories telling what Americans want to change and remain constant.

As I’ve said often, it was astonishing how much we share in common in those wants.  In the second trip, it was equally impressive to hear people of every stripe speaking earnestly about not knowing how to listen.  They clearly wanted to listen – wanted the possibility of cooperation that can come from that.  But they weren’t sure to trust that the other person wasn’t looking to level damage and criticism.  At the same time, they hadn’t figured out how to keep the focus on ways to solve problems instead of competing for air space, or as one young woman put it, “grabbing at some nonexistent award for being the smartest person in the room.”

The blog continued after that trip and on through 2013 until it became clear that I was overlooking themes that, suddenly in neon, were trying to be linked together – change, exchange, listening, leadership.

This mini-epiphany-of-the-blog-kind occurred about time I was in the position of shifting my career.  In that shift, I’ve come to focus on supporting high-character leadership.  Of course, those terms like any popular tag can fall directly into the ho-hum category for readers.  Therein is my challenge as I keep up with the make-over version of this blog.

So, here is the riddle of what makes not just for relevance, but for catalyst.  What kinds of sparks might happen if we began thinking and acting together? What if, finally bored with competition, fascinated with cooperation, we began exploring the promise of true wellbeing – in our human communities, as well as in the natural world that hosts the procession of our particular species?

Leadership, change, listening, exchange – they can be just another list, but settling on that interpretation would miss the neon opportunity with its quiet scream for our best attention.  It’s always been the case that placing the parts of a watch in a box and shaking that box forever will never result in the formation of a watch (thanking my friend Winky Wheeler and her uncle for that one).  Same is frightfully true for the brilliant leadership within each person.  We can shake it up with economic trauma, war, racism and all the other isms that fuel fear of each other – and we’ll never have the productive, healthy, peaceful families, neighborhoods and globe we say we want.

So, that’s what this new version of this blog is for.  Let’s do it.