Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life, One Conversation at a Time.  Susan Scott. Berkley Books:  New York, New York, 2002, 2004.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   What is a Fierce Conversation? When I first discovered this book I was captivated by the title. What on earth was a fierce conversation? And how did one have one?

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Amazing Grace (2006) : directed by Michael Apted. Written by Steven Knight. Cast: Ion Gruffudd; Romola Garai; Michael Gambon; Ciaran Hinds; Albert Finney; Rufus Sewell; Benedict Cumberbatch; Toby Jones and Youssou N’Dou A  Crusader to End Slavery One of the wonderful things about movies is their capacity to transport us into the past and to help illuminate critical turning points in history.   As historical cinema goes, Amazing Grace is one of the finer examples, illustrating a critical point in the movement toward the end of the slave trade and eventually slavery itself. The focus of this film is on the life of William Wilberforce, a crusading Member of Parliament in the late 18th century. He was obsessed with ending the slave trade in which the fortunes of the British Empire were deeply entwined.   Something of a religious fanatic, Wilberforce spent most of his adult life trying to get legislation passed in Parliament to end the slave trade. He was not a popular guy.   But Wilberforce would not give up.

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 Watching Our Thoughts In George Orwell’s novel, 1984, the Thought Police was an external agency that patrolled the inner sanctum of the inhabitants of Oceania. Today, we have to be our own thought police, watching for errant thoughts that wreak havoc on our lives and create chaos and violence in the world. Furthermore, by watching what we think, we will then watch what we say and thereby create. Words hold the thought-form. The thought is energy, and the words give form to that energy. Why is such diligence necessary?

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 Change and the Resistance to Change What is change? Why do some of us resist it?The theme of change in the current political campaign has gotten me to thinking about how human beings are separated by their attitudes toward change itself. I sit firmly in the welcome change camp but it was not always so. For years I resisted change. Only a lot of pain and suffering made me, finally, clamor for change. Something had to be better on the other side.

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The Instability of Peace  We live in a world in which certain situations are stable and others are not. A coin on the table is stable facing Heads, and just as stable facing Tails, but completely unstable standing on its edge. Peace seems as unstable as a coin on its edge: precarious, easily toppled, its fall a matter not of “if” but “when”. A few, sowing seeds of discord and strife, can polarize the many and set them against each other. I have felt for a long time that the hard question to confront about peace is not how to get there, but how to make peace a more stable situation. In one sense it seems unconfrontable: getting to peace is daunting enough, but staying there?

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Beyond War: the Human Potential for Peace. by Douglas P. Fry.  Oxford University Press: New York, 2007.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     There Will Always Be War In this book anthropologist Douglas Fry takes on the deeply rooted belief that human societies will always wage war. This apparently fixed idea is entrenched in our thinking,  in our written history and in our myths and legends. Surveying many hunter-gatherer groups still extant around the globe, Fry indulges in some academic skirmishes with other anthropologists who just don’t get it.

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                                                         Can’t We All Just Get Along?  Why can’t we just get along? I have spent my life studying why people hurt each other. The little wars we wage against each other are sometimes as vicious as the larger wars which nations conduct. The suffering and pain in human relationships as we gossip, complain and disrespect one another is intense. We don’t often realize the hurtful effect we have on people we care about and get defensive if someone observes that we are less than kind.

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To Hell in a Handbasket “The world is going to hell. Why bother?” If you live in Iraq or Zimbabwe this may be true, I grant you. Last week, listening to Earth Day speakers on the radio I wept as I heard about the loss of rainforests, wetlands and fisheries, all accelerating so fast we cannot stop it. There is much to despair about. There is so much violence, hate and greed on the planet. I’ve been up close to some of it.

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Let’s think about this together. One might say there is the Old Conversation or the old way of looking at war and peace and now there is a New Conversation. The old way of thinking says “War will always be with us” and “There is nothing we can do to change the violence in the world.” It says, “We must defend ourselves from attack,” and, “You have to retaliate for attack or you look like a wimp.” You can go on and on with these examples. We all know this rhetoric. We all grew up on it, and not just Americans. It is a world-wide conversationand it’s thousands of years old.

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There is a universal longing for peace and yet we never seem to achieve it despite our longings and good intentions. We are pervaded with cynicism and a deep-seated belief that war will always be with us because, well, “that’s just how humans are.” The intention of this blog is to start a new and very different conversation: that peace is possible if we say we want it, and if we are committed to creating it so it thrives on the planet. We can design and live into the kind of world we want to inhabit. This blog is about inquiring deeply into all our conversations from the past, exploring what keeps us in a violence-filled world, the costs of living in such a world and what it would take for us to deliberately create a world which works for every one, not just for a select few. A second intention of this blog is to create a community of readers who see the possibility in the ideas presented here and who will take hold of this new idea about creating peace intentionally on the planet. Toward that end, I am strongly encouraging readers to comment on posts and to interact with me, guest bloggers and with each other.

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