David Korten challenges us with the need to choose. Do we choose love for life as our guiding principle or the love of money. He points out that the former leads to thriving and the latter to species’ suicide.

 Michelle Holliday, our presenter last week in Thriving in the Emerging New World, points to the same choice. She sparkles with aliveness and presence: humble and accomplished, homespun and sophisticated, playfully serious and seriously joyful, she models thriving. It’s no wonder, since she’s spent the last 20 or so years exploring that quality. . She’s written a book, The Age of Thrivability – Vital Perspectives and Practices for A BETTER WORLD, and has an informative, stimulating website: http://www.ageofthrivability.com,

Why is thriving, or aliveness, absent in so many aspects of our modern lives?

Michelle begins by telling her story. She landed a ”good” corporate job right after graduating from college. Disillusioned by that company, she left and tried another. She found it similar: “superficial, manipulative and extractive. And I thought there must be more…” So she left that job, too, and began researching, following her curiosity, delving deep into how we’ve come to behave as we do. Based on our long history as a species, and the evolution of our ability to think and experiment, we still live by cultural values and a storyline that no longer fit our current scientific knowledge.

Michelle has arrived at a clear set of principles to guide us forward, based on recent science AND ancestral wisdom. But I don’t want to recount them here.

What impresses me about Michelle Holliday is her willingness to allow her life experience to change her thinking and thus her behavior, choosing a new way to relate to the world around her. Though still a young woman at her first corporate job, she took her dismay seriously. She respected her discomfort as legitimate. Unlike most of us, she did not deny her yearning for a work milieu that was congruent with her wisdom. She didn’t criticize herself for being too sensitive, but instead imagined that others were feeling similarly though maybe not talking about it. She imagined that the system needed change. She did not accept the status quo and decided to address it.

May each of us take Michelle Holliday’s story to heart. When have you experienced a disconnect between our cultural values and your own? How did you respond? When have the requirements of your workplace made you uncomfortable, perhaps made you feel out of integrity with yourself. How have you responded?

When have you dishonored your own bone-deep truth with silence or apathy?

How do you really want to live? This is a burning question, the fork in the road of life that all humans are facing right now. Which path will we choose? Thriving… or surviving…or maybe dying???
.