DZUKANI: Online book (one chapter per week) Chapter 4 "How do we see our world?"

If you missed chapter three you can find it here...

As suggested earlier, it is not our context that drives our purpose, it is the way we see our context. This is an evolving picture. With every new day and each new experience, we build on the view we had the day before. We may even make profound discoveries on our life journey which transform our world-view.

This happened to me when I read the amazing book, “Worldview Dynamics and the Well-Being of Nations”. In this work, my friend and author, Richard Barrett (founder of the Barrett Values Centre) describes just how important our worldview is and presents data on 145 nations that, to me, show how our happiness is affected by the predominant worldview held amongst our fellow citizens and promoted by government. 

Activity

You can find Richard’s book here:

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1684715997/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_XtMQEbY19PQ3T

Or listen to Richard talk on wellbeing, referencing his work on the impact on nation states, here:

https://youtu.be/3X1izg69qDk

Personal gratitude

I have been blessed with opportunity to travel the world through my work, to meet amazing people in many different cultures and see the wonderful life on our planet first-hand. These experiences have made me appreciate the precious interconnected life on our planet. 

On top of that, my work in leadership development and sustainability combined to make me realise how susceptible the world is to human activity and how much influence and responsibility we can take for its future. These experiences have definitely caused my own worldview to evolve. This in turn has impacted my life and career journey.

Activity

Take some quality time out of your schedule to write a summary or draw a picture that describes how your own world view has changed and what it is today. What is it you value about our world?  And what concerns do you have?

How do we see the future?

Since 2015, I have been running workshops for people across three continents, to help them visualise the world they’d like to see by the year 2030. In these workshops, I invite them to close their eyes and join me in a time-travel meditation. 

They get to choose where they go and they visit three very different places. I invite them to share these journeys and what they see along the way.

Activity

I invite you to do the same, when you’ve read this invitation, please find a comfortable place to meditate, close your eyes and envisage the world you’d like to see in 2030. You can visit as many places as you like but I suggest a variety of countries would be good. Also, perhaps a city and a wilderness, maybe even the bottom of the ocean. You get to choose. Just notice what you see in this desired world for 2030. Close your eyes now for as long as you feel able.

Make a note of what you saw and the feelings that arose for you.

When I do this exercise with a large audience and take stock of all their positive visions for 2030, the result is startlingly similar, if not the same. They always describe a world that is consistent with the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs that were agreed by world leaders at the United Nations in New York in 2015 and which, not by coincidence, have a target date of 2030.

Activity

If you’re not aware of the SDGs or would like a reminder, visit the United Nations Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform at:

 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org

Compare the vision presented by the goals with your own vision of the world. Are there particular goals that inspire you? And what is it about who you are (reflect on the work you did in the last chapter) that you could align to delivering some contribution to one or more of the goals? It will be the combined actions of millions of people like you and me that will deliver a world resembling the one defined by the SDGs.

Now, please let me affirm that the purpose of this book is not to promote the SDGs or encourage readers into careers in sustainability. That was a quest for my earlier book “Designing the Purposeful World – the Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint for humanity” which was published in 2018.

The purpose of this book is much bigger than even that. This is an opportunity to contemplate the meaning of life, and especially your life, with a view to helping you live it with richness of meaning and adventure in whatever way your heart truly desires.

Our world is whatever we want it to be

The truth is, our personal world, context, or universe (call it as you wish) is whatever we want it to be. Our world may predominantly be our family, caring for someone who needs us, serving our community, building a career in engineering, discovering a vaccine for Coronavirus or exploring our subconscious mind in search of meaning. 

Humanity is gloriously diverse, and I firmly believe we have just the right blend of people with the  right spread of interests to take us on an exciting and fruitful journey and care for each other and other life along the way. We need people with expansive world views and we need people who know everything there is to know about a tiny Hydrogen atom.

Activity

With this in mind, glance back at the activities you have completed thus far and complete the following two statements in whatever way makes sense:

My personal world is:

The future I am building is this:

Feel free to write as much or as little as makes sense. On completion, notice how your energy flowed as you were writing. Stop for one moment to ask which parts of your answers were of the most profound meaning to you. Perhaps take a highlighter and mark the most important words.

The big picture

This feels like a good time to revisit the essence of the thinking I introduced at the beginning of this book. We spoke of intelligent energy, consciousness, the Big Bang and the creation of the Universe.

Could it be that this joined up flow of conscious, intelligent energy, is flowing through our veins right now, growing our sense of purpose because there is something it needs us to do?

Chapter review 

1.    What are the three most powerful insights you will take away from this chapter?

2.    What are the three most powerful questions you will continue to explore?

3.    What would you like me to explore with you as I continue to write this book?

I would be delighted to hear from you with your responses to these questions.

In the next chapter, I will be asking the consequential next big question, “Why are we here?”