When you least expect it, something wonderful happens

I haven’t answered yesterday’s questions yet, but … I’ve found part of the answer last night.

That’s when I met with 6 other people for the first meeting of our local transition hub. If you’d like to know more about transition towns, take a look here and here.

Beside me there were 6 very enthousiastic, rather young, men and women and they all shared a passion: they wanted to work together with the people around them in order to make daily life more enjoyable and sustainable.

And moreover, they all made it clear that they wanted hands-on action. They wanted to act now. No more theory but action. Do it for real.

I was stunned, since doing it for real, seeing my ideas happen, sharing my beliefs and see and hear how they actually inspire people is what I’m missing the most right now.

For our first – and as it turned out, or only – brainstorm we were asked to jot down as many ideas and dreams about transition as we could.

As I was asked to explain what I had written down, I started to tell my story, about how I believe that we are all in some way or another superbly human beings, how important it is that we find that thing which we truly believe makes us happy, makes us proud about ourselves, how I dreamed of offering listening time to people, of training small groups of the community into active listening and non-violent ways of communicating, and how this all related to tribes and the notion of personal leadership, and how this was all connected to our desire to act ourselves, our longing to get in touch with life again, to take responsibility, and so on.

And as I was talking, something wonderful happened.

People smiled.

What I said, made sense. There was a connection, a touch.

I can’t begin to describe the delight I felt.

When I told I was going to invite some people over next month to explore what non-violent communication implies and how it can affect our lives and our day-to-day interactions, two women immediately asked if they could join in.

When I came home later on, the following words kept resonating in my head:

“It’s finally happening.”

Yes.