Evolving Together

See yourself as responsible for creating a shift as significant as the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. See yourself as significant enough to create that shift.  Grace Lee Boggs

I am wrapping up a beautiful collaboration with Juanita Brown of The World Cafe and the genius women of Active Voice around a three city viewing of and community conversations about the film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.

I was quoted in the POV piece this way “We have to evolve ourselves [together], not ‘I have to evolve myself’.” At the time, I was trying to express the difference between what I heard Grace saying about evolution (ourselves together) as opposed to what I heard the film often reflecting (myself first).
At this moment in our evolution, we are struggling with our bias toward the individual ~ i.e., speak from an I perspective, change yourself in order to change the world ~ and our desire to move toward collective wisdom.
I don’t doubt our truisms about the self, it’s just that they do not exist without social context: personal development does not happen without noticing, listening to and acting with each other. It’s not that we can move forward without personal growth, it’s that as social beings, we must evolve in relationship. There is no ‘comes first’ here.