At a celebratory ceremony for graduates of a master’s program in the humanities, there were many references to world changing: seemingly inspired by both the startling ability of education (whether formal or informal) to change one’s own world and the tendency of those thus impacted to wish to change the world for others. To share what they have found.

Indeed, a significant learning experience might be said to expand one’s sense of what is possible. Such moments of learning reveal, a bit at a time, how much more there is to consider in pretty much everything around us, on the planet and beyond. One can only imagine how much the world changed for those graduates in the two years leading to that ceremony. How much expanded is the “possible” now for each of them?

At its best, education leaves one with far more questions than answers. That is, if you recognize the ways ideas and actions intertwine – and consider the many permutations of each – then the easier, or at least more familiar, answers seem to slowly grow less solid. They become a part of the inherent pattern of shifting understanding and expanding possibilities.

Possibilities that often move one toward reflective wonder, inspired by what we have been and can be (individually and collectively) when we’re at our best. But just as often such open exploration leads us to wish that some things were truly impossible – and forces us to confront an understanding that they are not.

Many walking out of that graduation celebration really hoped to change the world. That leads to wondering what it takes to do such a thing.

What we usually think of as world changing is more often a large-scale effort to mold people and ideas into what a “world changer” thinks is a better way to do things, a better way to live, a better way to think, a more uniform belief structure, and the like. But, with closer consideration, such efforts really aren’t world changing from the perspective of whether or not they result in positive changes in humankind and its fuller potential. They seem, instead, to be power and control projects, predicated on the belief that one group’s ideals should prevail over others, regardless of the cost (a cost usually paid by those others). But no matter the rhetoric in which such large world changing projects are wrapped, most of the time, in the end, it is just about power and control.

Humankind is not really good at this “grand scale” approach to world changing, though we attempt it over and over again as global history records. One after another such attempts come, destroy much (distort more), and then they go (falling or fading). And, such efforts do indeed remain part of the current context in which we find ourselves (in a “try, try again” fashion).

All considered, truly enduing world changing – the kind that can shift the way we are and what we can be in a fundamental and enduring way – is likely a very different sort of thing (one might say, not at all a “grand scale” thing). Rather it is something that touches the lives of others with care and respect. Something perhaps more rooted in ongoing learning than in teaching. Something that doesn’t want to make everyone live and think in one way but rather seeks to understand more fully that our collective best possibilities reside in appreciating and supporting each unique individual to be their best possible self and to bring that “best” to our shared world. Now, there is a really expansive project that challenges the imagination. And yet, it likely comprises what we would normally consider small things – things that are not really small at all when one considers impact.

Maybe enduring world changing starts with more clearly seeing and understanding the world we reside in – the moment, the place, the time, and what is unfolding before us. Maybe it is finding the meaningful ways to touch those moments with reflective kindness, or holding on to those questions our education gave us and adding to them the questions life gives us in the moment. Maybe it is a thoughtful and open awareness of the present possibilities, rooted in having the personal courage to know that world changing is now and not later. It is you and not someone else. And it is a matter of one change leading to others – rippling out from one life touched, one idea shared, one act of kindness and care at a time. It is probably never about self and certainly never about power or control.

So, yes, those graduates could have started changing the world when they walked out of the room, picked up a box lunch, and took their educationally changed worldviews, their minds and their hearts out into the world – to that moment, that place, that person in front of them. Perhaps through them the world, since that graduation day, has changed one choice at a time. For them and for us.

Wishing you a year ahead full of opportunities to change the world as only you can (one choice at a time it matters).

The picture on the cover was taken by Paul Meyer, then Curator of the Living Collection at the Morris Arboretum (and Joyce’s cousin), on an international plant expedition in Western Sichuan Province in 1981. Those on that expedition were among the first Western visitors in that part of China following the revolution. Paul is 6’3” with very blonde hair and it was he, a truly strange specimen in that context, who was the source of great amusement for those in the picture.