starting to rebuild

I was passing this old building which was under scaffold being transformed into something "fit for purpose" for the coming decades. At one level, it had outlived its usefulness, but rather than clearing the site, the builders and architects decided to transform the old into something new.

Too often we build our futures alone, looking only to the interest of our community without recourse to any consideration of how the drive to have it all our way plays out in building good relations in this place we call home. The only way is destroy your story, your viewpoint, your idols. Transformation is rarely considered.

We can’t change the past, how we believe we have been treated by “the other” but what if the lens in which we viewed it was one of generosity?  This would involve two elements, first a looking back and considering how we currently locate the story of “the other” in our past and the second is to imagine how things today might have been different if we had acted in another way, if we or our community had been more generous to “the other”.

In other words, if we took time to re-examine our past through a lens of generosity, we might just be able to see how “our equality rights” might have been enhanced by including “their equality rights” and, through this process, we might be able to re-imagine a shared future in which our future narrative has a space for “their story”.

In order to re-imagine the future, we need to ensure that our future embraces the needs of the “other” and so we should seek common values, common goals, the common good.  This is a big ask, to embrace the other, equally, in generosity of spirit. Are we up for the uncomfortable conversation, are we up for doing things differently?