Activism

Since the cave we have tried to make the old gods smile. Each year we fail and winter comes. #CLNolan

"Wings are for flying, not frying" ...nice quote, nicer sentiment.  Animal-friendly consumerism could be a major future trend. Until 16 years ago I too gorged myself on turkey every Christmas Day, Boxing Day, 27th...and my mouth watered long after at the remembered taste of turkey soup on the 28th or 29th, a meal which constituted one of the culinary highlights of my year.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts...half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs - George Eliot, Middlemarch

Authoritative lists of supposed global role models provoke approval and controversy in equal measure, but also raise the more important question: who is honouring the vastly greater number of non-celebrity role models among our human family of perhaps 7.8 billion alive today?

For me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have - Theodore Zeldin

Imagining seeing how everybody else lives, just for one day.  Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.

According to the always interesting Maria Popova, artist and writer Austin Kleon was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator:

So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist. While all 10 tips illustrated above make sense, nos. 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10 resonate with me in particular.

A wrong decision isn't forever; it can be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved - JK Galbraith

Across the globe, people are formally and informally building alliances and partnerships to affect social change. The number of NGOs in the world has exploded by 40% in the last few years.  People with a passion for social and environmental good are finding each other, and are coming together in global and local network organisations that signal an important evolution in the way people work - Anon

Across the globe, people are uniting in a common struggle: to participate freely in the events and processes that shape their lives - Mahbub ul Haq,  Human Development Report 2013