Christina Carson, Author

Margaret Mead once said, “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Ms. Mead had many wise observations, but with this one, I take small exception. I’ve never seen a group named as the agent of change. Invariably, we record great acts in the world, whether termed good or evil, as the acts of a particular individual. Jonas Salk saved my generation and beyond from the scourge of polio. Hitler was the name associated with one of the world’s most atrocious endeavors. Beethoven proved the standard bearer to an age of musical giants. Something in our grasp of whom or what we are recognizes power as an attribute assigned to individuals not groups. It is individuals that change the course of history at any level we care to observe.

This morning I had brought home to me the power that moves through and between individuals. I just published a second novel, Dying to Know on Kindle a week ago. I was visiting the site to get a link to the page for the tweet I was creating. Since I’d sold only four copies of the book, I was surprised to see that someone had already left a review. I began to read what the reviewer, Jo VonBargen, a friend and most talented poet I recently met on Twitter, wrote; I sat astonished. The woman who began reading the review was not the same woman who finished it. The changes were of a deeply personal nature, but suffice it to say pieces fell away and others slid into their rightful slot, the end result bringing a new dimension of peace to my life. The power that fuels the individual is the only power there is and in our universe it does not operate in the abstract or through hordes. It is an inherent capacity within individual life forms, human beings, apparently having the greatest free rein with it.

So while we sit bemoaning our world and our times and feeling rather useless in the face of such monumental problems, we have at our fingertips, literally, a venue - social networking - that requires of us only time and thoughtful attention, to engage this power, person-to-person, in ways that change lives. Such change is neither linear nor sequential, it just happens – so don’t’ miss it. The guidelines I’d offer for greatest positive effect are: whatever you say needs to be true and whatever you say is best said devoid of judgment. When that is so, what you offer another has the power to connect us rather than push us apart, the power to open us rather than encouraging the seeming safety of closure. It has a transformative power. Isn’t that what we’re seeking?

“You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think,” Christopher Robin reminded his dear friend, Pooh. May our words to one another be as straightforward and endearing, for even more friends in the world would indeed transform it.