I like this phrase a lot.  It was offered in a group I’m a part of as we closed a conversation about how we can create spaces for people to flourish.

Here are some interesting quotes which caught my attention as I was thinking about people having opportunities in their localities to thrive.

I’ve mentioned Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) Centre before, established in Thimphu in January 2013, it is an attempt to move beyond Gross National Product (GNP) as the only means of measuring a country’s progress and development.  The metrics are coming together, as Bhutan’s Prime Minister Lyonchen Jigme Y. Thinley explains:

We have now clearly distinguished the “happiness” in GNH
from the fleeting, pleasurable “feel good” moods so often
associated with that term.  We know that true abiding
happiness cannot exist while others suffer, and comes only
from serving others, living in harmony with nature, and
raising our innate wisdom and the true and brilliant nature
of our own mind.

It’s been pointed out that whilst our technology advances our dependence upon it means our development of the person lags behind:

“I’ve dealt with many different problems around the world,
and I’ve concluded that there’s only really one problem: over
the past hundred years, the power that technology has given
us has grown beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, but our
wisdom has not.  If the gap between our power and our wisdom
is not redressed soon, I don’t have much hope for our prospects”
(United Nations senior officer at the International Institute for Applied Systems analysis).

The flip side to this is the notion we can have that we can only develop with technology, yet this can’t be true:

Our basic way to expand our efficiency is through modern
science and technology.  But another is through integrated
(emotional,mental, physical, and spiritual) growth and enhanced
wisdom.  This means growing our sense of connection with nature
and one another and learning to live in ways that naturally cultivate
our capacity to be human.

In the face of empire-building economies and markets, the idea of developing neighbourhoods of gross local happiness offers opportunities for us to reconnect us to our world – groaning beneath the pressures of what we’re able to do with present-day technology* – and to one another as we seek to find new ways of connecting beyond the nuclear family.

We can all be generators of GLH.

(*The old adage rings true here: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.)