It is fashionable to espouse the latest cynicism. If we live in hope, we go against the stream.*
(Eugene Peterson)

When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. […] The deepest irony about the young being cynical is that they are the ones that need to move, and dance, and trust the most. They need to cartwheel through a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas, never scared to say “Yes! Why not!” — or their generation’s culture will be nothing but the blandest, and most aggressive, or most defended of old tropes.**
(Caitlin Moran)

Cartwheeling through a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas should be for everyone … is for everyone! As long as we say Yes!

Come, one and all, to the ever-open, freewheeling, never-knowing-what comes-next conversations that allow possibilities to emerge that we had’nt previously imagined.

Yesterday, I mentioned that my main read for October would be on conversations, and it’s going to be Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation, writing about the impact of technology, she observes:

It all adds up to a flight from conversation – at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. Yet these are the conversations where empathy and intimacy flourish and social action gains strength.^

Welcome to the conversation.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Caitlin Moran on Fighting the Cowardice of Cynicism.)
(^From Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)