"...the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong to the whole, to the community...”
A Play on My Brain Stage
When I want to visualize something—an exercise I do very often—I close my eyes. I assume most people do that, though I am not sure. I have not looked into it.
Closing my eyes removes the “noise”—not in the literal auditory sense, of course, but the noise created by everything around me: light, doors, walls, specific colors, and objects. What I see then is what I call My Brain Stage: a theater stage where props, scenes, and shapes appear and disappear at random. Sometimes they are recognizable things; sometimes they resemble what you might see under a microscope in a Petri dish.
The space is, most of the time, dark, much like a theater with the lights dimmed or completely off. Only the stage is illuminated. I feel as if I am the director, watching an audition with the authority and capacity to determine whether what is happening on My Brain Stage will be selected for the play.
The play is the result of my visualization: what I want to see in that particular moment, what I am looking for to solve an issue, calm stress, or drift to sleep. In this latest visualization, the play became a way of thinking about thriving: what it is, what it requires, and who gets the conditions to pursue it.
Scene One. Thriving
In my latest visualization exercise, the first scene came alive as a high-speed cinematic sequence: a small patch of wet, healthy-looking soil, with a little plant growing as quickly as the scene itself. It was tender but not fragile, moving gently in different directions, vibrant green and unmistakably alive. I am certain many of us have seen a video of something similar.
Next to the patch of soil stood a prop door. I walked through the door and, still within the same scene, found myself back in what was probably fifth grade. There I was at home, in the laundry area, placing a few raw black beans against the inside walls of a small, empty Gerber baby-food jar, tucking cotton around them so they would stay pressed against the glass. I watered the jar daily and placed it where it would receive sunlight. The cinematic feeling did not change: it was still the same wonder, the same magical growth of a plant from a single bean—the childhood discovery that from an ordinary bag of beans in the pantry, we could bring them to life.
The plants did not need a banner behind them to tell me what was happening. I did not need a sign stretched across the stage—a “WELCOME” banner, or a “Happy Day” one—to tell me that the plant was thriving.
Thriving, one of my favorite words, or perhaps one of my favorite meanings.
And then the set changed.
Scene Two. The Means
The soil was gone. In its place stood my high school classroom, and there I was, in uniform, back in my freshman year, standing in a small circle with my classmates as we debated “the means justify the ends” and “the ends justify the means.” The teacher had assigned us the task of writing a synthesis, but what remains with me most vividly is the scene itself: small groups of girls, some standing, some sitting at and on the desks, passion and debate, the feeling that ethics was no longer abstract but alive among us. It was a wonderful philosophy exercise, and one I have carried with me throughout my life whenever important, critical, and ethical decisions must be made.
Then the stage changed again.
Scene Three. The Possibilities
A table came into view: my reading table, all dressed up with a pile of books. Some were being read simultaneously; others waited in a kind of queue. I want to say the table was dressed up because the books felt like gala dresses, each with its own fabric, color, and presence.
Two of the books in that pile, one of which I am currently reading and another that I have already read but still keep on top for its exercises, relate to thriving:
What Would Tequila Do, by Henk Campher, and A Guide to Thriving, by Jon Rosemberg.
Different styles, different offerings, different methods.
Though they are directed mainly at business audiences, the parallels to everything else we do are there. I can summarize a common core message from both authors: to thrive, you and the things around you must be aligned. If you sacrifice yourself—your principles, your beliefs—for the sake of your surroundings, or for what is supposed to be expected of you, you will not thrive.
And that is where the play stopped being only personal.
Scene Four. The Reality
In my “reading-digestion” process—which, for me, involves many steps beyond reading—I recently took extensive notes from the study that serves as the foundation of the Critique&Promise™ framework developed by my business partner, who is also my beloved daughter, Alejandra. It is a study on transformative leadership by Carolyn Shields, one that seeks to “identify and understand how many of the current assumptive knowledge frameworks [in U.S. education] constitute barriers to the success of all children.”
It is a study that shows how intentional changes to our education system would allow everyone to thrive. It requires change. It requires resistance to the status quo and to the pushback. It requires overcoming deficit thinking.
And when we take this message to our shared humanity, we understand that many people do not have opportunities to make choices that allow them to thrive. Some have to accept work under people or systems that keep them in survival mode. Others live in countries, and in states, where laws are strangling their well-being. It would be irresponsible and cruel to suggest, “just quit” or “just move.”
Scene Five. Our Shared Humanity
But if there is something I am certain we can do, it is work toward positive social impact and organize community around it. Action happens in small, intentional steps, one by one, toward changing whatever system stands in the way.
Which takes me back to the debate between “the means justify the ends” and “the ends justify the means.”
My own synthesis is this: if the goal is for people to thrive, then the ends cannot be separated from the means. We cannot claim a worthy end through means that diminish people, and we cannot praise the means if they leave unjust systems untouched.
That is where this play lands for me.
End scene.
Systems that deny thriving may rise.
They may set humans back, and they may take many people with them when they fall.
Still, the bullet train keeps moving.
Human progress may be delayed, but it does not stop.
And somewhere ahead, even in a future we may never live to see, the passengers will thrive.
Photo: Shinkansen bullet train at Tokyo Station platform in Japan, by Lizzie Lee