Thank you for joining me on this conversation about how we as parents can make the future more welcoming and help our children position themselves for success.

Why does this matter? Why does this matter more now? I am sure that, especially after COVID you have noticed how the future of work is going to be substantially different from the way it was in the past 20 to 50 years.

We grew up in a time of the industrial era. Our education system was designed to help us figure out how:

• to listen carefully
• to do things the same way
• to repeat the process with as little error as possible.

But the industrial era has now been replaced. We are now moving into the, into the world of the knowledge.

With the beginning of the internet, we now are in the world of the knowledge worker.

The industrial era rewarded those who remembered facts and numbers.

Those skills have been replaced with the computer, search engines, and algorithms.

That new skill that we now have to give our children the ability to find the information, to curate the information and evaluate its place amid the rest of the information.

This is what I believe - that we are capable of amazing possibility.

The world - in all its glory, dirt and grime - has been handed down to my generation by all the hundreds of previous generations who battled through despair, disease, war, and so much more.

What do we do with it? How do we accept this gift? Do we tie a ribbon on it, and hand it forward to the generation after us, or do we open it, take a hammer to it and offer up the shards?

I believe we are capable of generosity and possibility. I believe that the generations coming after us are filled with imagination, moral courage and a passion for righting wrongs and that we are here to empower and encourage them.

I believe that we will create a new tomorrow that protects our environment. As a society before us challenged the morality of keeping slaves though that had been a tradition for centuries, we will not accept an economic structure that demands that we pillage the earth's most precious resources purely to sustain our national economies. Instead, we will protect all the resources, particularly the water and clean air.

I believe we can invent the technologies that allow us to indulge in the advances of modern science and technology, but make the move to a greener use of energy. We can feed the Earth's growing population. We can find meaningful engagement for each human so they contribute to society as a whole, embracing robotics and AI as our ancestors embraced the plough, made bigger, not less, by technology.

I believe in nurturing the generation that follows us with compassion, but also charging them with the responsibility to care for Mother Earth, not to squander its resources.

I trust in the power of connection - families, communities, classes like Acumen & Akimbo that connect like-minded souls to each other so that we are able to foster a mindset of abundance and possibility. I am sustained by my connection to humanity and to nature: to the sunrise, the melting snow, the enduring cycle of tides and daffodils that bloom in the spring. Nature teaches us the resilience of rebirth.

I know that this world will survive past my race. So I believe in the Earth and place my trust in my generation and the generations after me to respect the Earth as a living being that pushes back when hurt but embraces when whole.

I will do what is within my power - stretching that capability to all its might - to make a green and wonderful world available to the next 7 generations, to gift to them as was gifted to me: the wonder, awe and amazement at what Nature can give us.

And in doing so, I honour the memories and sacrifices of the generations before, as well as the powers that created this beautiful Earth and bequeath to the generations that will follow.

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This is what I know:

I am a dot.

• I'm just one human in a world of 7.8 billion
• I exist at a specific point in time, stepping gratefully in the footsteps of those who came before
• Ours is just one of so many species that have covered this same earth for billions of years
• Our world is one planet, a dot in a galaxy and universe that is so wide and spans dimensions

I'm a dot.

And like a dot, I believe in connection. Connecting with friends and family. Connecting a young generation with their elders. Connecting problems with solutions and opportunities. Connecting our future with our past. Connecting peoples across space, place and time.

I'm a dot.

While a dot is small, it is not without impact - just ask COVID-19! You pile enough dots on top of each other, and suddenly you have substance and form, weight and shape which we can choose to use to move towards better.

I am a dot.

And a dot is a beginning.

Host: Karena de Souza  
Producer: Karena de Souza  
Music for this episode: Children of Lemuel by Blue Dot Sessions 
Technology: taped on HP Envy desktop, using Audacity 2.4.2, Blue Yeti Nano  
Processing: Audacity, lightly edited: noise reduction, amplify, normalize 
Photo credit: Karena de Souza photo