I'm procrastinating...!

It is Saturday afternoon and I am supposed to be doing prep work for a strategic planning workshop that we will be having with some of our trustees and faculty next weekend. I was doing some research and took a detour to check in on someone that our faculty and students have heard me speak about before. At the start of the year, I showed people a couple of videos of Matt Harding, a young man who has visited over seventy countries and made short videos at many stops. If you haven't seen one of them, I encourage you to take just a few minutes to take a look. You will join more than 30,000,000 others who have seen his videos:

For his most recent, click here.

For his earlier video, completed in 2005, click here.

Matt recently completed a "This I Believe" recording for NPR. This is wonderful series and Matt stepped up. I find his words, some of which I have excerpted below, very insightful:

Here's what I can report back: People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they're curious to hear and see others from places far away. I share that impulse. It's part of what drives me to travel. But it's constantly at odds with another impulse, which is to reduce and contain my exposure to a world that's way too big for me to comprehend.

My brain was designed to inhabit a fairly small social network of maybe a few dozen other primates — a tribe. Beyond that size, I start to get overwhelmed.

And yet here I am in a world of over 6 billion people, all of whom are now inextricably linked together. I don't need to travel to influence lives on the other side of the globe. All I have to do is buy a cup of coffee or a tank of gas. My tribe has grown into a single, impossibly vast social network, whether I like it or not. The problem, I believe, isn't that the world has changed, it's that my primitive caveman brain hasn't.

I am fantastic at seeing differences. Everybody is. I can quickly pick out those who look or behave differently, and unless I actively override the tendency, I will perceive them as a threat. That instinct may have once been useful for my tribe but when I travel, it's a liability.

When I dance with people, I see them smile and laugh and act ridiculous. It makes those differences seem smaller. The world seems simpler, and my caveman brain finds that comforting.

I believe my children will have brains ever so slightly better suited to the vast complexity that surrounds us. They will be more curious, more eager to absorb and to connect.

And I believe when they look into eyes of strangers, what they will see before the differences are the things that are the same.

(This was originally played on NPR's Weekend Edition on March 29, 2009.)

This is incredibly insightful from a former video game programmer! Matt's "This I Believe" column can be read or listened to in it's entirety at NPR's site by clicking here.

It is an amazing, remarkably connected world that we live in. To Matt's point, we are increasingly members of one big tribe. As educators, we have accomplished a very important task if we can help the next generation focus on the similarities that we all have rather than the differences.

Thanks again Matt Harding. Now, I have to get back to work.