JUST BEYOND

A moral imagination about self.

“We always have another deeper place we can go to where we can become better”—a place, David Whyte calls us to through his poem, Just Beyond Yourself.

As Keith Yamashita points out, “Each of us, as individuals, are the atomic unit of change.” So our greatest power to conjure imagination starts within—in our own ability to move beyond our narrative, self-story, myths of self—and go deeper.

As Gayle Young Whyte invites, “It’s about expanding our container of awareness—about the things we tell ourselves about ourselves, and be open to other data and facts that arise.”

Many of us—as an example, in this era of racial reckoning—are beginning to hold two seemingly conflicting thoughts about ourselves:

I am a “good person.”
And “I am a racist.”

This emergent realization is that we can have good intentions and at the same time—often unknowingly or unconsciously—perpetuate racist systems because they are so all pervasive we fail to see them.

And so our journey from here is about moving that awareness to a greater accountability, then action.

Yesterday, we asked how you wanted to be remembered during these times.

Today, let’s start gently—you can work on anything you wish.

(If you specifically want to work on your role in this era of racial reckoning, please consider doing the three-step exercise below even more deeply.)

If you prefer pen-to-paper, click through the prompts using the “Return” key, and write your answers on a piece of paper.

Tomorrow, we’ll send you even more inspiration to help you delve deeper.

*Once complete, you’ll receive an email summary that captures your responses under the subject line: This Human Moment | Growing beyond ourselves.

“And it leads us to a place, a spacious place that’s difficult to get to, difficult to drop below, a place where we have to go through our sense of fearful vulnerability to a place where we have no resentments towards others. Actually where other people are not in competition with us.”

—David Whyte

For those of us who want to work on summoning a moral imagination about becoming anti-racist, here is a three-step contemplation.

Memorialize your learnings.

Write down your responses to memorialize them. And we’ll send you back your own responses for your safekeeping as well as a resources list for further learning.

*Once complete, you’ll receive an email summary that captures your responses under the subject line: This Human Moment | Memorialize your learnings.