Thinking about the question of whether previous public office holding should be a prerequisite for candidate consideration, especially at the mayoral, senate, house, and governor levels.

What’s clear is that many who have long office holding tenure have two proven competencies: marketing a platform of positions and showing up for votes. As useful as both are, they are no substitutes for competencies related to economic development, entrepreneurship, venture capital funding, project management, community building, leadership, research and policy development, civic engagement design, public private partnership building, and regional collaboration.

These are the competencies of people with intellect and presence.

We may not know who’s responsible for Mumbai’s recent violence, but what we do know is that despair wears its pain as a badge of honor, justifying a land of self-fulfilling cynicism where joy is an irreverent denial of dogma. The most radical revolution is joy. All violence is violence against joy. All joy is celebration of itself, nothing ever more, or less.

Now that I’ve got a critical mass of the new book done, a title has finally emerged: “Narrative Nexus: The Power of Stories in the Possibilities of our Connections.”

It’s about how storytelling is a profound media for connection on all levels. It suggests that we need to move beyond toolish connections where we connect to people on the basis of their ability to serve our purposes. The alternatives are narrative connections where we connect on the basis of our stories.

Imagine a planet where our stories are the basis for connections. It is a planet of seamless community.

Thankfulness is the experience of appreciative receiving from others and things. Gratitude is the practice of appreciative giving back to that and whom from which we have received.

We hear about death in our families and friends, people too young and people old enough. We hear about the dramatic deaths, the slow fated deaths, the unlikely and likely deaths of wars, famines, and disasters.

We are expected to think of death as wrong. We’re expected to live our whole life in fear of death, which is a diminishment of life. We need to get over our fear of death, our sense of it as wrong. It is the other side of life.

My Zen teacher Ogui used to put his hand out, turn it over from one side to the other, and say, how can you expect to have one side of your hand without the other?

It was and is an aha moment of realizing that in embracing death, we embrace life. Those who have the courage to do that are able to live fully in every moment, no matter what.

Had a great chat tonight with friend David Cooperrider, founder of the globally transformational Appreciative Inquiry, about the status of narrative aesthetic. He related a story of a recent conversation he had with a Buddhist monk and professional storyteller who talked to over 5,000 people about their stories. David asked him how many stories he harvested from the process, stories that had narrative aesthetic, and the monk said 5.

We need to start reviving the narrative aesthetic where stories are more fields of countless possibilities than linear in nature, where the possibilities of meaning are more infinite than finite. We need to stop calling sound bites stories, which they’re not. We need to call stories the narratives that evoke a sense of wonderment more than conclusion.

Men’s group tonight, a feast of G’s outrageous za’s, Jim’s Taylor g’tar pickin’, and soul stretching. If I had to extract a thread, it would be how we listen to self and other with equal legitimacy, nothing less than walking the razor’s edge.

And only the ultimately honest survive.

Vermont blogger Barbara Ganley is a proud member of the slow blogging movement. It’s about posts falling from the blog trees when they are ripe from quiet reflection. Her mantra: “Blog to reflect. Tweet to connect.”

Only the fortunate are grateful, only the grateful are fortunate. Blessed are they whose eye never strays from the thousand things that support their very existence. Blessed are they whose heart wisely knows that their life is completely reliant on an infinite universe. Blessed are they whose soul soars in the open space of thankfulness.

Working here this weekend with a Washington DC based environmental leadership program where board and staff love the idea of doing futuring from a strength based perspective. Thankfully, people have lost faith in the power of problem and deficiency conversations to renew organizational passion, brand, and impact. They are relieved to break free from the traditional “strategic planning” approaches that do not better engage people’s gifts in the direction of their passions. It was also refreshing to see a diverse group manifest the greatest potential of diverse voices joined together to created shared and inclusive pictures of the future. We will achieve this dream when we get as excited about people living from abundance as we do about the market rising.