Renaissance Weekend

Wrote this when the family was just back from our second well, Russell and my second Renaissance Weekend. We went the first time we were invited, in 1999, then stopped while the kids were little.
The goings-on at a Renaissance Weekend are very strictly off-the-record, so I can’t report on anything specific, which is a shame. It’s an exceptional group of people in an extraordinary situation which makes for something really wonderful.
I do, nonetheless, want to comment my personal take-aways. First, and most fundamentally, I leave the weekend intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally reinvigorated. Mainly, I’ve been motivated to live an even better life to live more fully, love more deeply, to make a bigger difference. It’s magical to interact with octogenarians who are activists, people who have been to 80 countries in the last 5 years, astronauts, B52 pilots, priests, cosmologists, politicians including a serious Presidential candidate, battlefield reporters, and homemakers. I was consistently awed by the richness of these people’s lives, and grateful for their openness. The dialog is genuine and deep, with people striving to find ways to bridge gaps, often across wide and deep chasms. I can’t help but believe that the world is going to get better when there are so many very powerful people with such genuine desire to do good and a willingness to listen to and to learn. So, I leave the weekend 1) rededicated to doing the right thing 2) convinced that it will make a difference and 3) excited by all the possibilities of life.
In addition to these large lessons, a learned one very important thing: that the world I live in is far from mainstream, that the edge terrifies many people, and that we, the 53,651 have done a very poor job at telling the story of our work and our lives. I was on a number of panels on a variety of topics, but almost always the fears that people have about the things we do were palpable. In this group, the fears weren’t the typical base fears of predatory pedophiliacs. Rather, the fears were a step higher. Attendees were struggling with teenagers’ different sense of privacy. They worry about content producers and the meaning of copyright. They can’t understand and ~ our electronic multi-tasking. This group was trying to understand, but the gulph was so wide that I found myself evangelizing today’s internet. I showed a chart of the old distribution versus the long tail over and over (drawn on the back of my folder, since there aren’t really visuals at Renaissance) and telling stories about Etsy, Kiva, Donor Direct, and a guy who bought Harris tweed from a guy on the Isle of Harris and had his local tailor make him a jacket rather than buy it off the rack for 50% more. We have to do a better job helping everyone understand the wonder that is starting to unfold in our world and how it will make the world a better place.