To sustain this project, I hope to receive a different dinner invitation for every night of the year to explore how people who are making an impact sustain themselves and others. I will publish a brief description of the person I eat with, the menu of the meal, a partial transcript of our conversation and my own blog.

If you know someone that I just have to talk to, encourage them to contact me with an invitation and consider any logistical support you can provide to make the meeting possible.

If you have a story to tell about how you are living your life in a meaningful way, please contact me with a dinner invitation.

If you are a restauranteur, consider an interesting patron who would be willing to host me in your establishment.

If you are a regular visitor to the blog, encourage others to read and consider how you might support the project.

A Promise and A Dare

The most common questions I am asked after people wonder how they can become involved in this project are ‘where did you get the idea?’ and ‘why are you doing this?’.

The idea can best be traced to a promise and a dare. The promise was made to someone who loved me enough to let me go so that I could explore how I really wanted to live my life. The dare came from someone who was trying to help me stay and suggested I take a year to decide what I really wanted to do and how to do something about it. The force of the two, had me questioning the rather cowardly reasons I had spent so much time not doing the bolder things I aspired to. And if I was going to do something about my aspirations in a year, then I realized that I could be doing something about them now.

In fact the only part of my life I had not reshaped was my professional life where my primary responsibility was to challenge others to do something immediately about possibilities that they may not yet even envision. In this work as a teacher, stories came to me unbidden and while I welcomed them, I had no place to put them. While I was passionate about my work with young people and increasingly my work with teachers, both groups of whom, at their best, are passionately engaged in making and sustaining change, I was not doing what was needed to sustain myself and everything that was important to me in my private world. If my idea was to send others after their greatest possibilties, then certainly I needed to explore what would happen if an idea of my own caught interest.

So the promise of this project is that I will write everyday about people who dare to live their fullest vision of what is possible for them and those around them. And people who are doing interesting things will have another platform to talk about the things that matter to them. And those of us who are intriqued by how bravely others go about living interesting lives will be able to folllow along. I have only too recently realized that it is through our connections with others that we create a sense of our own selves and shape the worlds we can be a part of.

The dare is to put this idea out there for others to respond to. Far from being a self-indulgent wish, this project is one of asking for opportunities. I want to sit at the table not with people who are doing what others think they are supposed to do, but with those who are doing what they know they must do and who are working everyday to do it with more impact, more enthusiasm and more integrity.

This project was inspired by my own questions about the intersection between our private and public selves. I needed to ask my private questions in a public forum. And it takes the best kind of daring to not just ask our questions of others, but to find the answers within ourselves and allow ourselves to be a part of the story.

So this promise and the daring it will take from many to accomplish it, are not to be mistaken for a wing and a prayer. It takes a strength that is too infrequently spoken of to listen fully, to pour our truest selves into all parts of lives and to maintain an honest voice in the company of others. Should we be able to listen, live and speak together then we dare to create ourselves and our worlds as a fulfillment of out greatest promise.