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The Seeds Within “About once a month, I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel valued. You often catch them looking after other people and, as they do so, their laugh is musical, and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking of themselves at all.
“When I meet such a person, it brightens my entire day. But I confess that I often have a sadder thought. It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that inner light. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.”
--David Brooks What Brooks is describing is what Teilhard de Chardin called examples of evolved human beings that appear among us like scattered seeds introducing future change. He called them the “Ultra Human,” or “Homo Progressivus.”
They are not born this way. The seed for change is something they purposely nurtured. Chances are that this potential exists in most of us, and we don’t recognize it. It may appear an occasional twist of conscience that saddens us, showing us what is wrong – but if we don’t respond to it, if we don’t nourish it, we fail the promptings of much needed evolution.
We are not like those seeds that fall on the highway, as in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower. We are like those that begin to grow but are choked by pernicious weeds. The seeds are in us. We feel them in our hearts. If we don’t pull the weeds that hinder them, we miss our chance.
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