I remember how hopeful I was at the start of the so-called Arab Spring.
Ah, naïve me. I thought there would be a push forward but instead it’s a step back.
But moving from the political into the personal, here’s the message: we can never impose change from the outside. We can’t change Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name a few. We can’t make people be open-minded and accepting. We can’t convince them to do things differently even if we are sure that our way will bring them happiness.
What happens inside another country mirrors what happens inside someone else. People we care about. We can want them to change because we see they are suffering but we are totally powerless over what they decide to do.
Change can never happen from the outside in. We have to change from the inside out.
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About dianabletter
Diana Bletter is the author of several books including The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (with photographs by Lori Grinker), shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award, a novel, A Remarkable Kindness, (HarperCollins), a memoir, The Mom Who Took of on her Motorcycle, and The Loving Yourself Book for Women: A Practical Guide to Boost Self-Esteem, Heal Your Inner Child, and Celebrate the Woman You Are, an Amazon top-seller in several categories, and The Loving Yourself Workbook for Girls.
She is the First Prize Winner of Moment Magazine's 2019 Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, tabletmag, Glamour, The Forward, The North American Review and is currently a reporter for The Times of Israel.
Diana and her husband have six children and an unofficially-adopted daughter from Ethiopia. They live in a small village on the Mediterranean Sea in northern Israel.
DIANA BLETTER 
And we start–or jump into–all kinds of problems when we make it our job to change someone or something from the inside out.
Thanks for another excellent post…and reminder.
Thanks Diane. So true. If we all worked on ourselves first, the results would be amazing.