What the World Needs Now

(It’s not just love)

“What the world needs now… is love, sweet love…”

All the way back in 1965, Jackie DeShannon released that song containing lyrics literally everyone would come to know and sing in their heads even as they read them above now.

Those words will never be less true, no matter how many decades or millennia pass. What the world needs now — no matter what version of now it might be — will always be love.

But even moreso, in this now, I have this incessant nagging in my gut naming that what the world needs now is more people being completely and utterly themselves. People who so thoroughly trust and know who they are that to be anyone else is like an abandonment of all that is good. People who are so in love with themselves, and who so embody their own authentic power, that they can do nothing but say what they mean, and do what they deeply desire to do, and in so doing, change everything.

The world needs people who are free.

Can you imagine?

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

-Howard Thurman

I believe that doing love is a product of being who we were always meant to be; who we’ve always felt we were — outside of the societal conditioning, outside of our fear and self-deprecation and insecurities, outside of our self-sabotage. Doing love is remembering our inner child — the freedom of self we had when we could instantly make friends, embrace creativity without fear, and revel freely in the boisterousness of imagination — and embodying that child in the now.

Doing love is an outward expression of an inner reverence for our own humanness.

Practicing being who we are means allowing our actions to grow outward from the seed of our integrity (what we most value), and pursuing our truth with a relentless ferocity. Even if we’re afraid. Whether that looks like making music, writing a book, starting a small business, being a parent, or leading a protest — whatever it is, it must come from nothing more or less than the place that feels most real and honest within yourself.