Connor Turland+App1+AppQ1
During late April of 2012, I landed in Europe for the first time. Copenhagen, Denmark, specifically. I spent ten days there studying museums with other students from my post-secondary program, Knowledge Integration. But that wasn’t the pivotal experience. That came AFTER most students flew home to Canada on May 6th. I, on the other hand, left for London, UK. Forget travelling and flying alone in Europe as being daunting, I was going to meet George Por, Helene Finidori and others; few people in the world whom I admire more. A spontaneous, short term collaboration had been planned for my 14 days in London, in which I would offer my support in whatever ways I could to the massive 12 seminars in 12 days sprint with James Quilligan on the Commons and all kinds of surrounding topics. Forget the details of it, amazing as they were, what blew me away was the experience that I had of being so welcome in a ‘strangers’ home and in a ‘strange’ country, given how our deepest dreams and desires for the planet, humanity, community, and ourselves resonated so deeply. It is in a moment, or experience, like this that one can really feel their humanity. It took over a month and a half of considering my experience in London after I returned to make sense of it enough to begin writing about, and sharing the experience, and to see what place there was for me in furthering the work to restore and global commons and simultaneously shift humanity’s thinking into an updated, more functional, operating system.