ThankFest 2004 ... I Double-Dog-Dare Ya!

I have a thinking infection, and it's driving me crazy.

Since May I've been travelling down one big long serendipity path, and let me tell you: it gets pretty darn hard to shut your head off at night!

A woman named Milli Akinsuluré turned my life upside down in the mid-nineties, and my life has been largely governed by a conscious effort to have happy accidents ever since. This year there's been an explosion of them, and since May, I've met some of the most incredible human beings to ever inhabit this big blue ball we share. There's a little fellow named Stanley Musankwa, who led me to Dr. Tommy Clark, and Kirk Friedrich, and Ethan Zohn. That had me bumping into the ultimate Ambassador of Uplift Kwan, Tom Munnecke, who led me to Jerry Michalski (who else could blow up the first digital brain?), Bob Bilheimer, and now a group of people who are interested in helping individuals find their own power to make good things happen.

While it may sound like a bit of a commercial, I can assure you something far more profound than a 30-second feel good campaign is afoot, for in their presence in this last single week, I've come home.

I suspect this will be the fuel of many more blog entries to come, but, for today, I want to share this single thing:

The First Official

ThankFest

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

24 hours of gratitude in cyberspace

It's a challenge. It's a dare. It's a double-dog-dare! For whatever I can do to convince you of the desperately urgent nature of being thankful for even just one day, I will. As Rick Smolan took up the gauntlet on various 24-hour quests in cyberspace, I invite you to join me on this quest: for just 24 hours, I want you to be the Ghost of Gratitude Past, running through the halls of cyberspace in your socks shouting at the top of your lungs to everyone who will listen and who you know. Tell them why you're thankful. Tell them about some small, insignificant thing that turned out to be the one that changed your life. Tell your teachers, your coaches, your mentors and friends. Tell your children that night as your tucking them in something about them that makes you utterly thankful they're a part of your life.

For 24 hours, join the Thank-a-Thon, because while Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 may be the first official digital ThankFest, I can assure you it won't be the last!

You've got less than a week to get the word out, so get out there. Tell every Who in Whoville that you'll be blogging, emailing, faxing, campaigning to build the troops that will march into the halls of cyberspace and give thanks. Got a blog? Use it? Some other digital pulpit? Preach from it! Whatever you do, take a moment to explain why you're thankful that day.

Need a kickstart? Ideas shared here.

Know people who aren't connected? Have them write it, phone it in, paint it with a fingertip on a foggy window and take a picture to send it in. Help them share it someplace, any place, online, so it can be part of the living tribute we'll be growing in our digital gardens that day.

Then send me the link.

Consider it humanity's family album of the things that change our lives when we simply pause to give thanks. It will be an International Day of Thanks that has a common day each year; a tapestry of gratitude leading to cascades of uplift that will infect our other days.

While we have different days that we pause to celebrate and to be thankful in our various nooks and crannies of meatspace, let this be the one day that unites us without a tragic history, or dogmatic tale to tell, about how and why we gathered to give Thanksgiving a little early this year.

Then on Wednesday, September 1st, 2004, give your thanks, capture it digitally (words, pictures, sound, whatever you're inspired to do), and return here to dive into the portal that will be open to connect you with the digital scrapbook to share your link.

Here's how you return:

http://tinman.typepad.com/dosomething/2004/08/thankfest_2004_.html

Let this be the day that inboxes are swamped with no-spam invitations to enlarge an even bigger organ: our heart.

(Lars Hasselblad Torres, this one's for you ...)

Sue.