I was shocked when I thought back to my time living abroad and realized it began more than a decade ago. I returned to the US toward the end of 2015, but I embarked on my transformative journey, first to South Africa, back in 2011.

I wouldn’t recognize myself, from either end of it. We change over time, as our relationships, residences, and environments change. Yet I can identify some values and principles I established some ten years ago that I still live by: respect, responsibility, resolve… time, health and love. I can still remember sitting down at my kitchen table in Cape Town and writing them down. The very early beginnings of TAV, although I didn’t know it at the time, started at that wooden table with paper and pencil.

We may evolve over time, but we can choose to hold ourselves accountable to what we believe, to what’s right. We have the complete freedom and power to choose how we want to live. And at a very high level, if we open up to it, we begin to see we all want the same things, that we are more similar than we are different…and that we’re all here together, on this wondrous planet Earth. We can build a prosperous global society, a thriving planetary ecosystem, if we reckon with these basic truths. We can, indeed, change the world.