Words decay, as you know. 

They lose meaning, get co-opted, or fall out of use entirely.  But “cool” has been around for one hundred years and stood up pretty well, is still understood to mean “good, hip, youthful.”  If it is cool it is something you want to share in.

Can you think of another word this strong?  Will your great-grandchildren label anything “lit?”  Will there be hipsters then? Will the youth want “to chill” in 2040?  Will anything take “a minute” in 2050?

While “love” and “God “continue to enjoy a good run, not only has cool stuck around without too many fights about its meaning, it is understood around the world.

And there is nothing our world needs so much as an uptick in cool.

Because we have to cool off the world, both in terms of defraying the passionate intensity of our worst actors and in terms of actual temperature.

Sure, in one sense life now includes the routinely incredible. (Hold on a moment, I am just texting my friend on the other side of the planet.) But it has not gotten, in the day-to-day sense, “cooler.”  There are exceptionally cool streets and bands and neighborhoods, but the world as a whole creeps (or launches) from a mall-like culture and the norms of materialism, to a screenified life of frayed souls, cold hearts, and the steady anxiety of thinking you have to bee good.

We are, to put it simply, feeling stress and stress always brings heat.

If we might each carry a little less stress with us . . . for a month at least.

If we might each sew a stitch in the social fabric along the way . . . encouraged to do so by someone in the global village.

If we could each nurture something cool . . . were given a little money to do just that.

If we did these things because the system helped us find the time, the people, and the money to do so we might have a shot at cooling “up” the world–cooler to live, cooler climatically too.