I’ve spoken to Monitor reader Sam Daley-Harris in this space before. He is determined to change the way we change the world. We can do advocacy better, he insists.

Recently, he shared this piece he wrote for The Fulcrum, and I had to share some of it here. He writes of Eva Cassidy, the singer who died of cancer in her 30s. Not long before her death, she took to the stage at a benefit concert to sing one song: “What a Wonderful World.”

“Imagine,” Sam writes. “Instead of focusing on pain, suffering, debt or despair, she sang ‘What a Wonderful World’ surrounded by her community of friends and supporters. What if our politics came from a similar place of grace? What if our activism sprang from such gratitude?”

His answer: “It could.” We need to learn not to give up in “discouragement and despair” but to find ways “to have breakthroughs and see [ourselves] in a new light.” That is a recipe for transformational advocacy, he says. To me, it sounds simply like transformation, which is perhaps the same thing.