I am a writer and thinker on development for my part of the world, Kenya. I feel that the way to go forward is to recover (find) ways of restoring the peace component of our humanity, which could be guided by the notion of Zen, of course. I say that as a Muslim who follows a leadership of peace-making (what Ismailis do: www.akdn.org). I hope to share thoughts with everyone here. There are far too many for me to catalogue them here but, I do tend often to be guided by the notion of restoration and argue for an extreme position, "restoring the past for future", if only to stress the importance of what direction to turn to, to look for ways to restore human and planetary dignity: Restore and protect our memories and learn from history. It is not necessary to be self-centred. We seem to be missing the point of humanity and being human which is far more exciting than accumulation of power and access to resources. The fear of scarcity could be counterbalanced with the notion of abundance. But our memories, without which we can never survive, we tend to forget, are kept in the safe deposit boxes we call our ELDERS and the ELDERLY. The measure of our success is the degree to which we can restore their dignity, first.