I've retitled this news from Louise Diamond, author of "The Peace Book." She called it "Death and Re-Birth on the Path."

Things change. I’ve taken on a new assignment: to foster a systems approach to complex global issues among policy makers and those who influence them. As in any mythic heroic journey, this comes as a call, impelling me to leave the comfort of my current life and launch a quest to bring something new and useful to the world.

Overcoming the inertia involved in leaving the familiar and venturing out into the unknown requires energy. Where does that come from? What is the compelling vision that pulls me, and the values and beliefs that push me onto this new path, and how can they sustain me when I face the inevitable tests, or meet the dragons along the way? What is it I wish to accomplish, what can I hope to bring to the people as a result of the challenges I meet and the changes I both encounter and incite along the path?

I first discovered ‘a systems approach’ when I had a near-death experience on the operating table for my second breast cancer surgery, at the age of 29. Only of course I didn’t know to call it that at the time. Standing at one of those transformative crossroads, where I was expecting and expected to die within months, I chose to live as fully as I could in whatever time I had – full of joy and peace and love.

Not knowing how to do that, or anyone else who did, I went into the natural world every chance I got for the next four years, seeking the proverbial ‘meaning of life.’ I went to the forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, meadows, and deserts everywhere I could. I watched and listened, asked questions and stood still to receive the answers.

This tree has roots, I would observe, that keep it firmly rooted on the earth and well-nourished. What are my roots? It has leaves high up, shimmering in the sunlight. What part of me dances in the light? Those leaves and those roots cannot even see each other, yet their healthy functioning depends totally on the activity of the other. How is that true for me, with other parts of the human family that I cannot see and never think about?

What I found through this immersion in nature was a deep understanding that we’re all in this together; that there is only one family of life in which we are all related, and each has a role to play. I discovered that every one of us, and indeed every part of us, is whole and beautiful in itself , intricate and mysterious, while at the same time part of a larger whole even more complex and more wondrous.

The larger wholes go on forever, and they need and feed each other. The cells in my body are discrete entities, with their own ways of being, yet an integral part of the tissues and organs that ultimately make up my whole body. My body is part of a family, which is part of a community, a nation, a global family, a planet, a solar system, the stars, a galaxy among galaxies, and whatever is beyond.

When I wrap my mind around this, I arrive at what natural and behavioral scientists have come to call systems thinking: a way of looking at people and groups and their environment as a single living web where each part is connected in the whole, where those points of relationship and interdependence determine the well-being of all, and where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What if we addressed the global challenges before us from this perspective? How would that be different from how we understand things now, and how would it help us thrive in the coming years and decades? For instance, how would the relations between Israelis and Palestinians change if they understood that they are and will always be intimately interconnected, and that they need to help the other prosper if they wish to do so themselves?

How would our policy toward Iran change if we knew that what we push against pushes back, creating the vicious cycle of escalation that serves no one, and that the remedy is not to push harder but to find points of engagement? How would we solve the dilemmas of climate change if we started from the assumption that we live in a delicate and interdependent relationship with the earth, the water, the sun, the air, and all that we call natural resources, and that when we disturb that balance in the extreme, or for personal gain, we risk the sustainability of all? For that matter, how would things be if we actually cared about the sustainability of all, rather than of the privileged few?

Finally, how would the world look if we truly understood that our differences are valuable, and can be used to contribute to the health of the larger whole rather than to destroy or dominate those not like us; that our well-being depends on the well-being of others; that power over one another is counterproductive in the long run, and only power used with and in the service of each other can bring us through these times of rapid change and challenge?

And what would it take to shift from our current polarizing and adversarial world view, which assumes our separateness, to this collaborative systems perspective, which assumes our oneness and our interdependence? Ah, now, that is the big question. What would it take, indeed?

These are the questions I live with, and dream on, and feel called to explore, in concert with those whose job it is to make decisions about the complex issues of our times: terrorism; security; climate change; poverty; health care; housing; proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons; human rights; energy; water; oppressive regimes; war; and all the other challenges we know we must deal with, and soon, if we are to leave our children a viable, livable world.

So back to the beginning. I am launched on this quest. The urgency of the times and the deep knowledge of how complex living systems actually operate, tested in the laboratories of my own experience as well as in the world around me by brilliant scientists and practitioners, impels me forward. The higher vision that draws me on is that those ideals we all aspire to, of Justice, Peace, Freedom, Equality, and Universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood, are not just greeting-card mottoes but encoded potential that lie within the shared heart of our human system, just waiting to be realized if we can but find the key.

I dream that the age of interdependence in which we live will awaken a hunger in policy makers to discover that key within the rules of interdependence. I dream that they will realize the truth of Einstein’s belief that we cannot solve problems with the same mind that created them, and therefore will turn with openness and curiosity to see how a systems approach, based on a different set of assumptions and infused with a different set of processes than what we are used to, can bring creative thinking and breakthrough results in the challenging issues of our times.

Many years ago I went to speak with a Palestinian group that ran weekly dialogues with Israelis for mutual understanding. Walking into their meeting space, I found the following quote written on the blackboard: “If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.” More recently I discovered a quote from Buckminster Fuller that also inspires me: “You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

The old model of how we shape our world, what we’ve always done, is not working well for the global family of life, if I may indulge in an understatement. I accept the call to help build the new model, and feel fortunate to have both a decent set of tools in systems thinking and a wonderful group of colleagues and traveling companions in others who walk the same or intersecting roads.

I set forth on the journey, knowing that I will find obstacles along the way and be tested again and again; that the system now is perfectly designed to get the results it is currently getting; and that changing the status quo requires grace and timing as well as the intention, cooperation, and skill of many. I set forth on the journey with both a sense of higher purpose and a healthy respect for the details of current reality that will keep my feet upon the path.

I know too that as I walk this road I widen and strengthen it for others, and so I have created a vehicle, an entity, called Global Systems Initiatives, to guide our steps and mark the mileposts. Global Systems Initiatives will operate from Washington, DC, in a collaborative network with think tanks, grass-roots advocacy groups, universities, government, global institutions, non-profits, and others. It will provide education and training on systems thinking, convene study groups on particular global issues, offer consultation to decision-makers, produce policy recommendations, and use various media to share its perspective with the public.

This, then, is the last edition of The New Peace Report, born of a different journey; 18 months of reflection on world affairs through a peace lens. From now on I will leave a trail of breadcrumbs from my foray into the world of politics and government, national and global policies, through a new instrument, The Global Systems Review, the e-newsletter of Global Systems Initiatives,

Sent as always to my mailing list and also posted on my new website, www.globalsystemsinitiatives.net, The Global Systems Review will carry my voice and the voices of others reflecting on the issues of the day through the lens of systems thinking and complexity science. It will chronicle the shift to a world that operates from the understanding that we’re all in this together, and the twists and turns of that transformative journey.

Every heroic journey involves a death, a letting go, a releasing of the old to make room for the new. And since energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes form, every death leads to a rebirth. Goodbye, then, to The Peace Report and welcome to The Global Systems Review. I ask your blessing and your patience in this great experiment, as there are infinite unknowns on the road ahead.

I invite you, gentle friend and reader, to walk with me into the center of power as we have known it to discover and release power as we can know it, to truly change the world. For we are in the world to change the world, and we’re all in this together. The quest is on purpose, the time is right, and I trust the universe and all our relations, in great gratitude, to provide what is needed. Will you come with me? How simply splendid!