As this arrives in your inbox, I’m about to take a plane for the first time in 14 months. My wife and I will be visiting my 90-year-old father, for the first time since August 2019. Yes, all three of us are fully vaccinated. And we bought our tickets the very day we got our second dose. On our way, we’ll visit our daughter and her husband in New Jersey and my in-laws in Queens, then fly nonstop from LGA to minimize airport exposure. We’ve seen the NY/NJ family a few times, picnicking on my daughter’s roof or meeting in a state park halfway between our houses and having tea with Dina’s parents in their yard. We’ve also seen my younger child and their partner, but our kids haven’t seen each other in person since they came to our house for Chanukah in December, 2019. Zoom is great, but it isn’t the same.

So yes, it’s great to see the light at the end of the tunnel and to resume some “normal” activities—but that’s not enough! The pandemic presents an incredible chance NOT to return to “normal,” but to create the society we really want. That window will only be open for a short time. If we seize the moment while change is floating within our reach, we can join together to create a society grounded in social and racial justice, healing the environment, meeting basic needs, combining the best of pandemic and pre-pandemic (such has having events that include both in-person and online attenders), and more. But if we let the moment pass, it may be years before that opportunity arises again.

Why am I so optimistic in this dark and strange time? Because all those people who told change agents that they couldn’t change, that “this is the way we’ve always done it,” that we had to settle for so much less than we want have all been proven wrong. We know now that everything can pivot. We’ve seen dramatic change in so many sectors, and we’ve also seen a much broader and deeper awareness of the need to address systemic problems. From the murders of people like George Floyd almost a year ago to the attacks on Asian sexworkers in Atlanta just last month, we’ve seen how much work still must be done—and many of us have emerged from these shocks with a much stronger commitment to racial equity, fairness to the lowest economic strata, and willing to make deep systemic changes in how we govern, how we work, how we learn, and how we socialize—not to mention how we eat, how we get our entertainment, and how we travel. I think we may have passed the tipping point in recognizing that we have to go beyond “sustainability” (keeping things from getting worse) to a regenerative economy and society that actually makes things better.

As a green/social entrepreneurship profitability consultant, speaker, and author who helps businesses develop and market profitable products/services that turn hunger/poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance, I find this very exciting. I believe business, especially small business, has a huge role to play in initiating and nurturing these changes, and that business is more likely to get involved when we show them the opportunities to profit in this work.