Today was video interview day, in preparation for the Scottish Parliament event. Jacquie Forde interviewed Dean, Jen, Judy and me.

I felt pretty good about mine, talking about a subject I’m very comfortable with: prevention and the promotion of well-being from the inside-out. I focused on what I will focus on at the Parliament, that we have been missing the two most essential variables that lead to change in people’s lives:

1) No matter how wonderful the evidence-based programs we put in place, if people’s thinking doesn’t change, they will not, and in fact cannot, change; and

2) when people are guided by their wisdom they will not, and cannot, engage in the problems we’re trying to prevent.

The Three Principles focuses directly on these two most critical and neglected points of change, which outside-in prevention and public health completely neglects.

Jacquie and Judy dropped Jen and me off at the famous Rosslyn Chapel, which is a very old (c.1500), fascinating, mysterious and beautiful place. It’s the place Dan Brown made famous in his book,The Da Vinci Code, as the last clue led there, and the end of the movie with Tom Hanks was filmed there. Intricate rock carvings of weird faces and angels and pagan figures, no two alike, adorn the Chapel and are hidden in its nooks and crannies. Very interesting.

Then Jen and I each walked down the hill to the Rosslyn Castle, now mostly in ruins but a very magical place. You walk straight into the ruins of this castle, but then look over the wall and you suddenly realize you are very high up. How did that happen? Then I took a path and walked down below. Magical.

Last but not least, after we got picked up and then dropped Jen off to have dinner with some friends, on my urging Jacquie drove us to the Leith section of Edinburgh, where our tour guide, Judy Banks showed us where Syd [Banks] grew up on Duke Street, which starts at the end of Leith Walk. She was fuzzy on the exact tenement building in the row, but the poor conditions he grew up in became clear.

Then we saw the Lochend Road Primary School where he went to school. Then we drove to Kings Street in Portabello section, near a North Sea beach, where Syd moved as a mid-late teenager or young adult.

There wasn’t time for me to do what I wanted to do: get out and say a prayer of thanks—absolutely tremendous gratitude. I did have the thought that Syd was just another poor, adopted kid walking the streets, and no one could possibly have predicted what happened to him. No one can ever predict any child’s future, and this is why all children should be cherished and nurtured, no matter what they present to the outside world.