Musings

I told my wife and my kids: “There is not a single soul on this Earth that is not in some way influenced by every decision you make.  And there is not a single soul who does not likewise influence you.”

Take a snapshot, at this moment, of every human life on Earth.  Each is the result of a series of decisions leading up to this moment.  Some of the decisions are internal to the individual, some are external.  All carried us here to right now and will carry us into tomorrow.

I had a great conversation with a friend at work today.  In giving him some examples of how circumstances and decisions changed the lives of different well-known individuals, he made the comment, “And our own series of decisions brought us here!  If not for each of them, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here!”  He went on: “Do you remember Richard who used to work here?  I’ve known him since I was five years old!”  While that doesn’t sound all that amazing, consider that we are in the state of Illinois.  When he was five, my friend lived in a different part of the world altogether.

For another reason, his example made my hair stand on end.  “That’s an interesting example!” I told him.  “Did you know, that when our company made it’s first recruiting trip to his and your alma mater, they planned on sending a recruiter of Filipino descent and an African-American, neither of whom spoke Spanish?”  He couldn’t believe it.  We laughed.  “So, they invited my brother to go along, knowing his family was from the same place and that he spoke the language.”  My friend stopped laughing.  “Do you know what’s even better?  My brother helped recruit Richard as an intern!”  Shocked look on his face.  He had no idea.  Then I told him a quick story about my mother.

Decades ago, my mother went to someone for advice because she felt feelings for a man.  Her feelings for the man did not coincide with what she had been planning for her life.  Her confidant said to her, “You have to see him one more time to decide if you are in love with him.”  So she did.  And she was.  That man was my father.

The decision that person made to advise my mother to look into her heart and face her feelings ultimately led to my friend working at the same company I do.  On my team.  We have worked together for almost two years now, and never once did the degree to which our lives are intertwined reveal itself to either of us.  Until today, the day after I finished “Outliers.”  How incredible is that?

There are several lessons here.  

First, it reaffirms what I already know: do not be afraid to live life on your terms.  I am committed to being who I am, wherever I may be, in every moment.  Without that, I would never have had so personal a conversation with someone at work and missed out on an opportunity to experience one of those wondrous and mysterious moments in life.

Second, search for the chains of events in your life, the sets of circumstances and decisions, that were key in carrying you to this moment.  Allow yourself to feel gratitude for them.  Each, for better or worse, has made you who you are.  

Third, recognize that there is a whole chain of decisions yet to be made and that each will reverberate across the planet.  The ripples will touch every other human soul.

Fourth, my mother found the courage to explore her heart.  Look where it led.  Don’t be afraid to find your heart, set it free, and follow it.

The final thoughts from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” have left a lasting impression on me.  Why?  Because, as I mentioned previously, the book is about opportunity and how a myriad of variables all slide into place to produce what Mr. Gladwell calls “outliers.”  The book is essential an exploration of the human condition that finds its genesis in statistical analysis.  It’s about the human data points that exist outside the standard deviation for what we perceive as “success.”

In essence, a standard deviation is a way of measuring how far a data point falls outside what one would expect to be the norm.  So, for example, if a data point is within one standard deviation of the norm, then it’s not as statistically significant as a data point that is, say, two standard deviations.  Outliers are the people who exist as data point way outside the norm.  We’re talking about the Bill Gates’, Robert Oppenheimer’s, and…well…Malcolm Gladwell’s of the world.  It’s not as mathematical as I may be leading you to believe.  It is a gift of a book that is as compelling as it is because Mr. Gladwell has a way with words and weaving those words into stories that prove the point.  I could not recommend it more highly.

But I digress.  What has my mind spinning is this idea that I am where I am today precisely because of all the little variables and all the big variables that improbably slid into place to set me down this path I am on.  My hard work plays a part.  My laziness plays a part.  Luck plays a part.  Chance plays a part.  My genes play a part.  My family history plays a part.  Culture plays a part.  No duh, right?  Right.  I know; it’s common sense.  However, sometimes common sense is all too uncommon and, when analyzed, doesn’t make as much intuitive sense as we would like.

And it’s not only about me.  There are the bigger pieces that slide into place.  I am a product of the history of the United States of America.  The day of the month on which I was born plays a part.  The month in which I was born plays a part.  The year I was born plays a part.  The places I lived play a part.  The history of Los Estados Unidos de Mexico plays a part.  The colonia I lived in during the years I lived there play a part.  The Colegio Americano, it’s history, and the administration in place when I was there play a part.  Every cuate, compadre, amigo, amiga, novio, novia, and companero(a) de clase I ever came into contact with play a part.  

My life is as much about my efforts as it is the efforts of the billions of people with whom I share the Earth.

As HH Dalai Lama reminds us every chance he gets, we are all interconnected.  Our currency is love and compassion.  Everything that happens to me, affects all of you.  Everything that affects to all of you, affects me.  Degrees may vary, sure, but we are attuned to every vibration in this Universe.  

I feel overwhelming gratitude right now for the totality of humanity.  It is an odd thing to feel, and it is an even odder thing to try and express.  It’s an odd thing to go out on a skinny limb and profess, too.

I feel an obligation to myself and my own evolution as a human being to begin to understand all the personal variables that played a part in getting me to this point.  I feel the drive to find these, acknowledge them, and experience true, focused gratitude for them.  What a fantastic voyage to undertake.

At the end of “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell brings together all the disparate pieces that compose his central thesis, and he does it with the most personal story I can think of: the story of his mother’s life and how she came to marry his father.  It’s a beautiful story, and he tells it so swiftly only to deconstruct the romanticized version and reveal the layered chances and opportunities that brought his mother and father together at that poetry reading in London.  She was a woman from the back hills of Jamaica.  He was an Englishman, born and raised.  Somehow, they wound up together in that room one night.  It’s a great story.

But it’s not a story of chance.  Instead, Malcolm uses that story to reinforce every point he has made throughout his book.  He uses it to teach that one final lesson: opportunities are made and opportunities are exploited.  Whether you believe that people create their opportunities or you believe that a diety presents them to us, the bottom line is that it is up to each of us to exploit the moment at hand.  It is up to us to determine how we will use that moment to our advantage.  I am quite sure of that, if nothing else.

As I sit here and write, my beautiful children are quietly sleeping two floors above me.  My house is silent; my wife is out and about, and I am sitting here writing.  My heart is heavy with a grief that is hard to explain and hard to understand.  My kids are safe.  They live in a place that is relatively free from the nightmares that are befalling other children on this Earth at this very moment.  My children have opportunities that other children cannot even comprehend.  My wife and I sacrifice and sweat so that they can attend a school that we believe will make a difference in their lives.  As a father, I sit here, and I give thanks a million times over that I can provide for them in a way that leaves them able to pursue a relatively carefree life for the moment.  My good fortune, their good fortune, and the good fortune of my family in our little corner of the planet is something that I do not take for granted.

I grew up in a foreign country where such opportunities were not so abundant.  I grew up in a country with poverty that would make some of the poor of this country, the United States, grateful for what they do have.  I can remember seeing so many things in the years that I spent in Mexico that made me profoundly sad, even then.  But I can remember seeing even more things that showed me how easy it is to find joy in life.  This latter point is what I carry with me today.  

I remember stopping at a church once in a small town in a rural part of Mexico.  I cannot for the life of me tell you where it was.  I just remember men selling iguanas by the side of the rode.  The town was a dustbowl, as so many towns are in the dry summer months.  There was an immense tree in the town that was surrounded by the walls of the main church.  It was probably the only church for miles.  It was more cathedral than church.  We’d stopped there before, so my attention was less on the church and more on the grounds around the church.  In the shade of the tree, there was a group of children playing.  They were smaller than me; I suspect I was entering adolescence at the time.  The children were screaming and laughing as they ran around and around the small garden at the base of the tree.  They weren’t so much younger than me that I didn’t yearn to run from my parents and join them in their revelry.  In fact, I felt just that urge.  I wanted to run to them and kick that little blue ball.

I can’t recall now if I actually thought this at the time or if it’s reconstructed memory.  That’s irrelevant, I suppose.  The point is that I cannot count the number of times similar scenes played out in front of me.  Some I failed to notice, while others I did notice.  My realization was the same each time: despite the lack of shoes, despite the dusty and grimy faces, despite the filthy clothes, these children were having fun.  They were having the kind of fun that made me jealous in the moment.  I have never forgotten those screaming, laughing children.

I don’t sit here in judgment of those who do not have the good fortune to live a life like mine and with the opportunities I have.  I recall making that point with my parents on another trip: you can’t assume that people who have “less” than you are less able to experience joy.  In fact, if we look at the great spiritual leaders again, a life of poverty makes way for a like of richness in enlightenment.  Joy comes from the spirit, never from the trappings of the physical world.  

What does bring me sadness is the fact that there are children in this world, in this country, that should have the opportunities afforded to children like mine but do not really have access to the resources that will create those opportunities or that will enable them to exploit those opportunities.  That is a crime.  That is unforgivable.  That brings me shame.

When will I do something?

Marketing is not my profession, but I engage in marketing all the time. As a formal leader of people in a corporate environment, my job is to sell things to be people. I sell direction. I sell corporate visions and missions. I sell buy-in to the work that must be done, not just the side projects people want to do. I sell them on careers. I sell them the notion that they can be much more than anyone has ever told them they can be. In the end, I sell ideas.

I have been listening to A LOT of marketing the past week or so.  I am listening to marketing from behind the scenes; I am listening to marketers talk about marketing.  It’s fascinating.  In the process, I have learned that what they do and what I do in many ways is not that drastically different.  It goes back to selling ideas.

Ideas are powerful.  I can’t recall when it started, but one of my father’s favorite lines is “reality is perception.”  I couldn’t agree more.  And it’s this perceived reality that is at the core of both marketing and leading other people.  They create a perception that what they want to sell, you need, and leaders create the perception that where they want to take you, you really need to go.

I am enthralled…that’s all I can say. 

Water from the sky
Is it snowing in April? 
Motherf*****g Illinois weather.

OK, so I got the count wrong there at the end.  Sue me.

I can’t believe this shit.  Then again, it’s a blessing to have such trivial concerns, isn’t it?

I’ll count my blessings as I shiver in my bed.

 There are many hours in the day.  Yet each day feels so short.  As many hours as there are, there seldom appears to be enough.

It’s next to impossible for me to keep up with my real life and my online life.  As much as I’d love to put more time into some of the cool things that exist in the ether, I simply can’t.  It’s a matter of figuring out where I need to focus my time.  I choose to focus my time on my real life.  My kids, if nothing else, sort of demand that.  No, they deserve that.

I will say this.  While I might not always have the time to read everything I want to read or respond to it all, I am out there looking as often as I can be.  The beauty of modern technology and socializing on the internet is that communication can be asynchronous.  This works out just dandy if the recipient is down with the delayed, asynchronous style.  At work, people expect you to answer E-mail quicker than voicemail.  And, honestly, it often works that way.  Clickety-clackety at the keyboard is quicker, cleaner, and less personal, but it also avoids the stuff that crops up when people actually talk to each other.  Networking on the internet is different; the expectation isn’t for immediate response.  That works in my favor.

So, if I seem to be a bit…disconnected…it’s simply because I haven’t perfected the art of balancing the ether with the material world.  There’s just way too much to do in both, and far too few hours in which to accomplish it all.  The “real world” requires synchronized, real-time communication.  The world of the ether accepts asynchronous, delayed communication.  Between the two, I keep myself busy.  Thank goodness I don’t have a hobby!

I’ve had the opportunity to reflect a great deal about what it means to be a part of something, what it means to belong.  I’ve come to the conclusion that, as is the case with so many other things, the answer is always in motion.

Consider this.  Not only do we change our allegiances many times throughout the course of our lives, many of us do so in short-term bursts.  We participate in temporary endeavors with others at work, for example, that require our loyalty and engagement over a short period of time.  In contrast, we participate in social organizations such as church for decades.  We can measures attachment to these groups in hours, days, months, even years.

I suppose it comes down to how much priority we place on bond and how intimate the commitment to that bond.  That is what determines what we do with our memberships. Each serves a purpose.  Each helps us define who we are relative to others and relative to our own changing self concept.  They help us answer the question:

Where do I belong?

This has been a long week at work. My patience has been tried quite a bit.

Today, I glanced over at that stack of Eckhart Tolle cards that I got earlier this year. It had a long quote, but the message was one I got loud and clear: when you allow yourself to be still, you can feel the life inside your body.

I know. It sounds so…out there, so Earthy. Yeah, well, I can be a little Earthy some times. Apparently, not enough, though, because just the words were enough to instantly connect me to the Life Force inside of me. I allowed myself to feel it, to get drawn into it. It took me over. I felt the energy buzzing through my body almost instantly. I had not allowed myself to feel that connection…in a long time. Probably since last summer in Alaska. The presence of Life is so overwhelming there that it was simple to connect to it, both outside of me and inside of me.

Here…not so easy.  It takes a little more effort, a little more time to make that connection.  I guess I let that get away from me.  If you want to get a sense of what I am talking about, try it for yourself.  Start by closing your eyes.  Sit comfortably.  Let your body relax.  Let your hands fall into your lap.  Begin to focus on the feeling in your hands.  Not the feeling OF your hands, but the feeling IN your hands.  It’s like a subtle tingle, a constant feeling that grows the more you concentrate on it.  You should be able to feel it spread from individual fingers to your entire hand, like submerging your hands in warm water.

That’s is the feeling of life in your hands.  You can start there.

Feel the life in your body.

Someone asked a question about leading people through change, and I went off. In a good way, of course.

Here’s the bottom line: we can’t do things in a vacuum and expect those we lead to simply follow. The world is transforming, and we are leaving that mentality behind. It isn’t the way to generate true passion and realize the potential of those we lead. It just isn’t.

We have to engage people and ask them to take accountability for the end result. More importantly, we have to entrust them with that end result. At some point, every parent has no choice but to watch their child drive off into the sunset. You either help them prepare for that or you fight them every step of the way. You either give them opportunities to learn how to screw up and recover when they are small and the consequences are minimal or you continue paying their bills, giving them “loans,” and digging them out of holes well into their adulthood. Without that line of sight to consequences, the word “accountability” means nothing.

Incongruence bugs me, and incongruence of mythic proportions bugs the crap out of me. Teach the people to fish, for Pete’s sake.

When I was young, probably about 6 years old or so, we lived in a heavily forested area. We lived towards the bottom of a rather large, tree-covered hill. Our back yard was sizable, and it sloped steeply downward. At the bottom of the slope, where the ground started to level, there was a wall of trees. These trees were old. They were very old. Like I said, we lived in what I imagine was a very old forest.

There was a path at the bottom of the hill that was little more than a crack in the wall. The path lead through the trees for several yards before leading to the banks of a large lake. At the end of the path, where forest and lake met, there was a white wooden dock.

I learned to fish off that dock. I learned to stick a worm on a hook on that dock. I learned to swim off that dock. I learned about fresh water ecosystems on that dock. I saw my very first crayfish on that dock. I saw my very first catfish on that dock. I saw my first otter on that dock. I played with frogs on that dock. I dropped nightcrawlers off that dock. I studied the forest from that dock. I ran my hands on the cool bark of a weeping willow beside that dock. I watched my brother kiss a girl from that dock. I watched my mother playing with my little brother in the water from that dock. I watched my father jump off that dock, into the lake, and swim out to his boat. My grandfather told me to “watch out for the cat crap” steps away from that dock.

When I was six years old, there were few things more awe-inspiring to me than that dock. The possibilities it presented were endless. When we moved away…far, far away to another country…the path and that dock occupied my thoughts for many years. Eventually, the dock became a distant childhood memory. However, I never forgot the lessons I learned on that dock. Even when I think about it today, that place holds special meaning for me.

A few years ago, I went back to that lake with my wife. 25 years had passed. The path was gone. All the trees had been removed. The yard runs down to the lake’s edge now. The dock, though, is still there. Just as I remember it. That willow is there, too. I took my wife and my then-infant son to the dock. I stood there with them for a few minutes. I shared a few memories. We talked. But I took a few seconds for myself, to BE there on that dock again. I looked out over the lake, and a breeze moved little waves across its face. My father’s boat is gone, of course, but the memory of riding around on the lake remains. In my mind’s eye, I imagined the boat gliding over the water and slipping beside the dock. I looked into the clear water and saw a group of perch just below the surface, looking up eagerly. I smiled. They couldn’t be the same ones that ate the nightcrawlers I dropped in…could they? Of course not. But I imagined another little boy, maybe around six years old, coming to this dock with a can of worms. I imagined him dropping nightcrawlers, one by one, into the water and watching the fish dart up to eat them. Maybe he wears glasses.

I left and joined my wife and son in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill. We drove away.

Our minds are filled with memories. Some, we revisit often. Others, we hardly recall. Regardless, they are all there. They mean different things to us at different moments. While I am not six years old any longer, there is a corner of my mind that is occupied by a six-year-old boy with glasses two sizes too big. He is a part of who I am today. He makes sure that there is always an awe-inspiring dock in my life. It’s just a matter of listening to him when he points them out. Listening and letting him take the reigns from time to time.

The dock will always be there, no matter where I go.