The Heart Persists

The past week, life may have knocked me around a bit, like it did to my tire (above), which is my only explanation for being unable to write as much or as often as I aspire to lately.

Although blogs are nothing new, and I've posted thousands of articles to various blog sites over the years, this is the only one that lasts, because this is mine.

Each big change that sweeps into your life, especially of the losing kind (losing a job, a special friend, a house) creates a grieving period but also opens up new possibilities for your future.

This is obvious, of course, and I am not a self-help guru, so I won't condescend to anyone by offering cliches about how to deal with such situations.

But I will note that, in my case, when someone takes something away from me (typically a job), afterward I'm sad and perhaps mad for a bit, then I inevitably feel that a great burden has lifted.

After all, it really wasn't so great, once you come to reflect upon it. Somebody paid you to do something, they told you what to do and how to do it, they indicated displeasure but rarely pleasure -- you know the routine.

In American business culture, kindness is a lost art. The idea is to be direct. That's fine, I'm not particularly indirect myself.

But opportunities to provide what in HR parlance are "strokes" have been largely eschewed in recent times. The assumption is you should feel lucky to even have a job -- and there is a great deal of truth to that.

We all should feel lucky to even have a job.

Plus the world is changing, especially for middle-class Americans, as I've previously noted. Our position of relative privilege in the world is flattening out as we increasingly integrate our economy with the emerging global system.

There are some who would use our power, including our military power, to resist this adjustment in relative privilege. They believe we have a God-given right to being "number one" and other people should not be allowed to catch up unless they do so at no cost to us.

It doesn't work that way, sadly. The world as we know it is a finite place. There are only so many resources. They have to go around, according to some sort of system of equity, or monstrous disparities will persist between the rich and the poor.

There are those among us who defend such disparities, of course, and would fight to the death presumably (or more likely send others to fight to their death) in order to defend them.

Not me. I recognize my relative wealth in a world of poverty, illness, and shortened expectations. It doesn't make me feel better, although I am grateful that my parents immigrated to America, and that I am an American.

But the political discourse is so poisoned in this country I cannot bring myself to participate in it at this point. I wrote a lot leading up to the last Presidential election, but I may have very little to say this year, unless a measure of civility and sanity returns to the debate.

In my view, those who hold political power at this point should exercise it fully with little regard to the political consequences. Though that's easy for me to say; I'm not in the business of politics.

Yet I have a feeling some very good people have been making some very tough political calls lately; taking positions that may indeed shorten their careers to do what they think is best for the nation.

I'm not in a position to evaluate complex policy matters and not inclined to do so. But I do hope things get better for the millions of us who have been and are still being abused by the health insurance companies. We deserve better.

Beyond that, in my own universe, I'm hard at work on some new projects, things I'll perhaps discuss here in the days and weeks ahead. My writing may rarely touch on national policy or the business world these days, but it will touch on the human heart.

That is the topic I care far more about in the end. Others can debate their own hearts out. My own aches at times and at others it soars. This journal charts those vibrations, even as the larger world does what it wishes to the likes of you and me.

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