THE
FIRST PARAGRAPH IN MY WELCOME MSG IS ALWAYS THE SAME. WHICH IS…
Hello fellow citizens of Planet Earth, listen up!
I’m going to try and put a positive spin to what’s happening around us and to
us, every day, and one day at a time. So look to this link either at the
beginning of your day to wake up refreshed to be ready for the day ahead, or at
the end of your day to be ready for a good night’s sleep. Ahhh...sounds good,
hopefully. Here goes...
As we head into the most painful period of the
crisis of our time I wish to start our day today with a prayer and a message
for country and world - from one of the greatest poets that lived. He is our
Guest of Honor today. And this is our
Song of the Day.
Where The Mind Is
Without Fear
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
-- Rabindranath Tagore
Some of you may recognize this poem - it’s about
freedom and the desperate search for freedom (from pre-independence India). The
Recognition of how this is so relevant for us now was my epiphany for the day. The
Recognition that we’re still on the search for Freedom, that ever elusive thing
we all yearn for. Now we yearn for a different Freedom, Recognizing that this
Freedom from illness would put us on a path to a different world. Thus have we
already talked about one of the flavors of recognition being our R in paRtee. My Father, let my country awake!
The other recognition (yes I know you’re waiting
for this one :-) - we all don’t want to be just accepted but recognized for “stuff”
that we’ve done, right? Given credit for something you did, your kids giving
you the spotlight for stuffing their stockings real well (or really
appreciating and recognizing you for teaching them how to blow their nose - don’t
know why I thought of that), and last but never least your colleague at work
(corporate America coming at you now...) taking all the credit for work that
you did for him and you’re so pissed off it gets you started on corporate
politicking - an exciting prospect that may change your life towards being more
a politician than, say, a journalist perhaps? I’m sure you wouldn’t want to
fall into that trap would you?
Recognition is our Big Sister (or Big Brother,
depending on how you want to think about it) to acceptance. In one sense we live
life’s journey through a series of recognitions. Let’s think about this. When
you’re a kid you’re in attention-seeking recognition mode. I know one of my
friends’ kids when she was five years old who would go flat down on the floor,
hands and legs wobbling in the air, and screaming for what she wanted. And she wouldn’t
stop till she got it. Make it happen Matilda! How would this work if we did
this, I mean, literally did this in corporate America? Jimmy Fallon, where art
thou?
And then comes the throes of teenage, gripping
you around the neck and wringing it till every vein stood out, fifty shades of
purple. Like how John Nash explains the beauty of game theory being a game
where every boy or girl wants to get recognized and ward off competition at the
same time. Human dynamics is a lot more than the child’s play of game theory,
John - RIP. There are so many stories on the struggles for recognition I can ramble
on about, you would kick me out the 111th floor of the Sears tower. The
one that definitely pops into mind is The Breakfast Club with everyone
discovering themselves and...you guessed it, recognizing each other for who
they are. This is so important we need a time capsule of this for teenagers to discover
five hundred years in the future.
The last bit is of course romance, career and that
age old thing called aging (or the lack of each of these). Every little bit of
these is about receiving and giving recognition, ain’t it so Charlie? The easy
one is career - remember the one where a guy does all the project work, gets a
bad performance rating and his manager gets promoted? (the side you were on would
determine how good your memory is). Romance - where man meets woman, woman
falls in love, man doesn’t, woman goes nuts, man crushes her hopes but
preserves his nuts, and the whole thing ends up in unrecognizable shambles. Well,
maybe that one’s more of an acceptance - I’ll give you that. But hey, it all
ends in our R word.
A parting story for you. An old lady once took us
on a guided tour of an iconic American building and she kept talking about a
man she knew well while we walked the tall corridors. She talked about the
history of the building and how great men and women had walked the floors. But every
few minutes she would ramble about this man she once knew, and how he always
focused on credit. I continued to think he must have been a finance whiz. As
the tour was close to ending I couldn’t control myself and went “Ms. Hazel, who
is this man and how did he deal with all his credit?” And Hazel looked at me, my
reflection in her pupil gaping in amazement as she lowered her voice, leaned
over close to me and went in her eighty year old whisper, “no sir, that was
Robert Woodruff. You know he ran Coca-Cola for a long time, and he always said
never to look for credit”. And she smiled a divine smile and told me about the
most romantic thing - the quote Woodruff had on his desk his entire life. “There
is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets
the credit.” Life’s journey in twenty three words. Thank you Mr. Woodruff. You
all remain a Bright Corona; there’s lots more to be recognized for, there’s
lots more to recognize, and there’s lots more to cherish!
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