The Lion King in All of Us

I saw the Lion King on Broadway last night. It was, of course, amazing. I first saw it with my wife and children right after it premiered in 1997. Last night, we took our granddaughter. And I thought it was even better as a show, which is testimony to a rare grip on the processes needed for extraordinary results over time.

In addition to the costumes, sets, lighting, music, and great acting and dance, the storyline was gripping in its simplicity. A young lion experiences tragedy, goes away, finds new friends, grows, learns, and then confronts a challenge of self knowledge. Who is he, really? What does he want? He discovers that he needs to return to his homeland and face a big challenge to reclaim his proper place in the world. This of course is the arc of the hero's journey. Leaving, learning, and leveraging that new knowledge for heroic results.

We should ask ourselves: Where am I in that adventure? Where am I in that arc? What new knowledge do I need, what new growth, what new challenge? How can a sense of self and even destiny play its proper role in my next steps? 

Each of us has our own way to roar.

The Power of What You Wear

When I was a graduate student at Yale and got my first part time job teaching at the nearby University of New Haven, I was really nervous about commanding a classroom by myself. I had no track record as a teacher. I had no evidence I could be great at this. It's one thing to be a top learner, and another to pass it on, although as I was later to learn, the two are deeply connected. We never really master something at the deepest level until we've taught it to others. But that's another blog.

At the time I was an avid runner. I did about six miles a day through the woods of Connecticut. And it made me feel great. After hours of intellectual work in the morning, I'd lace up my New Balance running shoes and go out on the road where I'd often experience the first exhilaration of the day. After ten or fifteen minutes, I'd be inwardly flying, in total flow, and expanding my consciousness. It was great. My enjoyment of those runs was such that even lacing up my shoes beforehand gave me a confident tingle of anticipation forthe great stuff that was soon to come.

I don't know how I decided to do it, but it occurred to me one day that I had this great pair of light tan tall leather hiking boots. I decided I'd wear them to teach, and that each day, as I laced them up and tied them on, I'd visualize a great class, smiling students, laughs, intellectual revelations, and a great experience had by all. It got to the point where just putting on those boots gave me a sense of power and confidence. They became my superhero boots.

Years later, I was a professor at Notre Dame. Like most of my colleagues, I taught in wrinkled khakis and tennis shirts, wearing whatever shoes the weather demanded. But one semester while I was on leave of absence, which was a coveted opportunity to focus on creative work, I was supposed to write a couple of books. And it wasn't happening. I'd sit down and draw a blank. And this went on day after day. My mother had modeled some in her youth, and often bought me suits I'd never wear, except when it was really necessary. One day, it came to me out of the blue that maybe if I dressed up in a suit and tie before showing up to write, I'd be taking myself more seriously as a writer. So I did. And the wildest thing happeed. Ideas poured forth. The muse liked what I had on. So I continued the practice.

Then when I returned to the classroom, I decided that I'd show my students special respect by dressing up for them. Their presence became the special occasion. And they loved it. At the time, it was very different for a professor my age to show up in a suite and tie, or s sport coat and bright bow tie. I then brought into the classroom the new power I had discovered in the study while writing. When I dressed like it was an important occasion, it became one. And I found new power for the challenge.

Does this always work? Some new psychological studies seem to indicate there may be more to it than we might suppose. There's been a recent claim that wearing a suit may even help you think in a more formal and abstract way, transcending the details of what you confront and reaching out creatively to new insights.

Of course, I'm telling you this as I sit at my desk in a crazy tie-dyed T shirt and khaki shorts. So, don't get carried away. But still, consider that how you dress may send signals, not only to others, but also to your own subconscious. And perhaps you can set up the signals as I've done a few times in my life. Then, when you're entering an uncertain or challenging situation, those shoes, or that suit, or that lucky tie may just give you a boost.

So, maybe I need to go change.

The Magic of Self-Renewal

One of the most important qualities we hardly ever think and talk about is the ability of self-renewal. We talk a lot about resilience and its important for a life of achievement and positive impact. And resilience, of course, is the capacity to bounce back after a hardship or disappointment and keep going. It's like practical equanimity, or the equivalent of emotional shock absorbers. What I have in mind with the quality of self-renewal is a bit different.

Whenever you're in a long-term quest or a demanding job, and you've worked hard, day after day for weeks, months, or perhaps even years, and nothing spectacular has yet happened to reward your efforts, you can begin to lose heart, or at least to lose whatever initial enthusiasm or energy you may have had for the project. Of course, if you're experiencing a lot of praise or admiration or encouragement from others, that can serve to keep you going through those long dry stretches of labor. But suppose that's rare or non-existent as well. What's going to keep you afloat? What's going to keep the wind in your sails, or the spring in your step? It's the quality and activity of self-renewal that does this. And it may be one of the rarest traits of all. But it's possessed by people who accomplish great and difficult things, despite any disadvantages they have, or obstacles they continually face.

Psychologists have recently written about the importance of a quality they call grit - the sheer ability to keep on going. But self-renewal is perhaps deeper and higher. It's the ability to keep going with a heart inspired and eager for the work, whether that work is household cleaning, bricklaying, business building, seeing patients all day long, or writing a book.

If grit keeps you going, and resilience picks you up, self- renewal helps you stay energized. And it's ironically easiest when you're working for something greater than the self. It comes from reminding yourself of your vision and values, and remembering how much you care. For many, it's an offshoot of practicing the presence of God. It's a way of recharging your heart and reconnecting with your inspiration.

How good are you at self-renewal? How good are the people on your team, or the members of your family? It's something worth thinking about, and cultivating.

The ancient Greeks advised, "Know Yourself!" I'd like to add, "Renew Yourself!"

Dan Lyons, "Disrupted," and Startup Culture

I just read Dan Lyons' new book Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Startup Bubble. The first half of the book had me laughing out loud, again and again. The second half had me worrying about current dangers to rational business culture, and our overall economy.

Dan was a senior tech editor and writer at Newsweek, following a stint at Forbes. He had interviewed and met many of the main players in the tech world over the years, and pretty much thought he had a good feel for what was going on in the realm of tech startups. Young people were creating companies with sometimes crazy ideas, making serious money in the early funding stages, and finally real fortunes in taking those companies public, whether they ever made a profit or not. When Dan's job was terminated at Newsweek, he decided to enter into this world where big money could be made. He was hired by a Boston company called HubSpot. And the book is about his surprising time there.

When I first read the great novel Don Quixote, I remember thinking that some people would see the title character as the paradigm of a creative visionary, seeing things that others could never even dream or imagine. They would become Sancho Panzas of the Don, excited loyal followers hoping to get their own little island of fantasy rewards from faithfully following along on the journey. Others, of course, would view Senior Quixote right away as an unhinged madman, a delusional character who will easily ruin the life of anyone crazy or gullible enough to follow him.

Lyons' new book raises some interesting questions about the errant knight-founders of the current technology world. Who is a true visionary and who's just a madman? And, oh yeah, who might be simply an ordinary charlatan, but now with extraordinary tools of deceit? No one is riding an old horse or a small donkey, and "tilting at windmills." They're all riding the wave of the future, and many are getting crazy rich off the gullibility, hopes, and ambitions of others.

What struck me about Lyons' experiences is that he was exposed to grandiosity, silliness, incompetence, petty nastiness, cluelessness, craziness, well disguised cynicism, and even perhaps a real depth of psychopathic and sociopathic evil in the workplace. And it all, rolled together, makes some people rich.

We live in an unusual time, where magical thinking, new age superstition, hyperbole, and good old fashioned cheer-leading mixed in with a cultural expectation on the part of many younger people that everything should be entertaining and fun, all conspire together to allow our current Don Quixotes to become Pied Pipers on a massive scale. And of course, we see the Dons in contemporary politics as well as business, on every level.

The current snake oil salesmen don't work out of the backs of wagons or old trucks preaching the virtues of their elixirs to rubes on the street. They start companies, find VC funding, and create fun places to work where all their carefully selected Sancho Panzas can toil in hopes of "changing the world," or enriching themselves along the way.

I've been writing about the opposite way of running a business since the mid-nineties, in books such as True Success,  If Aristotle Ran General Motors and If Harry Potter Ran General Electric. And I happen to like fun, even silly fun every now and then. But I like even more business cultures that are built on the ancient transcendent ideals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity - not as slogans, but as realities of day to day work. I believe in the Aristotelian virtues, the deepest elements of the Tao, and the Christian core concept, nearly lost today, of the power in humility.

I believe in real wisdom. And I see the slick criminals and grandiose madmen of our time as using faux wisdom, the counterfeits of real insights, and a deceptive rhetoric wrapped around genuine human needs to forward their own agendas and line their own pockets. As a philosopher who has been fighting for the right approaches for decades now, I urge younger thinkers to join me in providing the true knowledge and authentic insight that's needed by modern business, as we swim a sea now of not only sharks, but poisonous conceptual pollution as well.

Dan Lyons' book is an entertaining and eye-opening wake up call to anyone who cares about the deeply positive role that good business can play in the modern world. When you run into a modern Don Quixote recruiting your work, or soliciting your investment, or appealing for your business with sky-high rhetoric, you would be best off running in the opposite direction. Don't be misled.

Exuberant Spontaneity And Its Limits

There’s apparently a new book and documentary out on the lives of news reporter Anderson Cooper and his ninety-two year-old mother, the famous Gloria Vanderbilt. And in connection with all this, the New York Times just ran an article about the two of them in Sunday’s paper. 

At one point in the article, Anderson says about his mother:

“She has this enduring optimism and this sense that the next great love or the next great adventure is just around the corner, and she’s about to embark on it.”

What a wonderful thing, I thought to myself.

The writer of the piece later quotes Gloria making a relevant remark, and comments after it:

“The phone can ring, and your life can change in a blink,” she said, emphasizing that last word and concurring with her son’s assessment of her nature.

We rightly value spontaneity and optimism, and even an enduring exuberance about life. These can be wonderful things. But, as Aristotle once cautioned us, for every human strength that we can identify, for every virtue, there are two corresponding vices—the extreme of too little, and an equally problematic extreme of too much.

In response to need, for example, generosity can be a great virtue. In such a situation, the “too little” would be miserliness or a disinclination to open up and provide help to someone who genuinely needs it. The extreme of “too much” would be perhaps an over-the-top magnanimity that's simply out of control, a tendency to take care of others so lavishly as to endanger one’s own resources, or even health.

Likewise, in the face of danger, courage is a virtue. Cowardice is one opposite. But there is also a “too much” of crazy carelessness, or rash foolhardiness. The key to living well is to find the virtue and avoid the vices.

Optimism is good. And the sort of spontaneous exuberance displayed by Vanderbilt can be a wonderful thing. But there can also be, not just a “too little,” but also perhaps a “too much.”

Toward the end of the Times piece, we’re told this about the exuberant mother’s son:

Mr. Cooper’s own nature is signified by a profound wariness and a strong belief that disaster is always around the corner. He sees himself not just as a realist, but as a catastrophist. “I always wanted there to be a plan,” he said. “And with my mother, there wasn’t one.”

Apparently, Anderson's mother was always super excited that “the phone can ring and your life can change in a blink.” And he became equally worried and anxious about the same thing, but going the opposite way. Can an attitude of exuberance, an openness to spontaneity, and an enduring optimism be taken too far? Can they even come to damage people close to us?

I ask this as a person who admires exuberance, feels it often, and always tries to take the path of optimism myself. But does Aristotle have for us a cautionary note we should take in?

Perhaps spontaneity and exuberance, in order to be the good things they can be, must be understood and embodied in the right way, balanced between the potential excesses that they not only allow but, in one direction, even invite. Then, the free spirit doesn't so much endanger or worry those around her or him who may in response develop their own distinctive attitudes about the next time the phone might ring.

The Empty Tomb and Plato's Cave

Today I came across a vivid Easter Sunday representation of the Empty Tomb of Jesus, as described in the Gospels. In this depiction, as viewers, we’re inside the tomb and can see that it’s essentially underground and dark, and yet an attractive bright light draws our attention beyond the now open door. Right away some thoughts came to me.

The Christian diagnosis of the human condition turns on a Greek word, hamartia, that’s most often translated as “sin” but that in the original language meant “falling short” or “missing the mark,” as in the case of an arrow shot toward a bullseye failing to make it to the target, falling short, and thus missing the mark.

The Christian claim is that we all naturally fall short of our proper ideal. We fall short of what we’re shooting for as human beings who deep down want a good, meaningful, successful, fulfilling and loving life that makes its best potential impact on the world. We’re all somehow metaphorically buried in a tomb of mistakes and illusions, and the gospel claim is that there is one who has escaped that tomb, leaving it empty, and has invited us all out of it as well, while actually also empowering us to leave it and move into the light that awaits us.

Plato had this image of a cave. He suggested that we’re all like men chained in an underground cave, watching shadows dance across its wall and mistaking those shadows as realities. We fear them or we desire them. We want to chase them or run from them. They monopolize our attention and define our lives. But they aren’t the realities among which we’re meant to live.

The philosopher, Plato tells us, is the person who breaks his chains and leaves the cave, ascending into the light of the true sun outside, to see the realities within which we’re ideally meant to live. But then, this philosopher descends back into the cave to spread the word to the other captives that they, too, can escape these illusions and the darkness that envelopes their lives. The light awaits them all.

The tomb from which Jesus escaped can be viewed as symbolically representing that same cave, where we're cut off from the true light and life that we’re meant to have. The Easter message is that the one who left that tomb empty invites us all to leave the realm of illusion and get out where we can hit the intended mark, following him into the light.

The Philosophical Sensibility in Pursuit of Wisdom

Wonder. Curiosity. Openness. Adventurousness. Creative thinking. Questioning. Analysis. An insistence on precision. A desire to go deep. Empathy. A quest to link the theoretical and the practical. Suspicion of the superficial. Even-handedness. Caution. Boldness. Even courage. A patience for digging endlessly for the true gold that can only be found by persistent effort. A desire for guidance. A desire to be a guide. An optimism about intellectual effort. Hope.

Digging Deep into the Obvious

“Each second we live in a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again.” - Pablo Casals

I find this observation of the obvious to be both profound and inspiring. But I also know that there are a lot of pseudo-intellectuals in public life who would scornfully dismiss it, and label it tautological, or trivial, or trite—a platitude that tells us nothing we didn't already know, long ago, and that we don't need a musician to tell us. But then again, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg said once about how critics view a longer form of the written word, "A book is a mirror. If an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out." We see what we're capable of seeing, and typically no more.

Philosophy is most often about digging deep into the obvious and finding the treasures that hide there. This remark by Pablo Casals reminds me to make each moment count, to seize the day, to venture boldly forth within the possibilities that each new moment affords me, and not to let any of these precious opportunities go to waste. Life can be a thrilling ride. It's a swirl of unique chances to grow and do and make a difference. Casals is certainly one who, within his own lifetime, made the most of this insight. We would all do well to follow his lead.

When someone of intellect and sensitivity draws our attention to a familiar facet of the world, it's not usually because he or she thinks we've never noticed the most superficial aspect of that thing; it's normally due to the fact that if we view it properly, it can contain within itself a spark, a goad, and an inspiration for us to enjoy.

My Evening With Pat Conroy, Prince of Stories

Years ago, I had the amazing experience of greeting a large audience at historic Thalian Hall in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina and introducing the main speaker for An Evening with Pat Conroy, the first of many events held that year to celebrate 100 years of story telling in the libraries of our county. I had the even more unusual opportunity of spending time with the author, just the two of us, for about an hour backstage before the festivities began, where we could talk freely.

He just wanted to talk about me and my time at Notre Dame. And of course, I only wanted to talk about him and his writing. If my wife had been there, we'd probably have spent all our time talking about her. But that's just the kind of man he was—gracious, kind, humble, and friendly.

Born and raised and educated in the south, Pat Conroy was a man who paid attention growing up and stocked his mind and heart with the stories of this distinctive region that he shared with the world for many years. He wrote his first book while he was still in school, and then followed up with a string of best sellers that continued for quite a run. I've read a bunch.

The Water is Wide is an extraordinary account of a heroic year of teaching on a small island off the coast of South Carolina, and the basis for two great movies.

The Great Santini is about growing up in the home of a fighter pilot, and having to fight for a small measure of independence and dignity in the midst of violence, prejudice, outrageous demands, and some surprising sides of love.

The Lords of Discipline gives us the experience of a southern military school and encompasses hazing, torture, friendship, self-mastery, hope, betrayal, and honor.

The Prince of Tides reveals one family’s struggles with tragedy and madness, much of it in the midst of great beauty, along with one man’s attempt at making sense of it all.

Beach Music helps us feel the gravitational force of family and how hard it is to achieve escape velocity from place and blood, no matter what you do. 

My Losing Season is a book where basketball meets the rest of life.

And, yes, I've even looked through the work that many people with culinary talents I don’t have tell me is one of the more compelling cookbooks of our time and place here in the south.

Pat Conroy’s themes were as universal as his sense of place was particular: The experience ofadversity, the power of friendship, the complex cauldron of family in which we’re all formed, the lure of the low country with its rich display of the wonders of nature, here at the edge of America. You can experience shock and trauma on one page, and find yourself laughing out loud in the very next chapter. 

Some of the best reading times I’ve ever had have been in Pat Conroy’s books. Probably like many of you, I’ve read them even when I really should have been doing other things around the house. I’ve relished every one, and I’ve even taken notes. Pat was a good philosopher, an astute diagnostician of human nature.  But, most of all, he was a master of stories.

You’ve likely read his books, you’ve probably seen and enjoyed the movies based on those books, maybe you’ve even cooked his recipes. With his passing, we all have the opportunity now to reflect with gratitude on his life and body of work. He was a southern original, a prince of his craft and a man I wish I could have gotten to know better. He will be missed.

It's a Wonderful, Spooky Life

It’s a wonderful life, and good-spooky, sometimes.

If you’ve been reading my blog recently at TomVMorris.com, you know I’m super excited about the publication of the new books, The Oasis Within and The Golden Palace. Almost every day, I get some nice affirmation that I’ve spent the past five years well, in writing the big series on Egypt that these books together launch. If you're a regular reader, you’ll also know that all this came to me as an inner vision, a movie playing in my head—something that I had never experienced before. An older physician friend asked me the other day, “Did it ever feel scary?” 

I had to smile. I said, “No. It was sort of spooky in its radical difference from anything I'd ever experienced before, but it all came to me with a tonality of goodness and benevolence, and a sense of joy.” Sometimes I think that life has more strange and cool stuff waiting for us than we ever might imagine.

Today, a shiny new black sedan was waiting for me outside my hotel in Philadelphia. I had just spoken to a group of CEOs and CFOs in The Lincoln Financial Field, where the Eagles play football. The driver took my bags and I slid into the comfortable backseat. I asked him how his morning had been so far. And his accent was interesting, sounding a little like some friends who are from northern India. So I said, “Is your accent Indian?”

He said, “No. Egyptian.” I instantly had one of those little spooky moments where you sort of can’t believe what you just heard. 

I said, “I’ve spent the past five years of my life writing a series of novels about Egypt, set in 1934 and 1935.”

He said, “My father was born in 1932.” Ok then. I had hit the jackpot here. So I told him the whole story, the movie in my head, and the feeling that I shouldn’t do any research on Egypt but just write what came to me. But I explained that I had also Googled stuff after writing it, just to see if there was any connection between my mental movie and reality, and that I was amazed at how much stuff had checked out to be true, even though I knew that my stories were about a re-imagined Egypt. I then told him that my main character is a boy named Walid.

He said, “That’s my name.”

“What?” 

“My name is Walid.”

I said, “That’s amazing.” The man pulled out his wallet and handed me his beautiful business card. Walid Omar. I was curious. “Could you pronounce your name really clearly for me?”

“WaLEED,” he said.

“Wow. That’s great. That’s exactly the way the people in my mental movie say the name. And my wife has been dubious. She’s thought I’m surely mispronouncing it, because a lady I know from Morocco had said it differently, as ‘WA-Lid.”

“No. It’s WaLEED. It’s spelled W-a-l-i-d but pronounced WaLEED.”

“Thank you so much for confirming what I heard in my movie.”

“You’re welcome.”

We continued to talk. He’s from Alexandria. And one of the books to be published will feature some events in that ancient city. I almost never carry my own books with me, but on this trip, I had a copy of The Oasis Within inside my computer bag. I was planning to re-read it on the flight home. But at that moment, I was overcome with a very strong conviction that I was supposed to give it to my driver, Walid. So I did. A book about Walid for my new friend Walid.

It’s a wonderful, spooky world in which we live, and a wonderfully spooky life we can have when we open up and step out and talk to people about things that mean something to us—and then listen.

May your day and week and upcoming month be wonderfully spooky, as well.

The Joy of the Deeper Mind at Work

Joy awaits us all. When we work with the ordinary levels of our mind, everything's harder that it could be. When we clear away the clutter and get beyond the chatter of the normal conscious mind, joyous magic can happen.

I recently posted on social media that I had, a few days ago, finished the final major editing of the eight books that now exist in a series of novels that I've been working on for five years, since February 2011. It's the first experience of writing where I wasn't working hard in my conscious mind to think and compose. It was all a gift of the deeper mind, a layer of mentality or soul, if you will, that we all have, but that we don't often enough draw on, day to day.

These books and the stories they convey came to me, as I've said before, like a movie in my head, a translucent screening of an action and adventure story far beyond anything I could ever have created out of my ordinary operating resources. In fact, when I first started reading the manuscripts out loud to my wife, she interrupted to say, "Who are you and what have you done with my husband?" It was all that different from my nineteen previous books, all non-fiction.

One reviewer of the prologue to the series, The Oasis Within, suggested that a series of conversations between people crossing the desert wasn't that big a stretch for me, and not that far out of my comfort zone as a philosopher who is always talking about life wisdom. And he was right. But there are all these little details and plot points in Oasis that I never would have thought to develop. And there's a reason that The Oasis Within is a prologue to the new series and not a numbered volume of it. It's mostly great conversations. It prepares one of the characters for the action that's to come. And it prepared me for it, as well. But a younger reader, or a reader who just loves action can start with Book One of the series, Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, the book that's now recently out by the title The Golden Palace, which is full of action, adventure, mystery, and intrigue and brings us philosophy in an entirely new key. And all the other books are like that one in this regard, too. It's like slowly walking up to a door, and opening it, and what's inside takes you completely by surprise and launches you into an adventure that just won't stop.

Early in the process, when I learned to calm my conscious mind and just relax and release, the magic would happen. With the deeper mind at work, you feel more like a receptacle, or a conduit. I've mentioned here before, I think, Elizabeth Gilbert's new book Big Magic, where she tells several stories about this remarkable kind of creative experience. It's joyous and practically effortless in its level of self-perceived exertion. How often can we say of our job, paradoxically, that "It's the hardest I've ever worked" and "It's the easiest thing I've ever done" and "It's been pure joy" all at the same time?

This is a hallmark of the deeper mind at work. There is amazing persistence of accomplishment and a sense of ease, and an overflowing of joy to match. The joy is wondrous, deep and high, wide and focused, inner and outer somehow at the same time. It animates everything else you do. It's remarkable, and it's maybe meant to be our most natural state—when we've peeled away all else, all the accretions of consciousness and contrary emotion, when we get down, deep to our most fundamental resource, one that's both natural and transformative at the same time.

I heartily recommend working from your deeper mind and experiencing the joy that's there awaiting you. I'm hoping that another book will also come to me the same way. After a million and two thousand and five hundred and more words, I feel like I'm just getting started. And isn't that the way our work should feel?

A Reflection on Valentine's Day

WARNING: You should read this only if you're absolutely sure you have nothing better to do. This is my belated Valentine's Day philosophical gift to you. The warning.

It’s nice to have survived another Valentine’s Day. And I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my history with this holiday.

Let me first ask something. Ladies, have you ever been given a Valentine’s gift that was poorly thought out, inappropriate, or in any way disappointing?

Guys: Have you ever given such a gift?

I’ve had my share of Valentine disasters. And we philosophers like to find wisdom in catastrophe. I woke up recently reflecting on it all. I’ve had plenty of time to think during my lengthy house arrest since the day in question. You’d think I’d know better after 42 Valentine’s Days with the same person.

There’s nothing scary about Halloween. It’s Valentine’s Day that’s scary. You see all the men in our local grocery store the day before in utter panic trying to pick out the right card or bunch of flowers. They’ve got their Game Faces on, but you can almost smell the fear.

My wife likes to tell her friends that she knows when it’s early February each year because right after the groundhog does his thing, I start walking around the house saying what a made up holiday Valentine’s Day is, and how it’s just a crass money grab. And how, you know, I like to show my love and affection every day, not just one day of the year. I’ve got all the standard guy stuff well rehearsed.

I mean, I got my daughter and granddaughter two-dozen roses this year and it was like, Ok there goes the college fund. They should draw Cupid’s arrow going right through your Master Card.

But when my wife and I were first dating I hatched a plan. I’d get her presents for Valentine’s Day whose price doesn’t double or triple for the occasion. But I’d have a really romantic heart-red theme—the color red—and that’s the primary Valentine color. So I’d always get her something red. I'd be golden.

Early in our marriage, she was driving a Volkswagen beetle, and I had seen a couple of those cars on the side of the road with engine fires, smoke coming out of the hoods. So I thought, wow, I can show love for my wife in a deep way with a very special red present. So I got her the extremely loving gift of a … red fire extinguisher. Well, that put out the fire in a way I had not actually anticipated.

So, Ok, it’s a gift you hope you never have to use, like a defibrillator. Maybe that was the problem. So the next year I got her something more hopefully useful, a red Swiss army knife. It was a nice knife. But I was the one who ended up sleeping in a tent and whittling. I’m just kidding. She was simply puzzled.

And I’m not the worst at this—not by a long shot. A banker in town told me that, I think it was for his first Valentine’s Day with his wife, he went to a top department store in town and got her, in his words, “The very best frying pan they had—top of the line” and when he presented it, she started crying. He said it took him a while to realize they weren’t tears of joy.

One of my other good friends just told me that he had realized he’d better explain his first Valentine’s Gift to his wife. So these were his words: “But we’ve really NEEDED a vacuum cleaner.” I’m not making this up.

In case you’re wondering what I got my wife this year, I once again thought I had something unique: Red Hummus and a red and white kitchen spatula. Yeah. I know. But now I get away with stuff like this, because she looks forward to being able to tell her friends, who are suitably horrified. In some strange, transformational alchemy, the worst my gifts are, the better the story is, and that ends up being the gift. But we do have to wash it down with some really good French champagne. I’ve at least learned SOMETHING.

I ended up this year actually looking good compared to one friend, a CPA at our church, God bless him, who’s maybe even more frugal than I am. You want him managing your money but probably not giving you a gift. He waits until there’s a sale at the Dollar Store.

At church Sunday, my wife asked him whether he had risen to the occasion for the special day. Did he get his wife something nice? His first words were “Well there’s this tray she has for serving me breakfast in bed.” And I knew this was going nowhere good. He said, “One of the legs on the tray had broken. So I got her a new tray.”

Many of us should feel lucky to still be walking and talking—and in a relationship that actually survives such choices. And I think there’s a philosophical lesson or two here for the taking, buried within my well-intended failures and the missteps of nearly my entire gender. But maybe I should leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

A Sunday Reflection on Religion and Faith

I've been away from blogging for a couple of months. I first took a break in honor of the holidays. And then I got busy editing my new series of novels for a quicker than normal schedule of publication. I hope you've already seen the prologue to the series, the book The Oasis Within. It's been out for a few months. And just this week, the first numbered volume in the series Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, The Golden Palace, appeared on Amazon. In two or three months, I hope to have volume two out as well, The Stone of Giza. 

I'm almost done in my editing of the eight books I've already written for the series. And today, Sunday, I want to share a passage I just edited. Even though the books are set mainly in Egypt, certain things happen in faraway places, like Tunisia, or Berlin, or New York City. This passage comes from a story line in numbered Book Seven, The Ancient Scroll. The setting is New York City in 1935 at a Methodist Church. The minister, Bob Archdale, is working on a sermon. We get a chance to see into his head and heart as he makes notes. I hope you enjoy this passage.

Bob at the moment was in his office preparing his sermon for the next morning. He was planning to talk on the nature of faith and how it’s more about perception and values and commitment than just belief. He had decided to use as his biblical text the famous meeting at night between Jesus and the Jewish Rabbinical leader Nicodemus, as reported in the Gospel of John, chapter three. At a time when most of the religious establishment either disliked or feared Jesus, this prominent teacher had gone to see him at night, when, presumably his visit would not be public knowledge. He approached the controversial figure and actually said, “Teacher, some of us know that you were sent by God, because no one could do the things you do without divine support.” And then Jesus, rather than acknowledging the scholar’s rare open-minded reasoning and remarkable belief, says something instead that can be very puzzling on more than one level. His words in response were: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus is of course perplexed and says, “How can anyone return to the womb and be born a second time?” And then Jesus answers in such a way as to indicate that his entire ministry and mission aren’t primarily about reasoning and belief, but personal transformation into what’s really a new life, with new perceptions, values, and commitments.

Bob knew that, at almost any time, many of the people in his church were showing up, week-to-week, to make a deal with God. They would believe whatever they needed to believe, and do whatever they needed to do, in order to gain divine favor and everlasting life. Some were likely just hedging their bets and maybe living out the famous Agnostic’s Prayer: “Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul, if there is a soul.” They were there in an effort to perhaps improve their lot and maybe defeat death. But God wanted them there to defeat spiritual blindness and deafness and idolatry and selfishness. He wanted to see them born anew, raised from the death of alienation and separation and selfishness to a new life of union with him and each other. He wanted an eternal life for them now, which was more about quality than it was about quantity. 

He really wanted to get this point across to everyone who showed up for the service. The faith they were being called to embrace is about new life, new values, and new commitments lived all day, every day. He wanted them to understand that when the insistent felt needs of the untutored ego can be released, its real needs can be met. And then, we can experience the genuine power of humility, compassion, and deep faith. The reverend was hoping to get all this across in a persuasive and illuminating way, so that at least many of the members of his congregation could perhaps see the issues of faith in a new and richer light.

When people approach religion for what they can get out of it, they ironically make it nearly impossible to get the most out of it. It becomes a tool—an instrument the ego is merely using to enhance its own interests, whether those interests are healthy or not. That’s why we’ve had so much war and violence and oppression in the name of religion throughout history. These things have nothing to do with true spirituality, but are perversions or deformations of what faith and the quest of the spirit are supposed to be all about. We often come across people pursuing their own greed, with their own ambitions, and superstitiously seeking to assuage their worst fears under a false patina of religious language, ritual, and sentiment. And this wasn’t just a danger for other times and places, Archdale knew, but it’s a temptation for any of us unless we can come to a true understanding of spiritual things.

Some Good We Can Do Together

I'm hoping you'll join me to make something good happen.

The New Book

Ever since I left Notre Dame in 1995 to pursue the unusual job of being a public philosopher, I've wanted to write a book full of ideas that had been transformative for me and that would also be genuinely life changing for readers. After 19 nonfiction books, I think I've finally managed to do so at a new level with the new novel, The Oasis Within. 

It arrived as the biggest surprise of my life, and as the doorway to - so far - seven other much longer novels that are also now completely written and just awaiting a final edit and publication. The Oasis Within is a prologue to this series of longer books. My granddaughter christened the big series "Walid and the Mysteries of Phi," featuring the name of the main character and a Greek letter that in this context names both a mathematical ratio and a secret society that's unlike any group of people ever written about, and that's profoundly relevant to how we understand our own lives. I've learned more about life and its possibilities from the characters in these stories than I ever would have thought possible. I've also come to love the characters as if they were real: and in a way, they are.

You've most likely heard me tell the story. The first scene came to me uninvited, as a strikingly unusual, vivid daydream one morning in February of 2011. An old man and a boy were sitting in the sand under a palm tree, talking. They were in the desert in Egypt. It was the summer of 1934. I ran upstairs to my study to write quickly what I was seeing and hearing. I continued to transcribe this mental movie for four and a half years, never consciously devising a scene or plot twist or character. I just watched it all unfurl and did my best to describe what I saw and heard.

A Fellowship of the Mind

There's a concept in The Oasis Within that's become especially important to me - the idea that there can be a "Fellowship of the Mind" in our world, a loose collection of people who are fully open to discovering who they most deeply are, and what they can truly do with their talents and energies – kindred souls who help each other learn to see deeper patterns in events and to draw on otherwise neglected powers for creative accomplishment that can make a difference for their own lives and in their broader communities. I have an audacious hope that if this book gets into the right hands, all the stories in it and the subsequent series may help bring readers together into such a fellowship that can be uniquely powerful. 

Our world is full of tangled problems that no one seems capable of solving, and of intransigent politics that rarely appear to rise above the level of schoolyard taunts. We need something superior to what we're already doing. And in a time when more people than ever are telling me they want their lives to really matter, we all need the right ideas and inspiration for the best path forward. 

My Proposal

Here's what I've realized and now want to act on: You, dear reader, know many people I'll likely never meet. You have a sphere of influence that I could never duplicate. If you've read The Oasis Within already and it's touched you, or even if you haven't yet, but are willing to, and you then find it so resonant that you're moved to go even farther and use it to touch the lives of the people around you, I have a proposal.

I want to get this new book into the hands of as many good people as I can. I don't care about Amazon rankings or bestseller lists or author royalties at this stage. I just want this book to have the impact it's capable of having. And the challenge is now mine, since to get it into the world, I've left the realm of established publishers and have "gone rogue" and created my own imprint for all these books. They were too "different" for the literary agents I've worked with in the past. They couldn't be put into an easy genre box for mainstream publication. Or so I was told. And I knew I wouldn’t change them from being what they are. I believe in them exactly as they’ve come to me. So, I've launched my own publishing initiative, in such a way that allows me to offer you a proposal.

If you can commit this month to buying at least 25 copies of The Oasis Within to give to friends, family, and associates, I can provide them for you at a cost of $7 a book, including shipping, for the beautiful paperback that retails for $14.99. Anyone who orders 50 or more at this price will also get, as a gift from me, the first long novel in the subsequent series, a book called The Golden Palace, which will be fully edited and ready before the New Year. Some friends who’ve ordered 25, 35, 50, 65, 100, or even 200 copies of the book to give away as gifts within their own circles sparked this idea. They were excited to pass the book on to their clients or friends, or to others they come into contact with in the course of their daily lives.

What You Can Do

Here's what you can do, if you'd like to partner up with me in this way. By sending an email to TomVMorris(at)aol(Dotcom), let me know how many copies you'd like to order to give to others. It could be 25 or any number above that. Include in your email your best mailing address. I'll place the order for you right away and have the books shipped directly from the printer to you. I'll then email you an invoice that you can pay by check. If your order includes copies for a book club, let me know and I'll make myself available for a short email of Q&A for the members, or even a brief Skype time with them. I've never done anything like this before. But I think the time is right.

During the holidays, you'll likely be giving presents to people you care about and who make your life better. I hope you'll join me in spreading philosophy by giving The Oasis Within to some of those people, inviting them into a fellowship of the mind and heart that can enhance their lives and perhaps even the world around them a little more than would otherwise be possible.

It felt as if the characters of these books chose me to bring them and their lessons into the world. If you can help me share them in your own part of the world, it would be great. If you've already ordered lots of copies, or in case that's not possible right now, or even if you're just not at all moved to join me in this way with such an endeavor, I hope you'll simply help the books find their mission in the world by mentioning them to others. There's a lot of work for them to do in our time.

Thanks so much for considering this distinctive form of partnership! 

The National Launch of The Oasis Within

Tonight is the official national launch of my new book and first novel, The Oasis Within. If you live near Wilmington, NC come to Barnes and Noble in the Mayfair Town Center at 6 for the celebration! I'll be donating a portion of each copy sold to The Teacher's Fund, a great local philanthropic outreach to area teachers in the elementary grades, to provide for supplies that are much needed. 

It's been nine years since I did a bookstore event, and I'm excited about tonight's opportunity. If you live anywhere other than Wilmington, NC, first of all, visit when you can. But second, you can join us virtually tonight by going to your favorite online bookseller and grabbing copies of The Oasis Within for friends and family. You can even write me about sending you signed bookplates for the books, for any order of 5 copies or more! 

If you live nearby, I hope to see you tonight. It will be a meaningful time for me. The writer's life can be a solitary endeavor. But bringing a book into the world can be an act of social outreach. This book is so chock full of ideas I can't wait to share! And early readers are sending me such gratifying emails! Let me share two or three here, and then I'll be quiet. The first is from an old friend, a company founder and president who just lost his adult son, suddenly, not long ago. The second is from a neighbor I met the first time on a plane to Charlotte the other day, an accomplished artist who lost her husband not long ago, and then her only son. We live in a world of great gifts and great losses, of gains and challenges, and possibilities for deep growth. Then I'll end with a man in town who did a nice Facebook post for the event tonight. Here are the sample reader reactions:

Hi, Tom! The Oasis Within is breathtaking. At times while reading I actually gasped at the beauty of the writing and the clarity of such profound and life changing ideas. Virtually every page of your book is now covered in highlights. I was particularly taken with your perspective on uncertainty. Like so many folks, I've often resisted uncertainty, or even feared it. I now have a new tool in the toolkit. 

I also loved your description of goals. In my career I have focused on goals and talked about goals and obsessed about goals. But I never really saw them as a new path of concentrated, consistent and committed action. How I use goals in my life will never be the same.

Your discussion of the fire of positive energy, and for me, the idea that tough times can become fuel is inspiring and so very useful right now.

I could go on and on, but I do want to thank you specifically for one other insight - the roles of nobility and humility. After 30 years and hundreds of AA meetings that revolve around humility, I still didn't have a good way to think about the dichotomy of those ideas in life. Now I do.

I was captured by Ali and Walid. And I was taken by surprise by the plot twist and revelation. I can't wait to see what happens. Tom, this is a remarkably important work, one that I'm certain will benefit thousands and thousands of people. Thanks for sharing and thanks for your friendship.

Jack H.

___________________________________

Hi Tom: I’m home from Naples and I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed THE OASIS WITHIN! I was hooked from the opening chapter……underlining, highlighting, making notes and ‘WOW”s in the columns………

Full of chills……one in particular…….When I got to the chapter entitled ‘WISDOM BUCKET’…..for some odd reason, I drew a heart around those words………I read those two pages…..turned the page and read the line…..”My wisdom bucket is in my heart”……..chills up and down my spine….. I was definitely meant to read this book………….so, AGAIN……THANK YOU. Hope to make it to the book signing……already have a list of friends who will receive them for Christmas!!! And definitely will share with my book club!

In the last 8 years, I’ve watched my husband succumb to cancer…….and then my only child succumb to ALS………. Since I’ve been searching……which I guess is pretty normal……trying to figure out what’s next for me and trying to be open to those answers, directions, signs, etc. This book arrived in my hands in a totally random way… (Thank you Universe). MY book is now full of “highlighting”, notes, “Wows”, answers……One I will read over and over and over….It’s THAT GOOD! And so now, I’m on this new ADVENTURE with Uncle Ali and Walid…….and can’t wait to continue the journey……. Thank you Tom Morris!

With gratitude, Anne. (Anne Cunningham, Metal Artist)

___________________________________

From Facebook:

I’m compelled to stump for my Wilmington friend and philosopher, Tom Morris. If you haven't yet stumbled across his absolute gem of a book, "The Oasis Within", then please check it out. It is the most meaningful book I've read in years, possibly ever. Book signing this Friday evening at Mayfaire's Barnes & Noble.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1668042616770164/

Tom Hackler, Duke Energy

Friends! This is Tom Morris again. If you have a chance to read the new book soon, please write and let me know what you think!  TM

Our Emotional Telescope

In light of the Paris events of late, I thought my friends might benefit from a short passage in my new book, The Oasis Within. Here it is.

The old man asked him, “Have you ever come across a telescope?”

“Yes, once, in the village, years ago. There was a man, a visitor, with a small telescope that you could hold in your hands, and he let me look through it. Things that were far away suddenly seemed close. It was like magic.”

The old man said, “When I was a lot younger than you, a kind neighbor gave me such a telescope as a gift. I imagine it was much like the one you held. I used it to look all around me. I remember I once stood in the middle of the village with it. I could see people in their houses, men at a distance, and animals far down the road. I discovered something important that day.”

“What was it?”

“When I peered through the small end like everyone does, it made things look bigger and closer. But then, I turned the telescope around in my hands. I have no idea what made me think to do that. I put it up to my eye again and gazed this time through the big end. I was so amazed! It made everything around me look much smaller and far away. Large men seemed little. Tall trees were shrunken into tiny images of themselves.” He smiled at the memory.

The boy said, “I never looked into the big end like that.”

“Well, we all have in our minds something like an inner telescope for our thoughts and feelings. When things seem bad, we automatically view them through the small end of our telescope, like most people do, and then those things look much bigger and closer and worse than they really are. That’s what makes us frightened or worried. But, just like a real telescope, we can turn it around, and look through the other end. That will make our problems appear smaller. It will reduce in our minds and hearts the perceived size of what we face. Then we can feel bigger and more powerful. Often, that’s just what we need.”

“Wow. That makes sense. It’s a new way of thinking.”

Yes it is. So, when you’re afraid or worried or sad, think of your inner telescope. Are you looking through the end that almost everyone uses? Are you making things seem bigger and more imposing than they really are? You have the power to turn the telescope around and gaze through the other end. You’ll then see the difficulties as smaller, and you’ll feel better, and stronger.”

The boy was impressed, and pleased. “I like this idea. It’s a good image. And really, it’s not something I’ve ever thought about.”

The old man smiled again. “Here’s the ultimate secret, my boy. Once you’ve mastered this trick with your mind and understand the power of perspective, once you’ve grown enough in wisdom and knowledge of the world, you can put your inner telescope down and simply look at things as they are. And you’ll know. Most things in reality are no bigger than we can handle. And that’s important to remember.”

Welders and Philosophers

In the most recent Republican presidential primary debate, Senator Marco Rubio said:

“For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” 

First of all, let me ignore the grammatical infelicity here and agree that the senator is absolutely right in his opinion that vocational education is not as appreciated as it should be in our time and place. One of the best books written on this topic is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford, who happens to be a philosopher with a prestigious PhD who makes his living by working with his hands as a motorcycle repairman, and thus demonstrates that the we should beware of false alternatives in our political rhetoric. Crawford argues eloquently for a recognition of the value and dignity of manual labor, with a special emphasis on its skilled varieties. Life doesn’t offer us a stark choice between doing or thinking, and neither should any good system of education. There are different ways by which we can enjoy a life of thoughtful work. Welding can certainly be one of them. So can toiling as a philosopher.

To the claim that welders make more money than philosophers, my first response would be that if it’s true, then, so what? Would it follow as the senator seems to suggest that we need more welders, thereby increasing our available supply and, against presumably equal demand, competitively force their wages down to the level of the sages? Stranger yet is the fact that behind these remarks we can see the exact value assumption that’s gotten us in trouble: The belief that higher wages mean a higher value to our society. That’s precisely the equation that’s led us down the road of valuing college prep vastly more than vocational education, and trying to train everyone for white collar careers, whether that’s the best thing for a particular young person, or for the rest of us, in the first place. A mediocre hedge fund manager may make a lot more money than a great school teacher, or a master welder, but you can’t convince me that this is a good measure of their relative value to society. So even if the welders of the world are out there lighting their cigars with hundred dollar bills and the average philosopher can’t pay the rent, I don’t think that implies anything about the relative value of welders and philosophers. 

When I first went to graduate school at Yale to become a philosopher, I remember seeing a newspaper clipping on a philosophy department bulletin board. It featured a photograph of a construction worker sitting on the ground, eating out of his steel lunch box, his hard-hat by his side, and with a copy of Heidegger open in front of him. I said to myself, “That’s it. That’s the role of philosophy - to help everyone become more thoughtful about their lives.” I spent fifteen years as a professor of philosophy in a great university and my goal was never to turn my students into wage-earning academic philosophers, but instead to help them develop a more robust philosophical dimension of their experience and thought, whether they went on to become doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, or welders.

And in my most recent two decades as a public philosopher working with people across industries and professions, my goal is the same. We need more good philosophy and philosophers in our time, not less of it and fewer of them. But that’s because we need more philosophical practitioners in all walks of life, including politics.

Rodin got it right in his famous sculpture of The Thinker, which I first saw in person many years ago. It surprised me to notice how muscular an individual is depicted in the statue. He’s obviously a man of action as well as of thought. Rodin had expressed a deep insight. The good thinker should ideally be a proficient doer; and the active doer, a careful thinker. Only then will things have a chance to go well.

This is something all our candidates for high office should keep in mind. Doing without thinking is much more dangerous than thinking without doing. And no politician who ignores such philosophical insights can ever take on the fissures in our body politic and stand a chance of repairing our wholeness with good and lasting welds.

Things We Can't Control

I’m standing in the Charlotte airport waiting to board a plane to Houston. And I’m well positioned, ten minutes ahead of time, in the Priority Boarding Lane of Gate C18. There’s a guy on the other side of a fat vertical column who has a cough every bit as thick as the cement post. It’s rich and deep - and quite impressive, in fact. It’s both frequent and explosive. I also hear the man sniffing. He’s really sick. I hope he’s not going to be sitting anywhere near me. It’s a big plane, an Airbus 320. There are hundreds of seats. But still, you know what they say about microbes in recycled airplane air. If he’s in the cargo area, I’m in trouble. That’s the sort of thing you learn from watching too many TV news shows.

But he’s here at the Priority Lane. A scary thought crosses my mind. Maybe like me, he’s in first class. That would be really bad. It’s a long flight and close quarters. But no, I remind myself, he could just be Platinum Preferred and able to get on soon, but will be sitting in the last row in the back of the plane. Yeah, that could happen. And maybe, just maybe, the germs would stay back there in his vicinity. He coughs again, thunderously.

I start hatching likely scenarios to keep me from worrying. He got here for this flight, last minute, up from his sickbed, or the hospital, and is going to board early because of the long walk ahead of him, far from my designated seat, 3A, which I chose just days ago when I switched flights to avoid predicted thunderstorms and tornadoes. Surely, my general good fortune will keep me at a safe distance from this germ distribution center. Did I mention that he never masks his cough with a hand or arm or anything? Yeah. He prefers to project out into the airport air more generally, getting those particles as far from his body as he can. I guess he figures that the rest of us can just take our chances. Where’s TSA when you really need them?

So we board. I’m the second guy on the plane. Mr. Sick is not third, or fourth, or fifth, or even sixth. Good. I feel relieved. Maybe he was just standing near me in the gate area for no good reason and he'll be in the back of the plane, after all, or possibly - hope springs eternal - he’s on another plane altogether. And even if - worst case scenario - he is on this plane and joins us in first class, there are 12 seats, which means 10 chances out of 11 that he will be in a seat that will keep me relatively isolated from his hawking, spewing, spraying barks of disease. 

And now, here’s where I let out a big sigh. You can probably see already what’s going to happen. I couldn’t, eternal optimist that I am. And there he is, the human aerosol, hacking his way onto the plane and down the aisle. He’s not in row one. Not in row two. Ok. Then I see him stop and lift his roller-bag into the overhead compartment … right above my third row. Oh, no.

But there’s no need to panic. Row 3 has two seats across the wide aisle and well away from me - 3D and 3F. I quickly do the math. There are only 4 seats in the row, with 3 now available, and 2 of those are options I could live with. My chances are good. And, of course, he sits down in neither of these less harmful spots, but in 3C, right up beside me. My elbow is inches from his. The coughs continue, but after some hot coffee they slow down to merely one every 20 seconds or so. They’re still impressively powerful. The back of the seat in front of his is now more teeming with viral and bacterial flora and fauna than a petri dish in Mass General Hospital. 

I lean as far up against the window as I can. I become one with the safety glass. What are my options? A massive attack of stomach gas on my part might encourage his own avoidance posture. Yeah, that would get him leaning in the opposite direction like nothing else. But this obvious tactic seems not to be an option right now. And that’s more than a little ironic, isn’t it? There are things in life that never seem to be available when you could most use them, and yet insistently near to hand when you least desire their advent. We live in a funny world. He coughs again to punctuate my sentence, and as if to mock my own normal and stubbornly reticent inner bodily functions.

I started writing this so I won’t have to face him and talk. The flight attendants serve food. He'll have the crepes. I'll have the caniptions. I practically bathe in Purell Hand Sanitizer. And I keep my food well out of his repeated spray pattern. I eat quickly so that ambient infectious particles can’t alight on the biscuit. I use more hand stuff. 

An hour passes like this. The pilot announces we’re ONLY an hour and twenty minutes out from our destination and the possibilities of detox. By now, I’ve used most of my sanitizer, which I truly want to squirt down my seat companion’s mouth, but I’m already far too close to the volcanic orifice, continually erupting as it is, like Old Faithful. Where’s a surgical mask when you need one?

There he goes again. Everyone else on the plane is sitting quietly and like me trying not to breathe at all. No one else is coughing. Just this one guy inches from my face. At least I’m not flying to London with him. As it is, we should be met at the gate in Houston by a HazMat Team. And I’ve got the busiest week of the year coming up in a few days. I really should get this guy’s name, address, and legal contact, in case I need to sue him. But I can't turn to speak to him.

There should be some limits on who can get onto a crowded plane. In this guy’s present condition, he needed to be airlifted to Texas - medivac style - and hooked up to something in the presence of only people in decontamination suits.

This all leads me to reflect on the stuff we can’t control in life. All things considered, I guess this guy beats a tornado, but not by much. But why did that have to be my choice in the first place? Why do we get into situations like this at all? I’m a philosopher, and I don’t have the answer to that one. But it causes me to reflect. I do know that this epidemiological nighmare guy gave me a new sense of my own concerns and anxieties, and a clear chance to rise above the fatalism that our situation clearly seemed to suggest. And I now realize that, despite him, I’ll be fine. I'll rev up my immune system with the power of postivie belief. All is well, at least with my soul.

And then I sniff.

When You Run, Run Free

Imagine for a moment that The Kentucky Derby is underway. It’s a beautiful day. The horses are all rounding a turn in full stride, close together, hooves pounding, sprays and clumps of dirt flying up from the track. The colors are dazzling. The jockeys’ bright silks are glistening in the sun – green, red, yellow, in solids, stripes, and patterns of diamonds. The action is frenetic. Whips pop against the horses’ flanks. You can hear the thunderous pounding on the track.

Now consider this. Many of us are those horses. We’re racing around a track we didn't create. We have jockeys on our backs urging us on, guiding us, and at times whipping us forward. If we’re good enough to win, someone gets a trophy. And when this race is over, there’s always the Preakness. And then we’ll get ready for the Belmont Stakes. And so it goes.

I was recently at a weekend retreat for incredibly high achievers. It was the triennial Morehead-Cain Forum that brings together from around the world and across the decades hundreds of men and women, along with their spouses, who have attended The University of North Carolina on a Morehead-Cain Scholarship, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious full merit scholarship. This honor pays for all college expenses, sends its recipients around the globe and across disciplines to continue their learning in the summertime, and gives them extra funds for personal and intellectual discovery along the way. Long ago, it allowed me to be the first person in my family and its history on both sides ever to go to college, something that would otherwise have been impossible for a young man like me who grew up in an eight hundred square foot rental house and could eat only two meals a day at home. I’m sure the Morehead-Cain also helped get me a full ride to graduate school at Yale, where I was able to study free of cost for six more years after college and earn a double Ph.D. in philosophy and religious studies. 

And here I was in a big room full of Morehead-Cains, as I have been over a long magical weekend every three years for the past couple of decades. Many of those around me are prominent doctors and lawyers who have changed their hometowns, or their prestigious big city practices, for the better, transforming things wherever they go. They’ve started companies, or television channels, produced movies, run global enterprises, made films, created Broadway plays, or performed in such venues. They’ve discovered, invented, created, and published. They’ve helped save the US Postal Service from insolvency, transformed blighted inner city neighborhoods, launched film festivals, fought wars, and run companies like Ancestry.com where we can get our bearings in the world by discovering our historical roots. Some of the former scholars are household names. Others quietly work behind the scenes to do incredible things that boggle the mind and help create the future for us all. 

And in one of our weekend sessions, we were discussing throughout small breakout groups how we define success. In two of the groups I sat in, it became clear to me, hearing everyone else speak, that we all got to college as great young race horses who knew how to win. And we all had small but powerful jockeys on our backs – the hopes and expectations of our families, the pressures of our peers, and our own needs for praise and accomplishment, along with various other forces that pushed us and prodded us to run faster, and always faster. As a result, we had indeed won lots of races and garnered vast arrays of trophies.

But at some point, it seemed, most of the older achievers in the room were starting to ask new questions. Do I want a jockey on my back? Am I running a race that I feel compelled to run or that I choose to run? Am I enjoying the process, or is it all for the water trough and big feedbag at the end?

As I listened to my esteemed colleagues speak of their lives in a vast array of very different terms, this vivid image came to me to organize most of what I was hearing. Are we content to run someone else’s race, on their track, for the entirety of our lives? Or is there perhaps a time to leave the winner’s circle at those venues and find our own paths?

Are we prepared to follow our hearts and go our own way, even if there’s no one to hand out a trophy as a result of what we do? Are we free enough in our inner selves to set our own standards, find our own goals, and pursue dreams that are distinctively ours, outside the glare and glamour of the track where everyone gathers? That’s a key to what I call true success.

There’s actually nothing wrong with running on someone else’s track, as long as that’s what we truly enjoy and freely want to do, and as long as there’s no bright smocked jockey pushing and forcing and prodding us along. We need to shake off the blinders and bits that have been constraining us, and make sure we’re finding our own way and doing what we do because it’s truly ours to accomplish and contribute to the world.

It was still a day away from when I would stand in front of all these successful people from around the world and close the weekend with my own session on “Wisdom for the Journey.” And I had other things to say. But as I sat in the final summation around the room of our small group discussions, I was moved to raise my hand and share these simple thoughts. And when I did, the great thoroughbreds in the room broke into spontaneous applause – something that surprised me. But then I realized that we had touched a nerve, and articulated a feeling.  The only smart bet for true success is that when you run, you need to run free, and stay true to your deepest self.

On the Team: The NFL and You.

I’m sitting in the Little Rock Airport at Burger King. It’s 9:40 AM and time for lunch. Yeah, that’s how messed up you get when you travel too much. So, a guy in a brightly colored pro football team T-shirt walks by and stops when he sees another guy wearing a different team’s jersey. He gives the stranger a thumbs up and says, “You guys did real good the other day.” And then I hear:

“Yeah, thanks.”

“You got a great defense.”

“It’s been a surprise. We didn’t know we’d be this good.”

“Well it was a nice win.”

“Yeah, thanks, we needed it. And you guys are going to be Ok.”

“We got to work on offense a little more.”

“Yeah. It’ll happen. You’ll be fine.”

And so it went on, for a little longer, as if these semi-portly middle-aged men shuffling through the airport with roller-bags were themselves players or back office executives at their respective NFL teams. There was a sense of identity and belonging that got my attention. All the “you guys” and the “we” references spoke to a deep human need for affiliation. What’s really interesting is that we don’t often get that need met in our neighborhoods, or churches, or workplaces where we spend most of our time, but in connection with favored sporting teams.

Something that distinctively impressed me about these two men was their affable spirit. The other team was something to be respected, and even admired, and not at all disliked, and so was the fan of that team. They spoke of their respective tribes like they were really involved, first hand, in tribal activities. And I suppose they actually are, in their own ways. Not everyone who is part of the action has to be on the turf, wearing protective equipment.

We should remember this deep need for belonging, or for affiliation. If we can cultivate more of it at work, we can connect up with deep resources in the human spirit that need to be called into play for the best results to happen.

And then, who knows? We may make it to the playoffs.