Strong Enough to be Successful,
Too Weak to be Happy
What added to my discomfort and concern with the “nothing but money talk” was the fact that at least two of the gentlemen are off the clock and on the calendar, so to speak. Their wellbeing is in peril and all they can think about is return on investment and a quick vacation trip to Hawaii.
Around noon, right after I placed the Rincon Market food collection on the tables at my home I sit down for a pleasant lunch and casual read of the Huffington Post on the internet machine, as Rachael Maddow often calls it. The first article I perused was “A Call for a Movement to Redefine the Successful Life” written by Alina Tugend. In my current state of mind, this was more than appropriate reading, I thought.
The subject matter centered around a conference presented by Mika Brzezinski from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the Huffington Post. The venue was Ms. Huffington’s new apartment in TriBeCa where over 200 participants jammed into her living room. Of course, TriBeCa is THE place to reside now in Manhattan which is bordered by Canal Street, Park Place and Broadway with terrific Hudson River water front access. Apparently, Ms. Tugend did not miss the irony in the conference location when she mentioned both the upscale neighborhood and the cramped quarters.
In commencement speeches and in her books and online newspaper, Ms. Huffington is mostly telling women that “The way we define success isn’t working. More, bigger, better — we can’t do that anymore.”
How true. However, with the addiction that comes along with the accumulation of wealth and power in our current society, just saying we have to stop is never going to work. And what will work is not even in the conversation.
Think about it? What can it be? Is it money? No. Is it power? No. Is it time off? No. It is probably something you will never guess and that is, nearly every human being on this planet wants to be better than the human being standing next to him or her. In other words, primitive tribalism. It permeates every aspect of every society on the planet and includes sports teams, political parties, schools, age groups, religions, companies, neighborhoods, races, nationalities, anywhere there are two people engaged in an activity.
And just looking for another metric to add to Money and Power to create a more balanced and intelligent life is a bit silly. What can one add to greed and avarice to make them more reasonable? So we have to take a whole new look at how we approach making a living on this planet. And a great place to start is we humans have to learn to celebrate our differences and the talents and worth of each individual. You can’t do that if your tribe says only people who ignore their families to succeed count or only people who hate certain people can belong to this club or only people who cheer for a specific team are worthwhile.
If we cannot make tribal behavior part of our distant past then we are destine to live stressful, unhappy and consistently painful existences.
In the meantime, I’m going to help folks help feed as many hungry kids and parents as possible. What about you?
Larry Robison, Division Manger at Pima County Flood Control sent around an email inviting everyone to a meeting Tuesday, June 25 at 8:30 am to review all of the improvements KE&G, the local contractor, made before they finish up. Folks are requested to gather at the Fremont Building on the west side of the park.
We collected a total of 181 lbs. of food. The money we donated amounted to $31.00, a $25.00 check and $6.00 in cash.
See you Sunday,
Peter
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