What is Success?



Recently, a friend and former protege - someone whom I'd met as a collegian of great promise and had watched mature into an exemplary adult - passed on a few months before his 43rd birthday.  I was stunned by the news.  It had never occurred to me that someone so exceptional would be gone so/too soon.  And, yet, he was....

 

His passing led me to do quite a bit of reflection, both on his life and on my own.  With respect to his life, I was moved to compose a tribute to him, which I share below.  With respect to my life, I share the following:

 

Rationally, we all know that we will die some time and that none of us knows when.  But virtually all of us live as if that transition time is far in the future.  The vast majority of us act everyday as if tomorrow is promised to us.  And yet (we know that) it isn't.

 

This is mostly because acknowledging our mortality is difficult and scary.  What comes beyond our physical death?  Even those of us with great faith in an afterlife have to acknowledge that we really don't know.  Further, for the most part, we prefer the life that we do have - however we may quibble with our circumstances in any given moment - to one hereafter that we can't define for sure.  Very few (if any) of us are looking to die to find out what's on 'the other side', so to speak.  (Or, if we are eager to leave this life - absent any debilitating and/or eventually fatal illness - we are actually considered psychologically unwell.)

 

In short, even though we know intellectually that we must die at some time (and that that some time may be sooner than we would want), we don't process this emotionally so that it doesn't show up in our behavior.  We take life for granted and do not live fully in the here and now, often postponing meaningful experiences until an assumed better time in our future.  We do not, as the great 20th century theologian and sage Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested, "get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted" and thus "live life in radical amazement."  Mostly, we are consumed by temporal and ephemeral concerns as we tell ourselves that the future will be better for us and those we love.  And yet, we all 'know' (intellectually, that is) that we can't assume the future....

 

What my friend's passing did was to remind me that I must fight zealously against the human nature that would lead me to look to a better future and thereby live less fully today.  What his life - far too short in duration for any of us who knew and loved him - taught me is to be mindful of and motivated by my/our mortality always.  It sounds a bit morbid, perhaps, but, in reality, if death has any lesson to teach us in life, it's that we must live life to the fullest now.  In the words of the incomparable Bishop John Shelby Spong, we must “live fully, love wastefully and be all that (we) can be.”

 

So, today, I will make a better effort to live fully and in the moment, including by composing this blog post, an idea that's been rattling around in my soul for a couple of days now.  It's the best way that I can pay tribute to my friend and to live the lesson that his passing and those of the other saints in my life whom I've had the good fortune to know have taught me: to live (more) fully now and, in so doing, to encourage others to do so.  As Marianne Williamson reminded us, "as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same."

 

In this spirit, I hope that you come to know my dear friend Ramsey Rycraw and find in this tribute some inspiration to live more fully in this moment and all others....

 

A Tribute to Ramsey Rycraw

 

(Saturday, January 25^th, 2013)

 

In 1904, in response to a contest sponsored by Brown Book Magazine to answer the question “What is Success?”, Elisabeth-Anne “Bessie” Stanley of Lincoln, Kansas, wrote:

 

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children,

Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;

Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;

Who has left the world better than he found it,

Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;

Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;

Whose life was an inspiration;

Whose memory a benediction.

 

When I heard the heartbreaking news of my fellow SEO alumnus and former protégé Ramsey Rycraw’s passing, I thought of this poem … and realized that it was a great way to begin to deal with the grief of losing a fine young man gone too soon.  So I have to begin by acknowledging reality: if you knew him, you’re hurting, because life with Ramsey seems far better than the prospect thereof without him.  And yet, to paraphrase some wise person (who was not actually Dr. Seuss) who observed long ago that we should not cry because his earthly life is over, but smile because it happened.

 

And it’s in this spirit of gratitude for the gift of Ramsey Rycraw and of beginning a new chapter in our individual and collective journeys that I share some thoughts and memories today.  Simply put, Ramsey was one of my SEO “golden children,” a star in every sense of the word.  SEO, or Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, is a small non-profit that has been doing good work and changing young people’s lives for more than a half-century now.  We had the good fortune to select a young man of promise to join our career internship program in 1992 and he lived up to and beyond that promise in our eyes then and has ever since.

 

Why?  Because he was so unique.  I have had the privilege of working with thousands of young people in my more than three decades with SEO, and I have to admit that because of my middle age and their number (now approaching five figures), I can’t remember them all.  Most faces I can recognize, but, truth be told, the names are long forgotten (even if they graduated from high school or interned with one of our partner organizations just last year).  But Ramsey Rycraw I remember vividly these two decades on.

 

I remember the intern Ramsey: a polite, well-manned and intelligent young man who had an engagingly sunny disposition, mad skills and a positive attitude that drew others to him and led them to follow his example.  In short, Ramsey was a dream intern: he was open to the wisdom that we shared, played the game as we asked, did outstanding work and represented the organization and himself well and helped others along the way.  As anyone who works with young people (especially large groups of them) knows, you pray for young leaders by example like this, for someone to point to and guide the less leadership-receptive to emulate.  Everyone who met Ramsey then was impressed by his humility, his capability and that broad smile that could and did light up a room.  It was not uncommon to have a couple of hundred college interns per year in our programs at that time, and I used to wish that every one of them could be like Ramsey Rycraw.  With all due respect to Number 23, I didn’t want them to be like Mike, I wanted them to be like Ramsey.

 

And even after his intern summer, Ramsey continued to lead by example and give back to his communities, including to his new SEO family.  Many of his peers remember him fondly from his work trying to organize our alumni back in the day or from his time mentoring high school students.  And, of course, he led by example in his education (by obtaining admission to and graduating with honors from the outstanding Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania), in his career in various financial services-related (et. al.) pursuits and in his family and community.  In fact, as an adult, Ramsey was the very embodiment of SEO’s mission statement at the time:

 

To develop young people of color to become leaders by example in their families, communities and careers

 

Whenever we needed to convince a prospective partner to join us in our work of access and uplift, we would point to our stars, which meant that we often pointed to Ramsey.  It’s why, in preparation for an historic fundraising campaign over a decade ago, SEO commissioned a book entitled Stories from the Street: The SEO Career Program, A Portfolio of Success – the “Street” being Wall Street, of course – in order to profile our alumni and to make the case for why we were asking for millions of dollars to fund our programs and to buy a first-ever permanent home for our then 40-year old organization.  Radiating warmly from page 18 of this “portfolio” is the smiling visage of Ramsey Rycraw.  (In no small part due to the legacy of success that Ramsey and others helped us to create, we were able to raise over $13 million and to purchase – without a mortgage – a permanent home for SEO for the first time in its history at 55 Exchange Place in downtown Manhattan, just steps from Wall Street and literally across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.)

 

Truth be told, I hadn’t been in as close contact with Ramsey in recent years.  It’s something that I’ve come to accept over the years: when you have as many “SEO kids” as I have been fortunate to know – now numbering close to ten thousand – and they, too, reach a certain stage in life – one in which their primary foci are their families and their careers – you accept that you don’t see them as much … but you savor every bit of good news that filters in and continue to celebrate their successes and their contributions to their own and to SEO’s legacy.  So I would see Ramsey occasionally and hear about his continuing and unsurprising success and be inspired to work ever more diligently at developing the next generation at SEO, the next generation of Ramseys.

 

And that’s the lesson that I learned from Ramsey Rycraw: that as much as I was a mentor to and leader for him at one time in his life, he has been an inspiration to and for me throughout the time that I’ve known him and thereby enabled me to touch thousands of other young people’s lives spurred on by his example.  The prospect of creating more Ramsey Rycraws has always gotten me out of bed early in the morning to make yet another breakfast meeting with a prospective partner and driven me to set up yet another fundraising lunch meeting and motivated me to commit to making yet another long drive home at night from an SEO event.  I never thanked him enough for this inspiration during his lifetime – so this I do regret – but I will always be mindful of this as I continue in my work with this special little organization that changes lives every day in profound ways.  Simply put, if it were possible, I wish that every SEO student or intern could be a Ramsey Rycraw.  There’s no doubt that this world would be a much better place were this to be the case.

 

So, in tribute to my former protégé and friend, I thank him and his family for his contributions to SEO and to me personally.  As I reflect on my own life, much of what I have contributed and will contribute to SEO has been inspired by special people like Ramsey Rycraw, who’ve added so much to my life and to those of countless others.  In this spirit of gratitude and appreciation, then, I close where I began with the words and wisdom of Bessie Anderson Stanley:  Ramsey Rycraw was indeed successful, supremely so, because he lived well, laughed often and loved much, and thus his life is truly an inspiration to and his memory a benediction for us all.

 

Godspeed, Ramsey.  Thank you for what you have done in your earthly life and in advance for what you will do in your eternal one as we go forward in our lives inspired by the gift of you….

 

May God comfort and keep all of us – especially Ramsey’s family – at this time as we ache, but may we thank Him always when, soon, we will again be able to smile, which, appropriately, will be those big, room-enlightening and spirit-lifting Ramsey Rycraw smiles….