Toward the Beloved Community....

It is a vitality, in short, which allows you to believe,

to act on the belief, that it is your country, and

your responsibility to your country is to free it,

and to free it you have to change it.

- James Baldwin, "What Price Freedom?"

in Randall Kenan, ed.,

The Cross of Redemption (2010)

Whenever life seems so/too challenging, I find myself retreating back into my twin safe harbors and in their succor I find the strength and courage to re-emerge to fight the battle anew.  This realization has dawned slowly, something that I appreciated dimly a decade or two ago but that blazes bright now.  My twin safe harbors are the wisdom, inspiration and profundity of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin.  The latter inflames me with both a clarity of grievance and a spirit of contest while the former grounds me in the oh so difficult need to channel this effort of redress in a proactively engaged, non-violent and, even harder, loving way.

As I survey what intuitively strikes me as the decline of the American civilization, I feel the need for their succor right now ... and I am mindful that despite the difficulty, I am called to contest for right by taking the much harder high road, as challenging as that may be.

So, I've picked up King again and begun to read and be re-educated and inspired.  And I've picked up Baldwin again to be called to be more incisively observant and trenchantly expressive.  So here goes....

I really do believe that we are experiencing the end of the American Era, led by a person so unworthy that I cannot speak his name.  He is the living embodiment of virtually all of the -isms that continue to plague our country and, as such, is indeed the Ugly American.  And yet he's less to blame than we are: it is us who elected him and gave him the most powerful role in the world without his having any meaningful preparation (and yet somehow we're still serially surprised and appalled that he continues to manifest our fears in an ever-devolving way...).

Now, I know that some of you will object by saying that 'we' didn't elect him, but we - as in all of us - did: he won the Electoral College, which has been a part of our electoral system for eons.  That it's malfunctioned harmfully a couple of times in this century is just a reminder that we've tolerated it and exposed ourselves to this risk for too long.  No, I didn't vote for him, nor, I suspect, did most of you who will ever read this piece ... but he did garner enough votes in the right places to win the election, which makes him the legitimate POTUS even if he's not legitimately qualified to be so and reminds us of this in ever demoralizing ways every day.

Until we rise up to change our system - knowing as we have for centuries that the Electoral College was a mechanism tinged in human bondage - then we cannot complain about it when it doesn't work the way some of us want.  As with the rest of life, you can't support something as long as it works for you and then decry it when it doesn't.

And reforming our electoral system - or making any other meaningful and needed change - won't be easy in this age of Citizens United, gerrymandering, resurgent inhumanity and willful ignorance.

As I reflect on this reality, I am less angered than awed by it, made weary by the contemplation of the road ahead ... and then angered again because it feels like so many of the battles to be fought were won years ago and undone by the cravenly powerful during my lifetime/on our watch.

So back to King and Baldwin I go....

In The Radical King, Cornell West's finely curated survey of MLK's prophecy, I am reminded again of one of the signs of our demise: as much as we supposedly venerate the man - including by having his birthday become a national holiday - even more than this we eviscerate his message.  In a word, Dr. King's been whitewashed in modern America, hailed as a hero for contesting injustice in our past and then left there, as if our collective and purposeful forgetting justifies the lie that his message isn't even more urgent in this - and every - day.

MLK's day isn't past, our collective will to seek justice is....

And in all of its forms: political, electoral, economic, ecumenical, etc.  Frankly, we allowed ourselves to become horrified - mostly from the comfort of our couches on the sidelines of the fray - as meaningful victories were overturned in the courts, which were once our place of solace and deliverance but have lately become yet another of our oppressors far too frequently.  Think about it: we've seen the Voting Rights Act gutted with SCOTUS's endorsement in an age where an all too real and craven voter suppression effort has disenfranchised millions in both the South and the North.

Did we march and advocate and resist when this occurred?  A bit, but, honestly, not much.  And years later, after other previously unimaginable losses - like the appalling Citizens United ruling - we seem surprised that our predicament is so utterly bad.  Really?!?  Truth be told, we were tired of fighting and have now come to understand the ultimate cost of our lack of vigilance over time: to be ruled, as Plato pointed out in his timeless Republic, by "someone worse" than ourselves.  Apparently, we now realize (much too late), citizenship is a continuous contact sport....

And the forces of evil have become so much stronger, right?  Actually, no.  Emboldened by their string of significant victories of late, they're just less covert.

There has always been class warfare in our society, but only now are the (largely) 'Publicans in Congress unashamed to be so transparent in doing the plutocrats' - and only their - bidding.  How else can one describe either of the two travesties of proposed tax 'reform' bills currently on the Hill?  When many if not most in the middle class will actually see their federal taxes rise as those of the plutocrats plummet and teachers can no longer deduct the supplies that they shouldn't have to buy for their kids in the first place but the privileged will get a break for garaging their private jets, you know something is seriously, abominably wrong.

And racists have always been here in our society - even after the modest gains of the civil rights era - but with an equivocator in chief to encourage them, they now feel free to let the rest of us know that we're the problem.  That they can be so blinded by race-based hate not to be able to see that the puppeteers who've pulled the strings in ways that have materially damaged not only their lives in the short run but their life prospects in the long run look just like them and not the other oppressed folks who are the target of their often deadly ire is one of the most damningly inconceivable and enduring facets of our current demise.

And the list of sexual harrassers runs throughout history.  The real surprise is why we are surprised: we elected an acknowledged harrasser to lead us and we're shocked by the revelation that there are more - many, many more - in positions of power who're being outed now?  Really?!?  More like we were willing to tolerate 'a little hanky panky' 'cause it's better than in the old days only to find out that it hasn't been better and that, en masse, actual lives have been scarred, maimed and in some tragic cases ended by the abuse.  (Pogo proven damningly right yet again.)

Etc.

And yet the Reverend King insists that, as Jesus commanded, I/we must love those who oppress us and be willing to continue to suffer - and likely suffer even more as we resist and advocate forcefully for a new more inclusive and equitable order - and seek to transform them through soul force rather than physical force.

Even though I want to call "Bullshit!" on this quite forcefully, in my heart of hearts I know that he's right: in what universe can the dispossessed ever topple the mighty by practicing violence against those who control the largest cache of weapons known to mankind?  Sure, it feels good - empowering, even (at least in theory) - to say that we'll arm and protect ourselves, but, in reality, we'll never have enough guns to withstand the collective power of law enforcement and the military ... which is something that our fringe Alt-Right brothers haven't quite seemed to be able to figure out either.

(And if we need any more proof, let's reflect on the lesson of the Black Panther Party: no, the powers that be didn't like it that they were actually serving the community in ways that the government was not but should have been, but the pretext that allowed the latter to exterminate them was the former's embrace of guns, supposedly in the context of self-defense.  Funny, but a government sniper can't tell if you're brandishing your rifle for self-defense or armed overthrow of the established order, but s/he can use this as a reason to keep blasting until the question is no longer relevant.  Let's face it folks, an armed revolution it will not and cannot ever be.)

So, nonviolently forward we go, but utilizing every arrow in our quiver consistently and forcefully, especially those that didn't exist in MLK's day, like Social Media.  If a better world really is important to us, then we need to advocate proactively, both by engaging with and demanding more from our elected leaders as well as holding them accountable by voting.  Simply put, there is no excuse for not exercising the right to vote that was so dearly won a half-century ago and has been under siege ever since: voting will take you an hour or two a year (or perhaps significantly longer in areas where the suppression is much stronger [and thus even more in need of redress]), but the consequences of failing to do so last for years and sometimes decades.  Think of what 45 has the legitimate right to do to our judiciary (with an obeisant Congress's support, of course): it'll be decades before some of these 'justices' age out of our system, which will give them a long, long time to continue to stack the deck in favor of the powerful.

So, in addition to advocating - actually getting to know our elected representatives, but, more importantly, having them get to know us individually and collectively - and voting, we need to protest, to show up in the streets (nonviolently, of course) and in the media - including and especially now, social media - and let our legitimate demands be known.  And then go and back this up at the polls so that we create a positive virtuous cycle in our civic life.

The one thing that money can't buy in politics is the ability to overcome a fully engaged electorate.  Hillary Clinton didn't only lose because of the Electoral Collage, she also lost because too many ostensible supporters - or, at least, those whose interests were more aligned with her platform than her opponent's - stayed home.  As true as it is that 70,000 additional votes in three key states could have created a different (and, almost objectively now, better) outcome, the real travesty was that only 60% of our fellow citizens chose to vote in this clearly watershed election.  (I'm guessing that there are a lot of grumblers in that 40% who have absolutely no legitimate claim to do so.)  Yes, the Right's fraudulent advertising can influence some of the electorate, but it can't keep them all from showing up at the polls.  That's the unbeatable strategy: to show up and vote while we still can.

But I digress (again).

And if we are compelled to engage and advocate in a non-violent way, what should we seek?  In a phrase, a more equitable and inclusive society.  Achieving this would actually Make America Great for the First Time, as it would be the debut of our actually living up to our professed creeds - in which we espouse equality of humanity and of access to opportunity - for all of our fellow citizens.

We need a free, equitable and more inclusive society so that all of our interests and needs can be reflected in our public policy, both at the national and local levels.  And we need to be hyper-vigilant in our resisting until we achieve this - all of this - as tempting as it is to dial it back a notch or two after significant gains.

From this vantage point and at this time when the forces of evil seem ascendant, this looks like fantasy, but it's not.  Our history teaches us this: but for the NAACP, there would never have been a Brown v. Board decision in 1954, which led to Emmett Till's heinous murder, which, in turn, led forces to coalesce to protest this travesty that served as the core of the Civil Rights Movement.

So, today, Black Lives Matter has coalesced to protest the unconscionable and unpunished killing of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of the police across this country as the Women's March did to protest the candidacy and election of a sexual predator, which have helped to foment an even broader resistance.  Let these be the core of an ever-widening, more inclusive Resistance, focused on making real our country's claims to egalitarianism.

I think of it as the coalescence of a Radical Humanist Movement (or, in King-ian terms, the Beloved Community), one in which one's humanity is the only thing that matters - and thus must be respected - and the other circumstances of your life, while they should be appreciated and celebrated to a point, must never be allowed to reduce the acknowledgement of you cardinal worth.  It doesn't matter if you're Black, Brown, female, LBGTQ, atheist, Christian, Muslim, immigrant, poor, whatever: it matters that you're a fellow human being - in my eyes, a fellow Child of God, but, again, I realize that some may not choose this designation for themselves and also that it's their choice that matters - and therefore you are entitled to be treated as such and to have access to the opportunities that flow from (constructive) participation in our society, period.

And as we fight for the full rights of all, we must be as incisive as Baldwin in assessing our situation and as trenchant in advocating for ourselves and in contesting the defenders of the (inequitable) status quo.  In other words, like our beloved Jimmy, we must insist on the right to criticize our country perpetually when in fails to live up to its professed creeds because we love it and will endeavor to make it better.  But, like Baldwin, we'll call out evil clearly ... and then organize, protest and advocate to contest and overcome it.

To return to where this began, as much as I lament us having lost our way in so many facets of our collective life, I do believe that the American Experiment can be reformulated anew and continue in an ever more powerfully positively influential way in the future ... but it'll require a revolution of values (as MLK pointed out), where, to borrow the phrase from the passionate and piercingly insightful Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks, we treat the people's needs as holy (which presumes that we focus on all of the people and endeavor in good faith to find a solution that works as well as possible for the greatest number of us [and then seek to ameliorate any unfortunately disabling side effects for any who are harmed]).  In other words, we must endeavor ever to be equitable and to ground our efforts in good faith as we do so, realizing that achieving a reasonable balance is itself a challenge in our wonderfully but fully diverse society and, indeed, world.

Along the way we can be both guided and chided by MLK and Baldwin, whose legacies of love, insight and advocacy are evergreen as well as ever more relevant to us today.  So I'll reclaim the radical King - the speaker of truth to power who was far less popular in his final years because he held a mirror to America that indicted us all - and the ever-radical Baldwin to inspire me and gird me for what will surely be a long fight, the fight, in fact, of our lives.  I will hold fast to that lodestar vision of the Beloved Community, a place and time in which all will be welcome and celebrated for who they are and what they can do not only for themselves but for the betterment of us all as well.

I accept that this vision is a long way off for now, but will you join me on the path?  As arduous as it will undoubtedly prove at times, can we invest ourselves more meaningfully than in this pursuit?

As Cornell West put it,

The response of the radical King to our catastrophic moment

can be put  in one word: revolution - a revolution in our

priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of

our public life, and a fundamental transformation of our way

of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from

oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

- Cornell West, ed., The Radical King (2015) 

And as Dr. King himself suggested, we should seek,

An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is

the love of God operating in the human heart.  At this level,

we love (all) men not because we like them, nor because their

ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type

of divine spark; we love every (hu)man because God loves him.

- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Strength to Love (1963)

A bigger table indeed....

You don't choose your family.

They are God's gift to you,

as you are to them.

 - The Most Reverend Desmond Mpilo Tutu,

Enthronement Address (1986)

It's Thanksgiving, that most American of holidays, so we pause to reflect on our blessings, revel in the company of relatives and friends and rediscover the true sense of our abundance: the love of those whose presence in our lives makes ours the unique - and uniquely meaningful - journeys that they are.  In this spirit, I offer both this meditation on the traditional Thanksgiving gathering and a suggestion to consider an evolved version of it.

Thanksgiving is the Booker Family holiday: for more than half a century now, I've been journeying to an annual gathering of the tribe, usually somewhere in the Boston area, but occasionally to a farther flung outpost like Atlanta or even in my now home state, New Jersey.  (This year it happens to be on Cape Cod again, but likely without the huge bonfire that so amazed and delighted us at last year's gathering ... but I digress....)

As a child, this was my typically once yearly opportunity to meet and mingle with my father's side of the family, a raucous, loving bunch who had big hearts, big mouths and big laughs.  They were so populous in the small hamlet of West Medford, Massachusetts, that it seemed like every other house belonged to some relative or close family friend.  West Medford, or "Meh-fuh" as it's pronounced (I was explicitly instructed never to phonate the D's), was a magical place that revolved around my grandmother's home at 39 Jerome Street.  To the side of her garage was a pathway to Uncle Charlie's house on the next street over and around the corner was my Aunt Alice's home just past my disabled cousin Jimmy Lassiter's home, and so on.

What a colorful collection of modest souls, starting with my grandmother, the late Carrie Hoyt Booker Frye.  (Just so you know, somehow, she was a Furr, which is ostensibly a branch of my family that has an even longer history in the area ... but, again, I digress....)  Apparently my grandfather James - whom I never met - was a bit of a rapscallion with whom she had 13 children - only 8 of whom survived to adulthood - and then parted ways.  (Yeah, I know, how do you have 13 kids with someone before you judge him unworthy, but isn't this the kind of mystery that makes families so fun?)  Some years later she met and married a wonderful man named Harold Frye, one of the sweetest, gentlest souls I've ever known.  From him I learned two things primarily: first, that one didn't need to be overtly forceful to have great influence - it was his quiet, commanding way that I'll always remember as he was so much a man's man but without the need to show it - and, second, that the role of a spouse is to be inseparably and lovingly committed to and focused on one's beloved - as, for Grandpa Harold, the sun rose and set on his beloved Carrie so much so that even her rather boisterous children would stand down in his presence (but, again, I digress...).

From my grandmother, I learned the art of the matriarch, how a grand dame presides over her brood with an iron will and yet with a sweet - but not too sweet - way about her.  And from her children, I learned a great deal about life, including that it's to be lived fully and joyfully with just a touch of rancor among relatives to balance out the overabundance of love.  Unlike my mother's side of the family, which featured some lifelong feuds among siblings, etc., the Bookers got on each other's nerves occasionally but loved one another unconditionally, an unshakable bond that has left an indelible impression on me (even as it attenuates in my and younger generations ... but again, I digress...).  Squabbles from time to time but love always.

Apparently my Aunt Alyce (who lived to be 99 years old) was a seamstress, a gift that I discovered during my college years when she custom-made some items for me that I'll always treasure in memory.  The eldest boy was my Uncle Frankie, who, among his many talents, was a contractor who rebuilt many of the modest homes in the neighborhood and spent a fair portion of the year in his 'retirement' as an itinerant golfer in Florida.  Then came Uncle Charlie, who, I was told, was never quite right after the War (as in WWII).  (Let's just say that rarely has a more colorful character walked this earth ... because if we say more than that, then we'll have to acknowledge that for every one of his real world accomplishments - and there were several meaningful ones - there are multiple incidents and stories that are much funnier and more lovable in hindsight.)  After this came Uncle Robbie, a sweet soul who became the antecedent of today's Uber driver after he retired from his main career (about which I can no longer remember).  (Let's just say that Uncle Robbie was also one of the sweetest men I've ever known ... and one of the slowest-driving, too!)  And then there was Aunt Gertie, a vibrant, jubilant soul whose presence invariably meant that laughter was imminent and sure to be infectious.  (Aunt Gertie went to visit a friend in Albany, New York, one weekend and didn't come back to West Medford for over 20 years - yeah, each one of 'em had some fascinating stories to tell ... but, again and lovingly, I digress....)  Then came my father, Billy, who was one of two siblings to leave the fold and move away from the family seat, which is why I grew up in Detroit.  (Let's just say that love and the passage of time afford me the luxury of wistful and happy remembrance of my father, because our time together during my adolescence was memorable for all the wrong reasons, which, thankfully, pales now in comparison to the lessons that he taught me - most accidental - and for which I thank him daily still.)  Then came the baby of the family, my Aunt Mary, who, among many gifts in addition to her endearing, quick and hearty laugh, had the most delightfully prominent New England accent, was the second adult in my life other than my (paternal) grandmother to remarry successfully and, it turns out, could drive a school bus, which she did on multiple occasions while ferrying the family down to visit relatives on the Cape.

(You're thinking that I just recounted seven colorful elders, but what about the eighth who survived to adulthood, right?  Well, it turns out that my father's younger brother James Ketell Booker didn't quite make it all the way to adulthood and died when he was fourteen, long before my time.  This being said, my uncle's legacy is with me every day: yes, people, that's actually what the "K" is for in my initials - my middle name is "Kettel" after my uncle - but, it turns out, as you may have noticed, that my father and my grandmother spelled it differently.  One of the many, many cherished memories of my youth was listening to the two of them argue about who spelled it right: a contretemps that my grandmother won, of course, because, as she pointed out with unassailable logic, she came up with the name in the first place.  Though he had to stand down with his mother, my dad never did quite admit that my very name represents a misspelling, a distinction that makes me chuckle every time I think of it ... but, again and also lovingly, I digress....)

As you can likely intuit, I could tell wonderfully crazy stories about these wonderfully crazy people whose influence is so indelible - as a family's should be - but I do so as a prelude to this point: that when we gathered to celebrate this holiday, all 30+ of us including cousins and various other types of relations, there were always a few non-family members at the celebration as well.  As I've aged, I've come to realize that it is perhaps the greatest lesson that my family, collectively, taught me: that as much as we congregated annually to celebrate our loving bond, that fealty was always expansive and benevolent enough to be extended to others.

Ours was always a bigger table, invariably welcoming of others who were instantly accorded an honored place amongst our merry band simply because they were esteemed and treasured by one of us.  Yes, my father's family taught me that the true nature of this collective relationship and of this holiday: that loved ones are related both by blood and by heart and that the greater the both of these the larger and more mutually reinforcing and beneficial the affiliation.  I can't tell you how some of those folks came to join our extended family back in the day; I can simply say that they were as welcomed and honored and treasured as anyone else in the room, an unusual and endearing affiliative gift which they noted often and always gratefully.

So, as you prepare to celebrate this holiday, whom will you invite to your own bigger table?  I can only share my experience, which is that the wider you open your arms, the more love will be in the room.  Accordingly, I hope that you invite someone(s) into the bosom of your brood as the Bookers have done for generations.  In so doing, I also pray that you reap the incidental but incredibly real and meaningful benefit thereof: the more love you extend, the more love will be felt, reveled in and shared.

May your table be bigger in direct proportion to your heart and may the blessings that flow from your association with the diverse and unique group of souls who populate your path in life lead you to treasure every step and every moment so that this and every day becomes a celebration of your gratitude for the Grace in and of your life.

39 Jerome Street is no more, but Carrie Booker Frye's legacy is alive and well - and growing - several generations on.  May your extended family experience what mine has lived joyfully so that you, too, come to appreciate this enhanced sacred celebration of life and love both in the moment and throughout time eternal.  It is truly a gift to be thankful for each and every day....

Happy Thanksgiving from me and my crazy-wonderful extended family, the Bookers!

For as long as I could remember, I had two really great stories

planted within my heart, stories that not everyone has.  The first

was the story of a family that loved me.  They spent time with me,

told me that I mattered, that I was adored, that I could be anything

I dreamed of being - and that they were for me.  Home was a sanctuary.

It was belonging.  It was a soft place for my soul to find rest.  Second, I had

a story about God.  In my God story, God was real, God was good, and I was

fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of this very good God. ... It was and

is a beautiful and (I believe) true story, one that for most of my life has yielded the

awareness that I was never alone and that God was always present.

- John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table:

Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community (2017)

Life and the challenge of living it....

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.

It is a great truth because once we clearly see this truth,

we transcend it.

Once we truly know that life is difficult - 

once we truly understand and accept it -

then life is no longer difficult.

Because once it is accepted,

the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

- M. Scott Peck, MD, The Road Less Travelled

Remember when you were a kid and couldn't wait to be older/an adult to take advantage of the greatly enhanced freedoms that came with it?  How's that working out exactly?  As for me, well, as I sit here typing in front of my computer screen looking at my "I Can't Adult Today" sign (a thoughtful gift from my wonderful wife), I'm torn: truth be told I enjoy my adult life so that I wouldn't want to go back to being a kid again ... but I also now know something that I really wish my parents and/or other elders would have told me back in the day: adulting is much harder than it looks.

In my formative years, if you'd told me that by 55 years of age I would live a life that can be accurately described as a rollercoaster - generally fun and thrilling, but also occasionally and meaningfully nauseating - I wouldn't have believed you: my own parents' lives - and those of the elders whom I also observed - were beset with challenges but on the whole happy.

And, yet, as I write this, I realize that this characterization may, in fact, be wrong: upon closer examination - with my adult life experience and lens on now - I can see that adult life was harder for my loved ones than I appreciated at the time, but I only focused on the part of greatest interest to me, the enhanced freedom part.  I totally underappreciated and underestimated the challenging side ... and therein lies the lesson that I hope to pass on.

In six words: adulting is harder than it looks.

Certainly the enhanced freedoms part of adult life is the easiest to value.  I get to make the vast majority of the decisions in my life, with the exception of those I make interdependently with my spouse/life partner.  And in this choosing is the opportunity to create, for the most part, the life that I want (subject, of course, to the vagaries of fate and the constraints of the level of resources accessible that we all face).  So this part of adulting is great ... and, apparently, the only one that I appreciated sufficiently in my youth.

The flip side of the adulting opportunity, the responsibility to deal with the unique vagaries of fate to which we are all subject, is another matter entirely.  Man, did I miss this totally as a kid: in a word, adulting is hard!

But the evidence was there to see when I was young, but I made the perfectly understandable and normal choice to be oblivious to it: my parents' lives involved a great deal of struggle, too.  There was the challenge of two very different people being and staying married for over four decades.  There was the challenge of their respective/twin addictions.  There was the challenge of being comfortably middle class enough not to want for necessities, but insufficiently so as to have many luxuries that would have made the journey appreciably more fulfilling and fun.

For example, my mother's dream was to travel in her retirement.  She toiled mightily and absorbingly for years trying to impart knowledge, wisdom and life skills to her students, all the while expecting that she would be able to retire in her sixties and see in person that big wide world that she had encouraged so many others to explore through the pages of books.

But it was not to be: less than a year into her retirement and less than a week into her relocation to her new home in the South (which would also make it easier for her to care for my aging, ailing grandmother), she had a series of heart attacks and open heart surgery, a leg amputated and, for all intents and purposes, her dreams of a life of leisure and exploration ended.  She had waited more than 30 years for something that would never be....

When I was young, so enamored of the freedom of adulthood, I failed to learn the other - and, I would argue, more important - lesson of life: with greater freedom comes much greater responsibility and therein lies the true challenge of adult life.

Don't get me wrong, the freedom part can be challenging at times ... but, invariably, these are good problems to have.  (Or, as 'woke' folks describe them, 'First World' problems.)  And there is a major lesson hiding in all of that wonderment that virtually all of us fail to appreciate: success brings with it challenges that must be addressed, too.

Think about it:  The Beatles are considered by many to be the greatest musical group of all time ... but even they couldn't handle being at the pinnacle of their chosen vocation for less than a decade.  So, too, with Mike Tyson, who could arguably be described as having the potential to have been the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time ... except that he couldn't manage life outside of the ring and ended up aborting his career within it as well.  (Fill in your favorite examples here as well.)

In other words, there's something that the Rolling Stones figured out that the Beatles didn't, which is why they continue to defy the odds and prance in spandex six decades later.  So, too, with ... well, I can't come up with a modern boxing analogy, but some of the older generation that preceded Tyson managed to stay on top for a lot longer than he did (admittedly, it turns out, to their physical detriment).  And therein lies the point: even success requires the life skill to handle it (something that I learned the hard way at my own previous professional and personal peak a decade ago).

The greater responsibility part of adulthood is the more obvious and straightforward of the challenges, but this doesn't make it inherently more manageable.  Just because we know life is gonna throw us curve balls doesn't necessarily means that we'll be able to hit them, and when we whiff we end up being clear on the need for a far greater and deeper set of coping skills than we originally anticipated.  Just because we know the pitch is coming doesn't mean that it won't strike us out.

And therein lies the lesson that I hope to share, especially with my younger loved ones and the next generation: we are well advised in life to prepare for the storm especially when it doesn't appear to be on the horizon, because the only certainty to which we can subscribe is that it is, indeed, coming ... multiple times.

At mid-life, I don't have a single friend or loved one who hasn't experienced the loss of a job or a marriage or an appreciable illness or....  And Lord knows, I've experienced them all, as did my parents.  The storm is coming, the question is whether we'll be adult (read = mature) enough to prepare for it (or, more accurately, them).

Among the best preparations, I have learned, are an ever-widening web of strong, loving relationships, a personal spirituality that centers and comforts us and a willingness to be accepting of our unique vagaries of fate.  In raging against the storm, I have found, we do the most damage.  By accepting its legitimacy and presence, on the other hand, we can weather it and learn from the experience.  Turns out that Buddhist principle is true that every circumstance in life (especially the ones that we perceive negatively) is trying to teach us something, the question being whether we'll choose to be open to learning the lesson.

And another Buddhist principle has worked for me, too:  Years ago, during a period of profound turbulence in my own life, I decided to learn how to meditate in an effort to weather it more effectively.  And I failed.  I couldn't sit quietly and quiet my mind as the thoughts - all random, some quite disturbing (which, I now realize, means revealing) - just kept coming and coming and coming.  A forced, 30-minute meditation session often left me more stressed than before because I could now add the frustration of not being able to calm myself to the long list of challenges with which I was already dealing.

And then I read somewhere that the point was not to achieve quiet but to achieve acceptance and release: that I should acknowledge the visions, emotions and thoughts that came up, name them and then release them.  The relief, it turned out, was in the letting go.  So, I learned to say, "this feeling is anger" and then to let it go and "this feeling is hurt/pain" and let it go and "this feeling is confusion" and let it go and so on.  And I felt better having found a type of meditation that I could actually practice.

But I kept reading and then discovered something even better: one sage suggested that meditation was the process of finding and experiencing the uniquely sacred in yourself and life and that if sitting quietly and clearing your head didn't work, you should find an alternative that did.  And this was a revelation because I realized something that I had always known but not fully appreciated: reading is my meditation.  When I am in the journey of the pages I am awash in what's sacred to me, at once fully vibing on the wisdom to be gleaned from whatever I'm reading but also fully present and grateful for the moment and the circumstances that create it.  In sum, when I read, I feel in touch with my deepest reality and grateful for this experience.  And in the temperate times when I can open the window, the song of nature makes this experience even more sublime....

Even better, to this enhanced awareness of and appreciation for a uniquely meaningful meditative practice I can now add writing.  A few years ago, a dear friend (whose identity, truthfully, I can't even remember), mentioned that she had been touched by something I wrote and encouraged me to write more.  Writing had always been an advanced skill of mine - having an English teacher for a mother and a singularly gifted and inspiring priest for an English teacher in high school certainly helped immensely! - and I had neglected it for the most part in my adult life.  I had shut off the creative pursuit in favor of other supposedly more urgent pursuits like raising my family, perfecting my golf game, developing myself as a leader and executive professionally and in my community, etc.  But, encouraged by this recognition, I decided to re-discover my gift.

And what a fulfilling, enlivening and elevating journey it has been!  In the solace of my thoughts, as I parse my reality and seek to glean meaningful learnings from it, I am at peace ... and I also can create something that others find meaningful, too.  Which is why I'm sharing this piece, both because its development has been helpful to me and because it has the potential to be helpful to you, Dear Reader, too.

Which brings me back to where I started this jaunt, wishing that my elders had been more explicit with me about the challenges of adult life.  First, I accept that maybe they were but I just wasn't mature enough to listen.  More importantly, I've learned from this circumstance and will not repeat it: you can be assured that I'll share with my own children and the next generation the need to be more prepared than is obvious to address the inevitable challenges that life will present.

And yet, again, I wouldn't trade this challenging adult life to return to being a kid.  As much as I may be tempted to be wistful about 'lost' or 'wasted' or 'underleveraged' time in my past life, I realize that I can't reclaim it or change it in any way, so I'm compelled to learn from it and go forward living differently and better.  Among the ways that this evidences itself is a continuing imperative to savor the freedoms of life and to embraces its challenges as learning opportunities/wisdom developers.

In the end, this is all that I have in this one journey through this time and space which which I'm gifted: to learn to from life and, in so doing, to make ever more fulfilling choices, one of the most important of which is to share with others along the way.  As hard as it sometimes is to accept, this will be my legacy, what lingers long after I'm gone physically: the impression that I made in the lives of others and the meaning that I shared in my earthly time.

And as I write this, I realize that, indeed, long ago, I was exposed to this wisdom but wasn't yet mature enough to appreciate it fully.  As the Bard imparted through Hamlet more than half a millennium ago:

To be or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind

to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

or to take arms against a sea of trouble

and by opposing end them.