You Do Not Live in a Real World ...

I receive lots of email forwards and most of them are junk. I delete them.

One stuck in my memory.

It was short film and showed an elderly widower cleaning out his house because he had to move to an assisted living facility.

He was going through some boxes with his son’s effects. His son had enlisted in the army and was killed in action. It hurt so much that he never mustered the will to go through the two cartons that contained all that was left of his son’s life.

He picked up a diary and opened it at random. His son wrote about how he and his dad went fishing and he was able to spend an entire day with his father. “Best day of my life,” he concluded.

Laboriously the man climbed up to the attic and located his own diaries. He selected a volume and flipped over to the same date. “I had a ton of work to do but Jim kept jumping up and down saying I had promised to go fishing with him. I gave up in disgust and went with him. Jim fell out of the boat and cried. He made so much noise that all the fish scattered. We didn’t catch a darn thing. Lousy day.”

He went to his porch, sat on a rocking chair and sobbed uncontrollably.

A CPM alum – he was among the first to take the course when I was teaching it at Columbia Business School – was lamenting a lack of communication with his son. One sentence he wrote really struck home, “I try to imagine how unresponsive I may have been to my own parents when I was in my early 20s and they had just gotten divorced.”

It took me back to one of the happiest years of my life. I was in Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar) and reading 3 books a day. Food appeared when I needed it and I loved sitting in my cane chair watching the rain and playing with my dog and, of course, reading. That is when I discovered P. G. Wodehouse and that began a love affair that is still going on.

It was much, much later that I discovered that things were not so fine with my parents. Multiple family members on both sides had serious medical problems and some died. There were financial issues, family discord and career challenges. My mother could not visit her ailing relatives because it was too far and too expensive.

I was sunk in my own cocoon and blissfully oblivious to all this.

You do not live in a real world. You live in your mind. Two people can be right next to each other and living in entirely different domains.

So, is it wrong to build a cocoon of well-being and live inside it?

No, not at all. A good part of my coaching is showing my clients exactly how to do this.

But you need to be aware that this is what you are doing and there are others who do not have either the ability or facility to do so. And you must be of succor to them. The ‘them’ begins with those close to you and then expands and expands till you reach the vantage point of the sage.

A disciple came to the sage and asked in all seriousness, “Master how should I treat others?”

The sage looked at him with compassion and said, “There are no others.”

Peace!