The Good Earth
Yes, I am borrowing Pearl Buck’s title and no, this story is not about a family living in a small Chinese village. This story is about sowing and reaping the resources that the Earth gives us. In microcosm, I am living the reality of reaping what I sow right here on this little hilltop. Some of my days are spent teaching and there is little that happens in this world that is more about growth than education. My mother pulled herself out of the confines of upstate New York by attending Cornell University and learning how to globalize her thinking and finding ways to improve the lives of people all across the world for forty years. She worked first as a development officer in Latin America, teaching indigenous people how to bring the benefits of modern techniques to their subsistence lives. She went on to get her doctorate in adult education and to develop and administer programs around the world as a UN diplomat to teach people how to thrive. A better use of resources cannot be imagined than the cost of training her to think and act differently while she changed her life at Cornell. Whatever the Land Grant College Act of 1862 (technically the Morrill Act) did, it brought education to a broad section of the population as part of the infrastructure movement initiated by Abraham Lincoln. That’s right, education IS the quintessential infrastructure. Infrastructure is defined as “the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.” What could be more necessary for the advancement of society and the wellbeing of the population than education? So I teach at the University of San Diego and will expand my teaching from finance and project financing to the ethics of global business.
Besides teaching, I also do expert witness work primarily in the arena of investments, using my forty-five years of experience in business and finance to help people solve problems among themselves that need righteous determinations. This too is reaping what I have sown. I spent many years (enjoyable years, I might add) learning all of the ins and outs of investment management and the administration thereof. While I did my share of execution, I spent much more time administering and growing such enterprises and thus have both a broad knowledge of how things should work and what does and doesn’t work. That is what makes me a good expert for litigation purposes and, not to be too grandiose in my self-estimation, very Solomonesque (as in knowing how to divide the baby). I invested my time and efforts wisely over those many years because I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge and did so with as much breadth as possible. This was my personal way of building my own infrastructure. Whenever I was confronted with a career choice to specialize (and thus garner more income by becoming more expert and adding more value) versus broadening my understanding and awareness by learning something new, I always chose the later. It was simply more interesting to me and now, with hindsight, I would argue it did more to build my knowledge base for then unknown expertise and future value. That is the essence of the good Earth, putting resource in to reap a multiplier effect of benefit in the future. One does not just reap what one sows, one reaps multiples of what one sows if done wisely.
If I am not teaching or adjudicating as an expert, I am usually writing these days. I find writing to be one of my most productive activities. I am quite prolific in that I write at least 1,300 words a day and usually more like 3,000 on all of my projects. At that pace I will produce over one million words per year or, on average, a dozen books worth of the written word per year. Writing is not just composition, writing is thinking and research. It is organizing and putting into productive, understandable form, thoughts and advocacy that I feel is important. Sometimes it serves to enlighten and sometimes it serves to lighten, which is to say, entertain. It keeps me mentally active, it gives me daily purpose and structure and there is a degree of visible productivity that feels tangible and enduring. Sounds a lot like infrastructure to me.
So, between teaching, experting and writing, I have lots to consume my only limited mental capacity and that is all well and good, but I need to exercise my body as well. I do that like most retirees, out on my hilltop property. Sometimes it takes the form of a project that is easily defined as adding to the infrastructure of my home. The deck and the roof and the garage and the pathways and the games area are certainly among those. They all represent investments in physical attributes that serve the purpose of making this property optimally productive for me and my family. But much of my time, by my own preference, is spent working the good Earth (literally this time) to the abstract and ephemeral purpose of creating beauty. That is mostly the beauty of nature, but also the beauty of turning nature into something more that is evocative of other greatness. These are the gardens, the bonsai, the Bison Boulder and the boulder paintings that I create to make me like all men and even the earliest of man that feel the need to leave their mark on the physical world. What could be more productive than doing that? Think about people like Robert Moses, who probably did more to beautify New York and leave a physical presence on Earth to be enjoyed by and add value to millions of future generations. This is the same thing Teddy Roosevelt did with the National Park System. This is infrastructure of the highest purpose because it uplifts and inspires man to added greatness.
By now you undoubtedly realize that there are several purposes to my story today. I do enjoy writing about my exploits and surroundings, but I also like advocating for causes. The cause of the moment that is consuming our national thoughts (other than battling oppression in police brutality and voter suppression) is whether Joe Biden is doing good for this country by proposing a $2.3 Trillion “infrastructure” bill that is far-reaching in its definition and in its grandness of purpose. I submit by virtue of how I choose to spend my time in “retirement” on this hilltop that big-picture concepts like retirement and infrastructure need to be defined broadly to encompass the fullness of their true meaning. One must also think in terms of fundamentals. If I am spending my time in the ways that I find most productive rather than what puts food on the table, then I have found my version of retirement. If we find ways to advance the cause and quality of life for the greatest number of people for the greatest value added over time, then we have found our best version of infrastructure. History will be the judge of whether the good Earth has been served.