The Silence of the Lamb
March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, right? Is that all about the balancing act of life or is it about the weather patterns of the Northern Hemisphere, or perhaps its all biblical in suggesting that lions and lambs can coexist? I really don’t know and Google isn’t being that helpful about it all. What I do know is that as we approach the end of March, the weather here on the hilltop is not feeling all that lamb-like. I am seeing nothing but 50s and 60s as far out as my weather app takes me and that is not what I have come to expect on my hilltop at this time of year. Actually, now that I think about it, it was pretty much this same way last year with all those atmospheric rivers that hit us, a new phenomenon that seems to have been displaced in the popular press by El Niño, which came and went pretty much without much ceremony. I suppose I shouldn’t be whiny about the weather here in San Diego, but it does play a big part in my state of mind, so its hard for me to ignore when it seems a bit shivery in the early light of morning.
We’ve had enough rain this year to produce a nice early Spring bloom, both in the garden and along the hillsides. There have been the normal array of yellow and orange wildflowers, but there are also an abundance of wild lilacs in their prime of cobalt blue, a particularly pleasant color to see along the hillsides where nobody tends them, but they still show their flourish of color. The Pride of Madeira with its complementary cobalt blue stalks seems somewhat subdued this season as do the red toppers on the various aloes in the yard. The euphoria have made a feeble effort to send up a few seed stalks, but I’m happy for that since I now know that all that does for the plant is make it less pretty and viable after the boom is off the stalk. So both the gardens and hillsides of the surrounding area seem to be in good shape with plenty of Spring showing, but nothing too over the top to create excess work for Joventino, who comes tomorrow for his regular once every three weeks trimming of the yard.
I seem to have run aground on Spring projects this year. There are the new pots and there is the new Turkish amulet tree, which now boasts 150 blue and white glass evil eye amulets of various sizes, but otherwise I can’t seem to find too much else that is screaming for attention. During the moments when it is nice enough to sit outside and enjoy the garden, I am still in wonder of the diversity and beauty of these gardens and immediately think about how fortunate we are to live in this Garden of Eden on this hilltop. Its good to like your surroundings and it always helps to start the day in a positive frame of mind. I think that is particularly so in retirement since most of your state of mind is a function of what you make of it as there is much less external stimuli to move you there otherwise. We spend most of our lives reacting to what is thrown at us, but it is at this stage of life when we are the primary instigators of the thoughts and actions that drive our spirit. Retirement and its impact on us remains one of my big thought topics.
I saw this morning that Larry Fink, the man who has run Blackrock, the $10 trillion money management business for as long as I can remember, published his annual letter to shareholders and spent an inordinate amount of his attention on the looming retirement crisis in the world. That gave me pause since it was eleven years ago that I published Global Retirement Crisis when I was a Clinical Professor at Cornell’s business school. That is a poignant issue for me. You see, Larry Fink is practically a household name in the money management business, the business where I had my most successful senior management moments over ten years and at three firms. I came and went with almost no notice except perhaps to a few employees who remember my days fondly. My impact on the industry was anything but dramatic, which is not to say that I am not proud of my minor accomplishments, but rather that I was no Larry Fink, even by a wide margin. And yet, here is Larry, making note of a globally important topic a full decade after I noted the issue and wrote very convincingly about it in a well-received academically published book that has been cited over the years by other academics and which remains a first page mention when you Google the topic. That’s right, next to the articles about Larry Fink’s annual letter to shareholders, Google mentions my book and my name. I guess in the world of money management and in my world of academic notoriety, that constitutes my 15 minutes of fame. While it is hardly all that special or worthy of too much attention, it does make me feel momentarily good and it causes me to think that when I go this morning to meet with Congressman Mike Levin for a cup of coffee, I will take a copy of the book, autograph it for good measure and give it to him with the thought that the topic I wrote about all those years ago is on the front pages of the financial press this morning…so there.
Wow, that proves to me that we really all do have to self-generate all of our own feel-good in retirement because it’s less and less likely by the day that anyone is going to tell us how wonderful we once were in our professional lives. I remember feeling the same way when my mother retired and got further and further away from her Diplomatic status with the UN. I recall thinking that it was such a shame that her light that burned so bright for so many years in a professional sense just faded away to a few old acquaintances that remembered her fondly. I think her career was far more impactful than anything I ever did and so I guess I should not spend too much time bemoaning the passage into irrelevance that sooner or later we all go through. In some ways I admire my old partner Bruce’s attitude of boldly saying (when I invited him to speak to one of my business school classes) that he preferred to become irrelevant. What seemed like laziness to me at the time is increasingly seeming like noble humility. The world will move on past us, as it should, no matter how big and powerful we once were in our day. I have always been happy to not have any statues of me that might cause someone somewhere to ask, who is that guy up there on that horse? The world has more important things to consider and many bigger problems to deal with than to spend a nanosecond wondering about the trivial things that I may have done during my time on earth.
That brings me back to lions and lambs. We may be lions in our work life and then regress to lambs in retirement, but more importantly, we must all become silent lambs at some point as well. What does that all mean? I think it means that we are the only ones who should think about our past glories and we should spend our last days helping others to find their glories rather than thinking about whatever roaring we may have done in life. No one wants to hang around a lion and everyone loves a lamb, especially if it stays silent.