The State of Grace

The State of Grace

I am struggling with something. I have lived outside the United States for eleven and a half of my sixty-seven years (17.2% of my life). That was in Latin America (Venezuela for four years and Costa Rica for two years), Europe (Rome, Italy for three years), Asia (Tokyo Japan for a quick three months) and Toronto, Canada for two plus years. I would venture to say that is more foreign expatriate experience than most. I also traveled a lot internationally for my forty-five year career to Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Add to that a lot of personal vacation travel overseas and I think there are very few places I have not been. I have not been in Iran or Mongolia and other than Pakistan, I have not been to many of the “Stans” in the steppes of Asia Minor. I have always felt very global and have had a hard time understanding people who have no connection to the rest of the world. So why, after all of that, am I feeling so comfortable being on my little hilltop and NOT being or even thinking so globally any more?

I saw the same thing happen to my mother. She had spent a lifetime of working and traveling globally. She lived for twelve years in Venezuela (even giving birth to one her three children there, my sister Barbara), two years in Costa Rica, twelve years in Rome, Italy and another year split between Southern Brazil and Lagos, Nigeria. It’s easy to calculate the twenty-seven years she lived overseas at 27% of her life since she lives to 100 years old. And it was the last thirty-six of those years, combined with the first thirty that comprised the vast bulk of her domestic stays. The first thirty are not so strange since she was the child of a working class immigrant, but the last thirty-six are more anomalous and spent mostly in the arid environs of Las Vegas, Nevada. This is not to mention that the middle thirty-four of her years she also traveled extensively to every remote corner of the earth and did only a little traveling to the rest of the world during her last thirty-six years.

Maybe this is less startling and more understandable as part of the ages of man with early life spent orienteering oneself and the later years those of settling in. Perhaps the wanderlust is simply something that wears thin and gives way to the inertia of age. One can liken this to ones tendency to have broad and varied interests in youth and then spending one’s productive middle life employed in a given occupation, only to find one’s self drifting off or even back to broad and varied interests once again as one ages out of the productive economy. So maybe what I am describing and what I am experiencing is simply a normal life progression and has less to do with an inexplicable metamorphosis. But if that is so and I am merely experiencing that stasis of old age, why do I find myself less concerned about the rest of the world than I have in the past? With all the marvelous advances in multilateral communications, I have more and more resources at my disposal with ease to stay engaged remotely. But while I stay informed, I am still left wondering why I feel less engaged?

Back in the late 1980’s when I was responsible for the creation of the Emerging Markets area of my bank, a friend (Bruce) got me involved with CARE, the global relief and development organization. I spent twenty years being an engaged activist and fundraiser for CARE, even acting as Chairman of the New York Trustees group for six years. I went on to dedicate nine years to serving on the Board as a Director and traveled to Latin America, Africa and Asia in that capacity, even going so far as to involve my wife Kim who had not previously seen much of the developing world. Since I cycled off the Board after three terms (that was the dictated term limit) I have become less and less engaged in what I was totally dedicated to for thirty years. I still have a warm spot in my heart for CARE and the work it does to improve the lives of people of the world, but it occupies a declining portion of my mindshare. Did I wear myself out? Did I really not care as much as I thought I cared (an interesting ponder especially given the name of the organization)? Or perhaps I simply have less passion for everything and must choose my passions more narrowly.

I think that may be the real answer, at least for me. I have always been a man of passion. Perhaps it is my portion of Latin blood that makes me so. I always liked that comment that the ancient Greeks only asked one thing about a man when he was eulogized; did he have passion. That is both a wonderful way of describing a man (or woman), but is also the proper tensing of the notion. It expresses passion as something of the past less so than being a thing of the present. I think of that less of a case of uniform post-mortem discussion and more of a realization that passion is a finite intangible. It is not something that is easily replenished nor something that is limitless. There are examples like Mother Teresa or Grandma Moses who remained passionate in their later age, but I suspect it is more than coincidental that these two obvious examples are women. WOmen are often forced by the conventions of society to restrain their passions and, I suspect, often can only find the confidence and space to express then later than the average man. It could also be that women are more passionate than men in an absolute sense. That is both too difficult to divine and far too subjective to be definitive, but I am still inclined to accept the notion of the finite nature of passion within any given individual as well as the notion that different people have different levels of passion innately in their souls.

I consider myself a passionate person on whatever spectrum we choose to use for its measurement. I feel I have always been so to varying degrees. I know that in my youth my passions did not, strangely enough based on the prevalent youth culture of the late 1960’s, extend to politics. Today they do. They did not lend themselves so much to charitable acts as they do today. They were more about self-discovery and the exploration of the vastness of the world. Bu that was the known world more than the unknown world. There is a very real difference. Some people thirst for adventure into the unknown. Thank God there are such people to propel mankind forward. The rest of us are perhaps just curious about what is rather than what might be. And further, there are those that are content and most comfortable in remaining within the confines of what they understand completely. We all know plenty of people like that and may even find ourselves feeling they are lesser for their limited awareness and curiosity. But that is probably wrong-minded.

I want others to think of me as a man of passion and I remain of this mind even now as I age. I will admit to more narrowly-defined spheres of expression of that passion, but I want to wake up each morning wanting to achieve something not just getting through my day comfortably. There is a part of me that respects the fact that my legs regularly giggle with excess energy. And then there is another part of me that yearns for peace. For passion and peace are not good bedfellows and reaching a state of peace is reaching a state of grace to which I certainly aspire. I would like to think that thinking and acting globally has allowed me to express my natural degree of passion and that the passion which I have expended makes my ultimate peace and state of grace all that more achievable. Perhaps what I am saying is that the state of grace is a distillation of the best of passion.