What surprised me, however, was that I had published it October 31, 2010 . . . 2010? That was over 10 months ago.

As I saw it on my blog, a blog I recently rechristened “Our Life in Business” for reasons I’ll describe in a second, I had to wonder where I had been for close to a year.

Truthfully. . .it’s as if I had been in a slumber.

I’m not exactly sure what did it. I took a drive to a South Florida conference just a few days ago and used the opportunity to dictate up a storm about the incredible issues confronting our nation at this point. And, of course, I couldn’t help but recognize in the silence of a four hour drive what had also occurred in the personal lives of our family over that same year.

That’s all it took. I lunged for a dictating unit realizing it was time to get back in the game.

I have much I’d like to share and I’m looking forward to sharing it.

o Life in Business has evolved into Our Life in Business with a family of five actively engaged at every level.

o On the federal level, the Obama Presidency continues to self-destruct at a level that even my most optimistic tomes to President Obama could not justify.

o And, on a personal and business level, the shades of gray continue to fade as clarity begins to emerge.

Awakened from my slumber. . . indeed!  Stay tuned.

It’s always been my great desire to produce both, even if not simultaneously.

     That blistering blizzard of sleet. . .

If ever I’d thought those winds would blow;

     Those ravaging waves complete! 

Could I ever have thought I’d deliver us all;

     With safe passage through that heat?

What arrogance would I have shown;

     As if it was mine to beat.

So what did it mean if that’s what I felt?

      A Narcissism elite?

Or perhaps the hand of God above;

     A Pilot’s navigational feat.

I will never know as I sit here today;

     Calming my post-storm seat.

But I am so certain it must not be in vain;

     As redemption I earnestly seek!

It was way back and certainly within the first decade of its infancy. I can remember any number of takeaways and many stay with me today.

As a matter of fact, I can probably say that the primary life drivers for my perception of reality today came from my mom and dad first. . . and the est training a very close second.

While there may not necessarily be an inclusive list, they are still some of the biggest in my life.

1. Do what you say you’re going to do . . . and nothing less.
2. Take 100% personal responsibility for every outcome in your life.
3. Saying and doing must be one and the same, or you rob yourself of your power over your own life.

And, my universal rules:

1. It is what it is.
2. This too shall pass.
3. Intentions do matter, but results rule.

All of that has become so incredibly ingrained in my very psyche that, along the way, as I built sand castles (sometimes stronger, sometimes not) on life’s shores, I never forgot the fundamental maxims ingrained in me in that intensive training years ago.

I’m thinking of that time now for lots of reasons.

One of the reasons is that I had the toughest time understanding, when I underwent those 60 hours of intensive training followed by multiple 10 hour intensives thereafter, that whole groups of people couldn’t cope with their pasts in ways which allowed them to shed themselves of the weight of accumulated years so that they could liberate themselves to move forward.

I just didn’t understand it. I didn’t get why it was so tough for them.

Of course, I was also a whole lot younger then and, while surrounded by people my age, I was also surrounded by people 10, 20 and 30 years older. They were the ones who tended to have the greatest problem.

But I’m now them. 

It looks quite different from this angle.  And the reason is not all that difficult to define. 

It goes like this.

As each of us goes through life, we continue to append more and more data:  raptures, ecstacies, emotions, ruptures, broken relationships, deaths, tragedies, failed dreams, broken promises, betrayals, and on, and on, and on . . . !

And as we process them through, the cumulative weight becomes tougher and tougher to bear. . . or shed.

In our younger years, while we have the inexperience of youth, we at least had the singleness of the event. Therefore, as long as we could clean up that event, process it through, get to the other side, we were ready for the next. 

But the problem, as we get older, is that even if we do that, one event after another (after another after another) eventually bows us under the sheer weight of it all.

As I look back over these last years, I am awed by the sheer cumulative weight of the experiences I created and then lived through.

And I find myself today doing my very best to shed all of that massive weight as I step forward to rediscover the mojo and  light-hearted strut that kept me so agile throughout my life.   

I’ve learned that it isn’t all that easy.  But there is a way. . .a process. . .I’ve learned to tap.  Let me describe it.

1.  Learn from, but nonetheless shed at any cost, the past:  live joyfully in the present with a picture of the future you are now creating.

2.  Passionately hold on to and incessantly defend your right to be the primary creative force of your own life and its future.

3. Formally reinforce that process daily in whatever way(s) is appropriate. Morning prayers; night time baths with a smooth glass of cognac; mid-day treadmill workouts; an evening run. Reinforce daily that process.

4. Be wise, but never be clever.

5. And defend yourself, but do that with as little harm to others as possible.

I’m not clear on whether all of that is enough.  But I do intuitively understand that to make it through the last half of my life, I have to lighten the load I’m carrying along the way.

It’s as if the early originality becomes your personal prison if you can’t break free of it later.

The French cuffs and cufflinks were very cool in my late 20′s and early 30′s, especially when it was not necessarily the dominant look within my age group, but is it ending up becoming my own personal cliché as I get older and have problems changing or evolving my style?

When does Personal Presence become Personal Cliche?

Jordan, just out of the 9th grade, is in a summer composition program at Lake Highland.  He was asked, as his opening assignment, to write an essay on a topic which affected him personally.

He wrote it, and after it was finished, he asked me if I would read it.

I did. . .and swallowed hard to get through it all, although I couldn’t hold back the tears.

Several days later, I asked him if I could publish it, and he said “OK”, but only if I included an introduction.

This introduction is the only one you’ll need. . .trust me!

Jordan A. Pino
Mr. Sprouse and Mr. Driscoll
Advanced Composition
29 June 2010
A Recollection of my Nonna

When I was a little boy, the world seemed different. All was small and everything that was bigger than I seemed to be almighty…almost invincible. Ever since I was born, my family was the center of life. My dad was the ultimate role model; my mother was reality, and someone who would take care of me. But my grandmother, my “Nonna,” was a great woman who resembled all that was right and proper. I used to believe she was truly invincible.

When I was younger, I would frequently sleep over at her house. My grandfather or “Nonno” had passed away a little bit after I was born and my Nonna lived alone. When I would visit, we would do many things together. We would sometimes watch TV. However, many times, we would do things that a young five-year-old normally doesn’t do. For example, she taught me how to knit. She also taught me how to sew, by hand and machine. Sometimes we would play childish games like hide and seek, or simple card games like “go fish.” We would also read books together: Nonna reading “Ogi” in Italian and I reading “Dog and Cat” in simple 1st grade English.

Always, when I visited she would cook for me. Nonna was a fantastic cook. All of her famous Italian meals were prepared every time I would sleep over. After dinner and in good weather we would occasionally take a walk around the neighborhood. Nonna’s house used to be a lot of fun.

Around the age of six, Nonna had her first accident. She was driving her little, red car on the way to her house. She was coming around the bend of the street in her neighborhood when she decided to slow down. The only problem was Nonna had mistaken the brake pedal for the gas pedal, which accelerated her car into the neighbor’s bushes. When my dad found out, he was annoyed at first and then became really scared for my grandmother when he fully appreciated what had happened:  Nonna’s driving days were over.

A few years later my Nonna had her second accident; she became sick with pneumonia and entered the hospital. For a while, she was deathly ill because her immune system was having trouble fighting the pneumonia and most of the doctors had given up hope, but after several months, she left the hospital, weakened but alive.

Her third accident was especially bad for her. Nonna was walking about the house, doing her daily routine when she fell on her hip. She called 911 on a nearby phone and was rushed to the hospital. After she recovered, she no longer could walk and has remained in a wheel chair ever since.  She would no longer be leaving her house except for occasional visits to our house or a restaurant and would require 24/7 care.

This is when I realized my Nonna was no longer invincible.

With age comes understanding. I see my Nonna every single Sunday after church. Although we tell everyone she is “strong like bull,” each visit we see Nonna, her health is evidently worse and worse. It used to be one accident after the other, which affected her physical strength, but now it is the slow deterioration of her mental health. When I see her, she is no longer active in our conversations, she is agitated by her inability to put words together, and she can’t walk at all and can barely hold her cup to her lips. I know now that the lady who taught me many skills, but also how to be respectful and proper, was slipping herself.

When I was six or seven, never in a million years would I have thought that Nonna wouldn’t be able to even get into her bed without a 24 hour assistant. Her only two reliefs would be living in her own house and not in a nursing facility, and, most of all, each of us being able to see her every weekend.

I used to think she was invincible and now I know she isn’t.

However, I know, no matter what, she was great and incredibly strong. Although she is undeniably getting weaker by the day, at 88 years old she has surpassed all of her brothers and sisters and has had a wonderful life. What’s really left of my grandmother is a memory. A memory of  someone who was once bigger than life. And what she has left behind is in my dad and the stories he tells of her. But above all the one thing that she keeps important and dear to her heart is the importance of family––something that I will never lose.

Now that I continue to look at it…and interestingly, for every one comment I get directly on LifeInBusiness, I get anywhere from 25 to 50 private or personal messages. A number of the personal messages generate the follow-up articles that I publish on the blog.

So, let me simply encourage you to respond.  Whether it’s private or published, I appreciate it.  And it gives me the opportunity to understand what I have to address in future posts.

Strobe and I had tried so hard to get a ride south from South Bend, Indiana and we had a couple of short rides. However, it was tough going, since college students across the country in those “Across the Universe” days were heading to Washington D.C. and the word was out not to assist those draft-dodging anti-American perverts.

Nonetheless, after trying several times to get longer rides, with no great success, we finally captured the ride of our lives from Indianapolis straight through Nashville, TN. When we got the ride and climbed into the car, it was as cold as the proverbial witch’s kitchen. Hours later, after riding with some madman who had a gun in his glove box (and was proud to display it while he was driving), we got dropped off in Nashville.

It was a balmy spring night. It was about 10:30.  It sported a little moisture in the air and this wonderful engulfing breeze. It was not hot and it wasn’t cold. Strobe and I felt the air, as well as the dew in the air, against us and we were so very proud of ourselves.

We were halfway to New Orleans, less than a day after leaving South Bend.  It was no longer cold.  And we had no idea how little awareness we had of how youth plays out.

These many years later, at a time so very distant, the feeling is no different.

As I sit out on the dock tonight, and feel the soft moisture in the air, uncut by either cold or heat, it brings back those sensations that these passing decades and countless life events have been unable to subdue on their own.

Youth and aspiration: a balmy night where all is right with the world.  Thank God!