Balance

I listened to a man speak for an hour today and when he was finished I knew where I was and what I was about, at least in the moment. He is a man of significant courage, or balls, if you will. If he is to be believed he has come up out of the coal mines, attended universities on football scholarships, worked for IBM where he discovered who he was and who he could be and then built an empire. A couple of them, actually. I believe. You are, as he states so beautifully and succinctly, your results, and that is all there is to that.

I've been in the working world for, let me see, a lot of years. From small businesses, large businesses, start ups, technology, insurance, technology, technology, services, technology and now this, Print. But still technology. After all, bidness is bidness no matter what you make or sell it's about the game called the bottom line and I am almost always about technology even if it is operational, finance, or analysis. But the truth is, I freaking LOVE the game called The Bottom Line. I live and breathe for it and have lost limbs, lives and marriages over it. I am the bottom line.

At the company where I grew up, the high tech corp which has since been swallowed up by Mr. E., I was as passionate about my job as anybody you'd ever come across. Passionate and earnest. Oh so very, very earnest in everything I did. In the end when I found out that not everybody was earnest or honest or passionate about the bidness I was stupid heart broken and disillusioned and crawled off into a hole to re-evaluate my life and all that.

I wish, I do so wish, that this man had come along when I was thirty and malleable and I would have jumped right on his football bus and who knows what would have happened? But that's not what happened. He came along now. Now when I am middle aged and tired and so very untrusting. And the most terrible thing, you know, I believe in his vision. It's a game plan I could get behind, align myself with and just, you know, take off. Don't you know.

I have hardened into a shell of unwillingness and now find myself gnawing at my own self restraint and wanting to bust out and be thiry-two again and on fire.

Well so maybe I will come to the party after all. Forty-three or otherwise.