When my first grade career started under the watchful eye of my mother’s first cousin, Ms. Conrad, I was only thinking about what it would take to make it to the end of day. Then I could walk home, play a little football with friends, watch the evening news with my mother, and do my homework with some help from Whiskers, my cat. There was no thought of where the next seventy plus years would take me.
It is a lot easier to look back on seven decades than to imagine the future when you are six years old in a rapidly changing world. Now it makes sense for me to look back. I retired about a year ago when our company went out business. Our business dried up with changes in government funding. Since then I came back and worked one stray project but there haven’t been any others in eleven months. We weren’t building buggy harnesses, we were analyzing needs and designing fiber networks.
My first thought is that I am happy to have worked for the last fifty-six years in a number of productive roles. I consider myself even more fortunate to have worked from home the last fifteen years. I worked hard, maybe too hard during large parts of my life, but I do remain proud of what I have done.
Still it is important to acknowledge that your work career is not your life. How you measure your life probably says a lot more about the person you have become than almost any summary you could write.
My overall measure of life is to look and see if the places, people and organizations that I have touched are any better off for my having been there.
Digging deeper, I look at the kind of people that our children have become. Then, I look at the kind of life we have lived. Did we help others when possible, were we kind and respectful people, did we strive to give more in relationships than we took? I also look at what we learned from life, how much we enjoyed the things we have done, what kind of relationships did we build including those with our spouse, parents, children, grandparents, and friends. I don’t seek to measure anything precisely or to see how close to perfection we got, I just want to understand if our good intentions came through. To have more friends than we started with in first grade isn’t a bad accomplishment especially if you have managed to keep one of those first grade friendships going.
It is not important to me that every person I have met likes me because I have run into some not so nice people along the way. If they tried to harm me or those working for me, I hope they remember that I always stood up for what was right even if it made some people unhappy or came with a personal cost. There are also some people with extraordinarily thin skin who expect to be treated like the privileged person that they have adopted for their persona. You can never do enough for these folks because they will always be slighted by something you said or did which would not bother a normal person. I happy to let these folks stew in their own juices on the sidelines of my life. Whether they ended up liking me or hating me is irrelevant. That handful of people like that intersected my life for varying periods of time is hardly matters because they were just passing through.
Finally in measuring our lives, we have to look at the times we have lived through. I lived in Canada for sixteen years and over sixty years in the United States. I can remember things that touched me throughout life, the polio epidemic, President Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s election, the Watergate hearings, Vietnam demonstrations, moving to Canada, the energy crisis of the seventies, 20% interest rates in the early eighties, the Quebec separation crisis, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama’s election, COVID and Biden’s four years in office. I have lots of other memories especially of farming in Canada, my twenty years with Apple, and the fifteen years living on the North Carolina coast. For over fifty years the challenges thrown our way have been ones where we could adjust our lives and get on with it. Only recently has that changed.
Governments have come and gone, we have lived our lives. Then Trump and the MAGA movement showed up. The first four years were bad but largely erased by the peace and sanity of the Biden years. Now Trump is back and the threat to our country and the life we have lived is immeasurable. We wake every day wondering what the idiot in the White House has done overnight. If we were ten or fifteen years younger, we would move back to Canada. I don’t want the final chapters of my life written from within the confines of Trump’s world of hate and violence. I fight Trump world with the written word and my voice. The hope we nourish is that we can finally have justice in the White House. We must demonstrate to the world that no man is above the law in America.
Our technological infirmity 