I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
Walt Whitman
I’ve had a long and varied career in business. I’ve started companies and folded companies. Given advice and sometimes even taken some. Made money and lost some too.
Along the way, I had the opportunity to work with extraordinary people who inhabited jobs big and small, working in companies large and small.
As part of that, I authored hundreds of thousands of words on a range of topics I never expected to know when I was young and wondering what I would do with myself.
Digressing here, when I was seven, I thought I might be a big game hunter. Who knows why? Later, I imagined myself as an architect, a chaplain, and briefly an attorney. None of those things came to pass. Instead, I worked in the building trades, helped start a coffee company, and then made my way as a consultant and finally as an executive.
Heading into my seventh decade, I confess I have not figured out the meaning or ways of retirement. My curiosity, restlessness, and deeply grooved sense that I only exist if I’m doing something keep badgering at me.
Walt Whitman’s elegiac poem, Song of Myself, famously includes the line “I am large, I contain multitudes.” What a marvelous invitation to introspection and exploration. How large do I dare to live? How far do I dare to grasp? How still do I dare to sit, knowing that . . .
I [also] exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.