Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! The Flip-Flop Fairy (who I happen to know is the second cousin to the Tooth Fairy) floated by on Friday and returned my flip-flops for the season. It was about 80 degrees on Friday, which is unseasonably warm for April, but I was thrilled to be able to free the toes! Next week its dropping back into the 50s, which is more normal - but I love those temperatures for long walks in the woods, so I am not complaining. There will be many days of flip-flops, and I will be able to retire my slippers to the closet soon.
This weekend instead of an essay I am sharing some of my plans for my newsletter and podcasting efforts. Starting next weekend, I am splitting RWL into two newsletters. You will be getting the traditional RWL - an intro and links on Wednesdays, and then the Sunday essay will start coming to you under the new name of “Being in the World”(BITW). If you are currently subscribed to RWL, you will be automatically added to the BITW mailing list. But once I start using the BITW, you will be able to unsubscribe from it, from RWL, or from both. Of course I hope you choose to stay and tell your friends!
For now, I intend to continue with both newsletters. I like doing both. They exercise different skills for me and allow me to think and share different ways. A few months ago I made the decision to break the newsletter into two parts because I felt like I was mashing two different things together, and I felt like that wasn’t working, at least not for me. That led me to this decision.
So what is “Being in the World” going to be about, and why that name? Ever since I was a kid, there has always been one question: how do I live a worthy life? It’s a bit of a weird question, I suppose, but I think we all ask it, sooner or later. I was raised Catholic, so I always had the Church’s perspective on what was ethical, but it felt incomplete because it primarily focused on the spiritual and not the physical. What I wanted was something more in the world. I remember being exposed to the ideas of the Renaissance in 8th grade social studies class, and that was really the beginning for me. The idea of the well-rounded person, who could appreciate literature and science, who used their powers of reason to not only seek spirituality but to be and do in the world. In high school Western Civilization class, we had our first exposure to the Classical world of the Greeks and Romans - their philosophers, their art, their values - and I started to see something that could be integrated and more complete.
As an undergraduate, I chose to double major in philosophy and English, thinking I would finally get all the Answers. I liked my work, but ran into too many Marxists in the Philosophy department, and Critical Theory was beginning to take hold in the English Department, and I became somewhat disillusioned that I would find what I was looking for. I gave up on my quest and went into the Army. I figured sooner or later I would come back. But for now, I would be in the world.
I was told by my first boss that I would need to get a masters degree in business to be successful, so I reluctantly started taking finance and management courses. Almost immediately, I fell in love. Finance and accounting were practical approaches to storytelling about organizations - but with numbers. Understanding those numbers opened up a new world of following companies that were doing things in the world. Management courses were not focused on grubbing for money, but instead about creating cultures where people felt a sense of connection, contribution, and competence - in other words, the components of meaning.
I came full circle when I finally was able to do my PhD at George Mason. The George Mason Economics Department is a collection of some of the most interesting and unique thinkers I have ever run into. I went there thinking I would do a typical, data-driven health economics dissertation, but I discovered that the faculty were working in the area of history of economic thought, economic philosophy, and economic history. There were lots of discussions about justice, and what one should and should not do. I was able to finally unify my interests and wound up writing about justice for my dissertation.
I’m lucky to have a job where I get to think, write, and talk about all of these ideas. I love working in a management field because I get to think about being and doing in the world, and helping people grow into their own worthy being and doing. Management isn’t an abstraction - it is grounded in the practical. But the practical has to be grounded in the meaningful. As the poet Mary Oliver said,
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
We have one life. We want it to be worthy of our time. As Thoreau said,
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The question I will try to address here in this newsletter will be, how do we go about being in the world and doing so in a worthy way? I don’t have final answers. I’ll try not to talk like I do. As the great Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca writing in about 60 AD:
I’m talking to you as if I were lying in the same hospital ward, about the illness we’re both suffering from, and passing on some remedies. So listen to me as if I were speaking to myself. I’m allowing you access to my inmost self, calling you in to advise me as I have things out with myself.
This adventure is a conversation I am having with myself, as well as with you. To be able to write about it to you helps me think through the problem more clearly.
I also plan to start a new podcast that will address the same theme. I’ve already started lining up guests - scholars and leaders - to talk about being in the world and leading a worthy life. I expect those episodes will start coming out this summer.
I hope you find the effort worthy of your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.
“God help us, we are [all] men of La Mancha”