Came a Christmas morning text among many, but from an uncommon genre of warm wishers:
“Merry Christmas to you and the family Neil!🎄”
As, by aging, wisdom besets me absent volition, a realization unfolds from within—somewhere deeper than my conscious mind alone. It has the flavor of authentic appreciation—gratefulness that some interpersonal relationships perhaps born of transaction or convenience evolve to survive, and neither their nascence nor evolution were inevitable. Nay, they are both inter and personal. Between two human beings, EACH of whom exercise their inalienable freedom to invest — to risk — trust. Not all such commitments bear fruit, yet that makes more wondrous the ones which do.
My profession is in selling—always implying risk for a buyer, and to the seller as well whose time too is limited. My profession is support—always an interpersonal time commitment that’s BIdirectional, demanding trust each way, especially if subsequent engagements are to happen. My profession is science—a foundationally *human* vocation. Scientists fancy much of their practice as objective, but the involuntary wisdom I’m talking about eventually, for most scientists, humbles them to recognize they are only scratching at the surface of unfathomable mysteries. The vocation itself makes scientists more aware of human nature and frailty.
Beneath this wisdom is some vague understanding that personal integrity has its own way of rising. It seems the more we grow true to who we are as unique human beings, the more we grow into the calm that, although we are mere stitches in the fabric of creation, our thin and frayed thread is no less or more valuable than those over and under which we are woven.
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Neil D. 2020 COVID-19 Christmas Day
Feel with Neil 