I feel like I have been  just a little out of step  the world for these last two weeks. I seem to be constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time… or…  actually … not at  the right place at the right time. It’s like my whole ‘be in the moment’ thing has slipped a few hours into the future. Not wildly so .. like it used to be.. but just enough that I keep missing stuff I feel like I’m intended to see. None of it’s earthshaking stuff.. I’m thinking of stuff like missing that Ben Zander talk at the conference last week.. and having everyone come up to me and tell me how much the message was perfect for me.. or at the same conference last week.. always being in the boring conference presentation while hearing laughter or loud  clapping  coming from the meeting in the conference room next door. Monday I managed to miss an important meeting at work in which the secrets of the universe..  ..actually  the secrets of our product roadmap and the  budget for the year….  were finally revealed..  Everyone has been talking about that ,meeting all week about wha a great turning point it was for our area… sigh.. Tonight I had another one of those things. Several of our friends went and saw the Nobel prize winning Holocaust witness Eli Wissel  this afternoon at UVM. Wissel was in town to receive an honorary degree from UVM. I’d thought about going.., the talk was free and open to the public,  but I had work meetings throughout the afternoon   and miles to go before I sleep…

    From what I heard from Deb, Jen and their kids  Wissel gave a memorable talk.  They said he talked three types of reaction to tragedy like the holocaust: the first is to close off the past, try to forget it and live for your own pleasure and preservation.. the second is to become bitter and angry about the wrong that has happened to you and to stay angry at the world.. the third  is to become a witness to the world of what has happened to you and to become a force  to teach and to prevent others from ever having to face that same pain. Those descriptions sounded alot   (I know alot isn’t a word, mom 🙂  like the way that people react to a tragedy like  the death of a loved one.  Since Sam died we’ve met folks who’ve reacted in each of those three ways.. I always try to live in the third way….. that is live in such a way that we help others learn from Sam.. and learn by our experience of his passing.  but I don’t always get to choose how I react. In fact, I’ve come to believe that people generally don’t get to choose the way that they  react.. It comes from your nature, circumstance  and surroundings more than from choice.. and for that reason, I’ve also learned not to pass judgment on people   who react in one of the first two ways.  Deb told me that Wissell said exactly the same thing.. I think grief has no scale.

   Deb and Jen told me that Wissel also talked about  how unbelievable it was to him that despite all that the world has learned from the Holocaust that we still have genocide in our time:  in Darfor.. in Rwanda, Kosovo in Iraq.. He told a story about when  Pres Clinton had said that ‘if Americans had been in Rwanda.. 400,000 lives could have been spared…’ he wrote to Clinton and said  ‘why if ?’ . I think that’s a pretty telling story when you think about how fast our country moved  into Iraq or Kuwait when our business  interests were at stake.. makes you think.. no ?

  I really wish that I’d heard Wissel’s talk  today… but I was in the wrong place at the wrong time… .. and you already know what that’s like Sam.. you really know

-jc

 

ps. The TakeYourKidsToWorkDay thing I did yesterday was covered by the Burlington Free Press and  WCAX TV. Here’s a low-res video of the story