Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in Pursuing Happiness
There are some experiences I don't want to end. I want to savor them, to freeze time because of the lift in my spirit. But those moments pass, as they have to do. That is a good thing.
The feeling of failure is just an emotion, not a statement about who we are. That feeling is a road sign that we are advancing rather than a roadblock whose emotional baggage is a detour on the road to a fulfilling life.
Last February 6th, my mother celebrated her 100th birthday, as we clapped our hands and sang. On July 29th, she passed away quietly as I held her hand in the silence of the early morning. How can you describe and honor a life that lasted a century?
My father died a quarter century ago today, and I find my thoughts increasingly turning to his legacy and the legacy I hope to leave to my children. I wonder if my own will come close to his.
One of Itzhak Perlman's last directions to his young orchestra was to remind them that talent, which they already have, is not enough. "You can play the music. Now you have to speak the music."
To say the words “I forgive you” and “I am sorry” is easy. To mean those words – to have undertaken the work required to turn bitterness to acceptance - is hard. But for our own good, and the good of others, we need to learn to forgive and move on.
As in so many things, life ought to be in balance. If planning is good, then so is not planning.
I lost my mother about eight months ago, but she will be ninety-nine in early February. This is the result of dementia. It is an illness that has crept up on her, and us, in small, almost imperceptible steps, as fog crawls slowly up a hillside.
For many years, I have longed for the perfect day – the one when everything goes right. I have had, perhaps, ten of these. Yet I have had many perfect moments.
In less than three weeks, we will be moving from our home of 19 years. We will be exchanging our 1.5 acres for 0.15 acres –an attached home whose garden is but the size of our current garage. This is our choice, and I am in no sense complaining. But it feels like is a loss.
We have filled our lives with sound, yet our love affair with sounds can become a weakness. We should not fear the empty space that silence creates, for in it we may find something invaluable, the sound of ourselves.
If we let the land enter our hearts and surround us with its smells, sounds and scenes, it becomes more than a surveyor’s plat, more than a mortgage, more than an address. The land, experienced emotionally, has a hold on us.
As impermanent as we are, as fleeting as are our creations, our stories are permanent enough to help us know that our lives meant something. Nothing in life lasts. But our stories remain
Our legacy is not just our work accomplishments. It is also the way we make people feel. People will remember us less for how much work we crammed into our days than for how much caring we brought into their lives.
Vacations are not considered the”real world.” But the work of truly living, the responsibility to appreciate life before losing it, both also possible when we leave our daily lives, is the “real world” too.
This is not Lake Wobegon. Not all of our children will be above average (though each can be above average in something). But a society that does not encourage mastery gets mostly average performance. For our children, for ourselves, for our society - we need more.
A balanced life is a mixture of prose and poetry. We all have both in us. We are all writers and poets of life. Some of us - I count myself among them – tend toward the planned life, much as prose is planned. Others live lives that are more poetic.
