September 01, 2008
On turmoil and tenacity...
Everybody's got a story...
Mayor Sam Sullivan and CEO of Apex Communications Andrew Westlund are on the program today. Both men are unique, eccentric (dare we say?), talented and very successful. Both have very different stories.
A key thing they having in common is the fact that their lives have been anything but smooth-sailing. The turmoil they've had to endure in their lives is a common theme in the lives of all successful people and, we think, in all of our lives.
It seems that no matter how hard we try to avoid it our lives, almost by their very nature, attract struggle, suffering and pain.
Andrew grew like a weed as a boy turning him awkward and gawky and giving him an inferiority complex attached to his height that he would confess he carries with him to this day. All his success and all the acclaim that has gone with it has done nothing to change the fact that, every day, he must exhort himself to rise to the occasion of the day seizing it for all it's worth.
Sam Sullivan suffered a cataclysmic accident in his youth, one that changed his life, forever. Although more dramatic in comparison to Andrew's growth spurt what's interesting is that suffering attaches itself to us on a personal level. From the outside we look at Mayor Sullivan's journey and can't imagine the difficulty and despair of it, yet on the inside of our ourselves, the pain we suffer--whether from a growth spurt, the lack of one, or from any of the various and petty rejections we suffer each day--is as real as Sam's pain must have been.
The point being twofold.
1) We can't avoid suffering, so we might as well accept it, and throw off the mass-marketed 'fixes' (shopping, consumption, petty power, selfish relationships, etc...) we're bombarded with embracing the fact that there is no quick and easy solution or pathway to peace.
2) We ought to remember to foster a deep compassion for the people we pass on the street, and interact with, each day. My mother used to say that maybe the person who'd treated me badly at school that day had been dealt with harshly by a sibling, or maybe their parent was sick or suffering. Her point was that we never know exactly what other people are suffering from or going through so the good and right and productive thing to do is to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Here's hoping our show today 'speaks' to you on some level, in even the smallest of ways, helping you to live a life less-ordinary tomorrow.
Peace.
TD
