Wade’s Journal – 9/27/12

Not wanting to bore Wade’s Weekly subscribers with repeated posts on my work to end too-big-to-fail banks, I plan to switch to primarily posting “Wade’s Journal” here. These entries will consist of fairly spontaneous, relatively uncensored personal reflections on my recent experiences.

The biggest news in my life is a new lady friend. Yes, believe it or not! Not wanting to jinx it, that’s all I’ll say for now. But if the relationship continues to bloom, you’ll hear more soon.

After the Writing for Change conference, the participants were invited to share a dinner, during which I had a very interesting conversation with the woman sitting to my left. She’s working on a self-help manual for Tarot card users. I asked her lots of questions about her ideas, especially with regard to “personal development,” which is the central purpose of her project. She said the first and most important step is to “announce your intention” to close friends.

That phrase, announce your intention, which was new to me, rang a bell and has stuck with me. Putting such intentions into words and sharing them almost automatically helps us achieve those goals, especially if we report back later on our subsequent efforts.

But in our hectic world, it’s hard to find time for such reflection and even harder to find people with whom we can share such reflections. From time to time, I ask people, “In what way do you want to be a better person?” But most often, even when I plan beforehand to ask that or some similar question, we end up merely reporting on what we’ve been doing and what we plan to do. Or we engage in intellectual discourse, discuss sports, gossip, etc.

Even with those close circles with which I am most closely affiliated, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples and the Occupy Be the Change Caucus, I don’t often find this kind of intimate, open, honest communication, including the acknowledgement of weakness, shortcomings, and mistakes.

Often when I reflect on how I want to be a better person, I think about how I want to act differently. But it recently struck me that a deeper question is: what kind of person am I before I act? What is my state of being? Our tendency to focus on action seems to be a reflection of our Western task-oriented culture.

When I reflect on that deeper question, I often come back to how I would prefer to be less vulnerable to disappointment.  I would rather not to care so much about success or failure.

I keep shooting for ambitious goals. I see pressing needs and want to do what I can to help meet them. But my efforts generally elicit only a modest response, which has often been painful.

The same is true with the Big Bank project. A growing chorus of experts warn that we’re on the edge of a catastrophe because of how our financial industry is structured. And our Big Banks are already crushing our economy and corrupting our democracy. Absent a powerful grassroots movement pushing for structural reform, prospects for progress are dim. So I feel a moral obligation to do what I can to help build this movement, while accepting that I may only be able to plant seeds.

With these thoughts in mind, I just looked at the two daily quotes that popped up independently of one another on my Igoogle homepage. They are:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

"Yesterday's failures are today's seeds that must be diligently planted to be able to abundantly harvest tomorrow's successes."
Author Unknown

Synchronicity? Or coincidence?

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NOTE: If you’re interested, I just posted “Restructure Wall Street: Cultivate the Grassroots.” Comments posted there would be appreciated.