The other day, as I was thinking about decades of career coaching and writing columns like this one, I had some Grateful Dead music going on in my office. That’s nothing new. But when “The Wheel” came on – a song by Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia, and Bill Kreutzmann written for Jerry’s first solo album in 1972 and then performed by the band a few hundred times over the years – it created a moment of thought confluence.
Thought confluences are those special moments, purely accidental for the most part, when two thoughts converge and form one, either because they’re meant to do that in a predestined way or because once they meet they’re naturally inseparable. An “AHA!” or “Yeah, Sure” moment. It’s the way heavy rope is made or how a double helix is built.
Anyway, it happened while listening to “The Wheel” and thinking about my column and you, and it made sense to share it with you as I enter more of my future.
“The Wheel” is all about the circle of life, with imagery concurrently vague and vivid. It’s about the expected and the unexpected, the certain and the surprise, the recognized constants and the sudden discoveries.
“The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down / You can’t let go and you can’t hold on / You can’t go back and you can’t stand still / If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.”But mostly, I believe, it’s about perseverance and progress, fostered by our innate drive toward growth. It’s about accepting the universe as it is but still trying to do something to improve the conditions under which we accept it.
“Won’t you try just a little bit harder? Couldn’t you try just a little bit more?”
That deal – acceptance with conditions – is uniquely human. It’s why, with each annual journey around the sun, we expect to do more, to do better, to do new things. That’s what makes change constant; it’s what makes progress a given. But only with commitment and effort.
That’s what I mean – surely what The Dead meant, too – about our innate drive toward growth. Innate, not acquired. Innate. We don’t simply expect it; we work for it. Watch the baby get up and walk for the first time. It is a purposeful act, the recognition of the problem of not getting from here to there fast enough – and then summoning up both the solution to the problem and the previously unrealized strength to execute that solution.
“Little bit harder, just a little bit more / A little bit further than you gone before.”
Many years later, that same being – no longer the toddler – recognizes the different forces at play in continuing our growth. Some of us see one, others see another, and some acknowledge both.
“Small wheel turning by the fire and rod / Big wheel turning by the grace of God / Every time that wheel turn ‘round / Bound to cover just a little more ground. “Bound to cover just a little more ground.” When that line came around, although I’d heard it in person or recorded countless times, that’s when my thought confluence occurred. There it was, After decades of coaching and offering advice here, that’s what I’ve tried to do, and this is the time of each year, of each annual journey around the sun, that I articulate that I’m grateful to you for continuing to read this this column, grateful to this newspaper for publishing it, and I look forward to next year and beyond..
This is a particularly hard time for us all right now – and the world will be forever changed, monumentally. No matter what our past efforts have been, we need to do more. I will do everything I can to help whoever asks. Whatever I’ve done for whomever I’ve helped will no longer be sufficient, so I promise I’ll live by these words:
“Won’t you try just a little bit harder? Couldn’t you try just a little bit more?”
Promise to do the same.
Thanks for reading.