The Focal Point/Serendicity Factor — 1
Dear Mr. Lake,
This is a perfect example of the value to me of talking to you. I don’t have to list the whole body of work or the complete resumé, because it is nowhere written down. I can just say things I know to be true and you can decide for yourself if it rings true.
Here’s the mystery and wonder of my life.
Whenever I am present in a dramatic moment of change in some place, organization, or institution, I wind up as a focal point of what is going on. Not always as a decisive player, mind, but always as an agent of positive change. Not always winning, but never content with losing. Engaged hard and to a purpose.
There are so many of these instances, so improbably ordered, that I have been forced to the conclusion that my life has never been my own. I was always where I was because I needed the experience or the experience needed me to be some kind of player in it. Even my mistakes and failures, especially my mistakes and failures, were absolutely necessary for me to keep some kind of appointment with the next focal point.
You have no idea how many different people and perspectives I have been hurled or brushed against in my 65 years, how many critical projects and meetings and grievances I have been immersed in. All seemingly by accident and never in hindsight by accident at all.
Tendency to keep writer and business bio separate. Huge mistake. I thought there were two of me, the writer and the corporate ronin international management consultant. Same guy.
They say to writers, live your life as a writer, go to interesting places, see interesting people, act out, then write the insides out of of everyone you’ve ever known, including your own family, and count out the lines of truth on paper.
I ruled that out from the gitgo. Why I invented the Punk writers of South Street. To keep my family and me out of it. Before that, I’d resisted the call to be a writer. I sought and won, after a failure or five, a corporate career that took me around the world. But the world seems to have had other ideas. My dad seems to have known I was special from the start, but he thought, in line with the times, that I should be a lawyer.
Come 1963. Family transferred to Paris, transatlantic crossing on the real H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth, couple months in a tony apartment in Neuilly, with a mother who ran us through the sewers of Paris, the Louvre, a long closed impressionist museum in a house children could enjoy, the Catacombs, the Place Vincennes, Bastille Day with Charles deGaulle on the Chanps d’Elysée.... surprising end to assignment, descent through the Loire River Valley, tours of Amboise and Chenonçeau, bedbugs for all in the Nougat capital of Montelimar, multiple close calls with death on the Grand Corniche (holes in the rotten retaining walls dating back to Roman chariots), the Monaco Grand Prix course inside our beautiful Studebaker, 10-year old deep in love in a Menton bistro on the Riviera, spaghetti in a grand Genoan hotel, the Leonardo da Vinci nearly lost at sea, this close, all you could see was sea, and then home to the assassination of the president. 1963.
It was all a mistake. The French never intended to partner with duPont, only to steal from them. Our whole summer was a mistake in that regard. Except that it began, or intensified, a key pattern of my life. An unbelievable amount of experience jammed into an interval of time that doesn’t make sense afterwards. I didn’t know it but this was to recur. I got kissed on the cheek by an elderly First Class Steward on the Queen Elizabeth, kissed on the forehead by a dead ringer of the young Edith Piaf also named Edith, saw the Mona Lisa inside her green bulletproof glass, drank in the lily pads of Monet until my eyes swam and I sort of understood, ate dinner across the Seine and under the lights of Notre Dame Cathedral (now burning), saw the neon-spinning windmill of Montmartre, and sped through the hissing subways of the Metro alone with my sister (we always had 35 centimes for the fare home if we got lost), and still came somehow home. But nothing, especially time, would ever be the same again for me. And I was never going to be a lawyer.
STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER...
This is a perfect example of the value to me of talking to you. I don’t have to list the whole body of work or the complete resumé, because it is nowhere written down. I can just say things I know to be true and you can decide for yourself if it rings true.
Here’s the mystery and wonder of my life.
Whenever I am present in a dramatic moment of change in some place, organization, or institution, I wind up as a focal point of what is going on. Not always as a decisive player, mind, but always as an agent of positive change. Not always winning, but never content with losing. Engaged hard and to a purpose.
There are so many of these instances, so improbably ordered, that I have been forced to the conclusion that my life has never been my own. I was always where I was because I needed the experience or the experience needed me to be some kind of player in it. Even my mistakes and failures, especially my mistakes and failures, were absolutely necessary for me to keep some kind of appointment with the next focal point.
You have no idea how many different people and perspectives I have been hurled or brushed against in my 65 years, how many critical projects and meetings and grievances I have been immersed in. All seemingly by accident and never in hindsight by accident at all.
Tendency to keep writer and business bio separate. Huge mistake. I thought there were two of me, the writer and the corporate ronin international management consultant. Same guy.
They say to writers, live your life as a writer, go to interesting places, see interesting people, act out, then write the insides out of of everyone you’ve ever known, including your own family, and count out the lines of truth on paper.
I ruled that out from the gitgo. Why I invented the Punk writers of South Street. To keep my family and me out of it. Before that, I’d resisted the call to be a writer. I sought and won, after a failure or five, a corporate career that took me around the world. But the world seems to have had other ideas. My dad seems to have known I was special from the start, but he thought, in line with the times, that I should be a lawyer.
Come 1963. Family transferred to Paris, transatlantic crossing on the real H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth, couple months in a tony apartment in Neuilly, with a mother who ran us through the sewers of Paris, the Louvre, a long closed impressionist museum in a house children could enjoy, the Catacombs, the Place Vincennes, Bastille Day with Charles deGaulle on the Chanps d’Elysée.... surprising end to assignment, descent through the Loire River Valley, tours of Amboise and Chenonçeau, bedbugs for all in the Nougat capital of Montelimar, multiple close calls with death on the Grand Corniche (holes in the rotten retaining walls dating back to Roman chariots), the Monaco Grand Prix course inside our beautiful Studebaker, 10-year old deep in love in a Menton bistro on the Riviera, spaghetti in a grand Genoan hotel, the Leonardo da Vinci nearly lost at sea, this close, all you could see was sea, and then home to the assassination of the president. 1963.
It was all a mistake. The French never intended to partner with duPont, only to steal from them. Our whole summer was a mistake in that regard. Except that it began, or intensified, a key pattern of my life. An unbelievable amount of experience jammed into an interval of time that doesn’t make sense afterwards. I didn’t know it but this was to recur. I got kissed on the cheek by an elderly First Class Steward on the Queen Elizabeth, kissed on the forehead by a dead ringer of the young Edith Piaf also named Edith, saw the Mona Lisa inside her green bulletproof glass, drank in the lily pads of Monet until my eyes swam and I sort of understood, ate dinner across the Seine and under the lights of Notre Dame Cathedral (now burning), saw the neon-spinning windmill of Montmartre, and sped through the hissing subways of the Metro alone with my sister (we always had 35 centimes for the fare home if we got lost), and still came somehow home. But nothing, especially time, would ever be the same again for me. And I was never going to be a lawyer.
STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER...
I would eagerly read the next chapter if you wrote it or posted it. I'm thrilled by the prospect of number and words games, hidden pieces, and just hearing about your life. I'm honored to be given access to it.
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