September 15, 2025
Good morning! Coming to you this morning from Without A Vision Consultancy’s summer headquarters in Starboard Cove, Maine. We marvel at our last ocean sunrise for this summer just as California is getting tucked into bed the night before. The recipient of communication is, de facto, the best evaluator of its quality.
- Prevailing upon your patience and generosity, the following is from the working draft of a book-in-progress with the working title, How Do You Know?
- I don’t know if it will ever get finished, but parts of it are getting close.
- Here are a few paragraphs from one of the chapters:
- I’ve been asked to reflect upon some qualities or characteristics that MIGHT make life better or at least more interesting. These reflections and ruminations are a response to that request.
- Throughout my life I’ve not been blessed with money, talent, athleticism, or good looks and so I’ve had to make do with what I could scrounge and leverage; these are some of those stories.
- HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS: I would tell you to not make the same mistakes I made, but I’m not sure what they are. My seventy-three years are against a backdrop of unrequited love and botched relationships. My wife would tell you she gets the credit for our marriage working most of the time, and she would be right. I’ve been blessed with thousands of acquaintances, but alas, very few friends.
- There is no such thing as a perfect relationship. Whatever you might observe, there are things you’re not seeing or hearing if you perceive a relationship to be perfect. Healthy, motivated people work to strengthen and sustain what they know is imperfect; they don’t focus on the difficulties, but rather on the benefits that accrue to those who value and desire an acquaintanceship, a friendship, or something more.
- Tragedy notwithstanding, you will not encounter a greater challenge in life than establishing, nurturing, and sustaining an honest, open, and intimate relationship with at least one other person. Millions of books have been written on the subject – from the trivial to the well-researched and respected professional tome – and yet the secret to a successful relationship remains elusive; there is no panacea, that’s for sure.
- There is a temptation as I write this paper to opine as to what works and what doesn’t, but if there are approximately eight billion people on Planet Earth there are at least that many different possible paths to solving the perplexing relationship puzzle. The paramount imperative is you must want to have a relationship – and, let’s presume, a healthy one. In other words, it’s a decision – and a recurring decision. If such is the case and if the person with whom you want to have a relationship is similarly motivated, that is a pretty good beginning. Still, the path to success is strewn with considerable debris and it will often be tempting to abandon the effort even if you’ve expressed publicly your decision to have and to sustain this relationship.
- Feelings get hurt, assumptions get made, mutual interests change, behavior – being human – is flawed, trust is damaged, egos are fragile and vulnerable, something new and unexpected inserts itself, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and sustaining a healthy relationship is just plain old hard work – and who wants to work hard?! From the outside looking in it will often appear that a relationship between two people – not your own – is an effortless romp, but rarely would that be true.
- That being said, and shamefully abbreviated, why are relationships an important, perhaps the most important, ingredient for success? John Donne said it best in 1624, “No (wo)man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Because of the very nature of being human we are inexorably connected to each other. Hemingway’s, For Whom the Bell Tolls, (1940) borrowed extensively on Donne’s poetic prose to further emphasize the interconnectedness of humankind with a story set in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.
- Throughout the years of Nazi supremacy in the 1930s and 1940s millions and millions of people were persecuted, enslaved, tortured, and murdered as a part of Hitler’s evil scheme to rid the world of certain races and kinds of people. In the end, good triumphed over evil, though not nearly soon enough, because with each tragic death of one of Hitler’s innocent victims, the funeral bell tolled for all those still left living. Hitler’s savagery was largely ignored for many years before people finally began to take notice of the genocide as a destructive affront to all of humanity. Each of Hitler’s murders affected each of us, and still does. (Continued next week…)
