12/3/2021
Hey Dana –
I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Park James hotel in Menlo Park. I wrapped up my career at BlackLine late Tuesday evening. I started my career at Revenue.io Wednesday morning. I’ve been working my way toward your birthday event this weekend in stages, first staying in San Jose Wednesday night, and working there yesterday, then getting to the hotel last night and having dinner with some now former BlackLine colleagues, and today I have a Revenue.io meeting in Walnut Creek, after which Susie should be rolling into town, and we’ll finally get to you in Napa later today. Looking forward to an amazing weekend.
What the hell does this have to do with your birthday?
Immediate context… (“aaaahh, I see,” you say)
I’ve known that I was going to write down some thoughts for you. Shockingly (hint of sarcasm there), the windows that I targeted to anticipate having a clear head to devote to this effort either never materialized, or they closed a bit too quickly.
I think we all really knew that this is how it would go down. From my perspective, not so much procrastination, but rather a need to get to that organic ‘feel’ of what this is, and then transferring that thing I ‘know’ into something that seems like it will have so much less depth in written form. (You know, sort of like how the movie never quite captures the nuances of the written word.)
So you get a steady-stream-of-consciousness, which was my plan all along. I just thought it might make you laugh, or at least smile a little, knowing exactly where I was, in both the physical as well as the head space, when I pulled this together.
So here you go, in outline form, to be filled in with live voice over at a future time in a more perfect setting. (And settle in, I’m sitting here choking up – welling up – and I haven’t even gotten started…)
Peacefulness
Familiar comfort
Warmth
Friendship, in its deepest, most complete form
Knowing someone who wants to know and understand you, and who does know and understand you, but whose knowledge and understanding of you isn’t stuck in time because it evolves as we all do. Knowing someone who can help you evolve as she helps you see yourself through the way in which she sees you and the changes that you experience through life.
Because you realize now that there are people in your life whom you simply met initially, but then in ways you could not have been capable of contemplating, have stayed with you for what has become the rest of your life.
The poet/philosopher Steve Martin once described something as being akin to the Holy Ghost – you know… someone you never see, but you know he’s always back there…
"That can be a metaphor for our shared experience. If it’s not always a conscious awareness, it’s a subtle feeling of the depth by which our friendship surrounds us, and the unknowing security that that depth provides."
It’s unlikely that you can anticipate all the highs and the lows and the day-to-day everything in between that you will experience in life. And if you can get there, I think it’s even harder to anticipate who will be with you through all those highs and the lows and the day-to-day everything in between, and how profoundly important, and impactful, those people will be who roll with you through those experiences.
Could you ever imagine what the importance would be of having a true friend who cared for you, pulled for you, leaned on you, laughed with you for so long? There is a difference between a lifetime of discrete experiences vs. the cumulative experience of a lifetime. We share the latter while being able to remember and point to the former, which just makes the story so rich, and provides a virtuous cycle, or flywheel of momentum toward what is to come. (had to insert some corporate jargon there – it’s part of our shared vernacular)
But always, always, always…
Peacefulness
Familiar comfort
Warmth
Friendship, in its deepest, most complete form
Cool,
Jim