Consistency and Sanguinity

Mutuality's preconditions

I often reflect on the elements of corporate work that lead to my dissatisfaction, passions, and limited terms. There’s an angry young man in me that wants to blame the inequality and societal instability accelerants of modern American companies; my Marxist-socialist tendencies are in rich soil, as some of you know. But this is an over-convenient, incomplete explanation. I do like to think of myself as an intellectual-ethicist at odds with amoral and antimoral systems. The truth, though, was this: I was lacking the consistency and sanguinity needed to flourish in human groups.

When I say missing, I mean it in both the environmental sense and in the personal willing sense. A geographically peripatetic childhood, a choice-chock school experience, and an ill-fated first full-time job in consulting (of all inconsistent things) were external circumstances well-built for a chaotic focus on myself, untethered from long-term contributions to groups. And at the same time, I had developed mechanisms of evasion and anxiousness in my personality: fervent hope feared events might be luckily canceled; procrastination when tasks felt undoable; to quit was my most constant, faithful companion.

All this inconstancy developed and operated in concert with my emotional conductors: excitable peaks, sadness valleys, drunken rivers. If this reads like an antagonistic resume, a cover letter with the watermark do not hire, that is very fine. I was able to jog along this thin ice by bluster and phraseology hoovered in from that most evasive, escapist activity: reading. There comes a time when one must, in that cliché way, look closely at oneself in a flat, clean mirror. My father’s death and one more job shattered the reflected image — I had real work to do.

It was finally the midnight of self-understanding, constancy, and accord. And five and a half hours from dawn, I changed course. I wrote in notebooks nearly every day, streams and oceans of consciousness. I found small groups that I could show up to regularly and contribute to. I overturned the maggoted rocks in my mind, sowed seeds, watered, and waited. And I will keep doing these things.

I had found an image of the active human, the leader, the one who is interested and engaged and astute; it seemed that to emulate these qualities, these aspirations, would make my self-fulfilled prophesy and result in that ultimate sweetness: an upward spiral of belonging. This false path to a true idyll took me caterwauling for many years. It is only recently, in consistent & sanguine actions & relationships, that I find mutuality’s sustained & sustainable glow.