You Create Your Own Stage. The Audience is Waiting
As many poets know, if you pay attention, the world is full of “found” poems. I “found” this title at lunch last week inside a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. I think it is considerably more thought-provoking than the generic fortunes you usually find inside fortune cookies – such as “Your hard work will soon be rewarded.”
I’ve always assumed that the stage is already there – and our job is simply to enter stage left or stage right and play our roles. But I’m always – well, generally – glad to have an opportunity to expand my ideas and perceptions, so while I might not be sure what my fortune means, it is certainly worth thinking about.
You create your own stage? Perhaps that means we each choose the environments in which we will live our lives, and those become our stage. For me the two most important “stages” in my life are my family and my business. In one I am the founder and in the other I am the patriarch.
On my family stage I am fortunate to have a large family. Most live in the Los Angeles area. Especially during the Covid pandemic my social contacts have largely been limited to work and family. Why catch Covid from a stranger? That’s what families are for. We get together with our sons or daughters almost every weekend and, we always enjoy each other’s company. No one drinks, so there is never a drunken uncle at our Thanksgiving celebrations.
In business I formed ACF more than fifty years ago, and that is my other chosen stage. I, and thirty to forty others, have been the rotating cast that populates the ACF stage. Several employees have been with me for more than thirty years. I must admit that, at least in business, I believe in one dictator – I mean leader – at a time, and my role as CEO and president has lasted for more than half a century. Take that, you term-limited presidents of the United States, (public office is not and has never been one of my chosen stages).
A famous writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature was asked by a reporter, “How do you feel about that?”
The author replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t written about it yet.”
That response always rings true to me. Writing about something brings me emotional clarity and I often know better what I am feeling and thinking after I’ve written about it.
What is your stage, and who is your audience? Who are the other players? Is your stage one you have created for yourself? If not, and it isn’t one of your choosing, perhaps you should, as per the wisdom in my fortune cookie, change stages and create one that suits you better.
That’s something worth thinking about.
Alan