Most of you, I don’t know. We’ll likely never meet. Never speak. If time keeps drifting and this outlasts me, most of you will have never had the chance.
Still, I think about you often. When I was younger, I learned to worry. As I got older, I learned to love the world. I didn’t stop worrying. Now I worry about the whole world. The whole of it. From our mitochondrial mother to the last of us that will call itself human. I worry about people I will never meet. Never speak to. Never drift past in this rushing flow of time.
I’m not bragging. This has been taxing. Never-ending anxiety over a fundamental source of suffering that can never be alleviated. A pain we can never shake or dull. There are the natural forms of suffering we all encounter, such as aging, sickness, and death. Then there is this strange one we have added for show: Scarcity.
There is more than enough food, yet we know people are hungry.
There are more than enough roofs and beds and bunks, yet people go without shelter.
There are more than enough of us, and yet people go unloved.
So many of us suffer, and yet so few lead.
I worry if you haven’t eaten. I worry if you haven’t found shelter or tribe. I worry you haven’t found yourself. I worry all that keeps you from leading.
Oh, how great the world will be when you learn to lead. Leadership requires a lot, but key to peace, leadership requires stewardship and service. It requires selflessness. It requires the bliss of losing yourself to the needs of your people. Whoever you have found yourself leading up a hill.
Do it now. In this lifetime. Make the determination. Say, today I am lost, and I will not be found for some time. Today I am lost, and in that I am reborn an explorer. There are people out there who wish to see you on that path. People who will worry if you have eaten or slept or laughed. I’m one, and I got as far as I did because of all the great leaders I had along the way.
If you’ve got the itch, it means you’ve got the eye. Don’t let this be your ego boost. Your time to worry about you. Worry about them. Worry about everyone else. We’ll worry about you. A place for everyone in someone’s heart.