Life is passing me by - just not the life I'm living.

Life is passing me by - just not the life I am living. I chose to be at home serving as an anchor to my daughter and my wife. I help them spiritually, emotionally, physically each and every day. This is the life I am living.

The life passing me by is that of the working man or woman making an effort toward......what? Certainly we need the myriad businesses out there in order to procure the goods and services of a lifetime. Yet, who in their daily lives is truly contributing to the quality of living for the many billions now occupying our singular 'home'? We seem so caught up in the buzz and bluster of hype, particularly in this country, that we no longer seem to have any grounding as to what life might be. Indeed, it seems that we are completely unhinged except as far as our bodily needs intrude upon our daydreams.

Does this mean that we need to go back to our past to find a defining sense of integrity and a set of values? I think not. We humans seem to do this as a reflex action. A jab of insecurity pangs us and we instantly reach into our psyches for some assurance, something 'real', to guide us. It is close to instinctual in us - perhaps it is the vestige of instinct that lies deep in our gray matter. Yet, it would seem that the very past experience we look to for guidance and value undermines the sense of value we can place in what we do day to day in the present.

In my christmas boxes there is a chipboard package that bears my awkward preteen handwriting of my name on it. Also on that box is a price sticker of 99¢. Within that box is a steel tree stand that disassembles to fit within the flimsy package. The merchant name on that sticker is W. T. Grant. Today, the W.T. Grant stores of my youth are no more. They have long since been replaced by other businesses such as WalMart or Tarrget with altered business models to succeed in our current day.

As a preteen, I wandered through Grants and Zayre and Woolworths stores looking for Christmas presents that I could afford at 50¢ per person. Each store had its own slightly different personality and its own particular scent. My town had 2 Grants stores. If the one downtown was out of something you could always check the one in the shopping center. I once stole something from a Grants store, only to be turned in by my brother. The memory of the store manager, sitting in his 'hidden' office, lecturing me about stealing directly from him, still serves me as the image of the archetypal businessman from the sixties. He wore a brown suit, had a windowless office and his pants hitched up, as he sat behind a metal desk, to reveal skinny ankles. It seemed an impoverished, souless setting, even to a young kid.

Yet those stores and the way we did business with them helped define our lives - not just how we did things but how we thought of things. When you needed a this or a that, you knew which store to get it at. Woolworths had tons of bins that held baubles from the world over, especially Japan. Grants had shelves of stuff including my tree stand from a US manufacturer. Zayre, which was bright and open, had the most complete album selection outside a music store. One knew what store was likely to have what and at what level quality. You went to the shopping center to check out the last 45 rpm offerings. You went to the locally owned and run department store which sponsored childrens' Christmas television programming if you had more to spend and were shopping for Mom or Dad. If you wanted the latest fashion, it would show up at the local apparel merchant's store - maybe. The bright yellow bell bottom pants I wanted desperately for 5th grade were available at the shopping center but never made it to the clothier's downtown - or to my closet for that matter. Yet that world of options and possibilities defined an ordered world view of how things were done and where to procure the needs of a lifetime.

Those stores, some bereft of soul even then but defining markers on the experiencial landscape, are simply gone now. Sunk beneath the waves of time like lengendary Atlantises, they have been swallowed up by newer concerns or quietly closed their doors after a liquidation sale; they are but the dust of memories now. This is what the WalMarts and Home Depots and Targets will all become in some not-too-distant future. These beasts, currently ravishing the economic and political landscapes -defining what we live with and how we procure it, will at some point lay down and die to be replaced by new and more awesome entities. Indeed, these box-stores are but a link in a chain that includes the various department and specialty stores of my youth. They are business models bound to the conditions of the times they occur in. As the conditions alter, so the means of business rise and fall like species of animals across the sweep of time.

In looking to the past I find not an honesty and integrity of a purer past but a continuum of sameness. The Japanese products of my youth were no more or less anything than the Chinese products of the present day. No profound difference lies in our human tendencies across the millenia. The way we express those tendencies changes and we think it profound but what was true about human nature, human desire, human ambition, human suffering ....hasn't changed much at all across perhaps all of recorded history. The conditions of the times have changed as we have leveraged energy and populated and ravaged different environments so we have built business methods to fit the current time. Doing the business of living defines both the consumer and the merchant. We change our behaviors to meet these changes. The forefront of commerce lies in anticipating the change and leveraging this change for wealth and convenience. Yet, the activities, whether with fruits and nuts in the bazaar or intellectual content distributed by electrons over a vast connected computer network, are still the same. The new and shiney in our time is just that - new and shiney in our time. It is not essentially different from the new and shiney of any time.

The world of commerce and business will always be there and will always be about the new and shiney way to make money. I can rejoin the effort at any time. The question remains though, why would I want to?