I have been on my knees lately…with my ear to the pavement. Waiting. I hear Change coming and I wanted to see how close it was.

Change is here and I want to introduce it to you. We’ve been talking for about an hour, so I know it a little better now and wanted to point out a few important characteristics of Change.

First of all, the saying “giving the shirt off your back” is no longer what change is about today. No one, in these times, will give you the shirt off their back. Not even your mother. I know now that I would only give you the shirt off my back if I had a spare. The thing is, everyone knows, I always have a spare. Or two. So that means that the person you can count on, the person you should trust isn’t the one who will give you the shirt of their back (which means they only have one), but one who would give you their spare shirt (the one who has 2 or more).

I am not being pessimistic and I don’t have a bad mother (she’s the best in fact). Think more in terms of the airplane oxygen instructions which requires the Giver to have oxygen before it gives to the Taker.

We are living in this false desperate time. I say that because my grandmother was retelling her stories of the Holocaust and in every story there is a profound act of kindness from one of her friends or strangers. There are the relatives from Canada who sent my grandparents clothing and furs to sell after they got out of the refugee camps. Or how about the Chief of Police in Frankfurt in the late 50’s who so kindly educated my grandmother on how to get the hell out of Germany and into our America the Beautiful.

We should not pretend to be a people that we are not. Madoff, who had the reputation of being generous, affable and debonair, was NOT.The strangers my grandmother was telling me about were not secretly wanting to be on The Refugee Reality Show in 1945. And they weren’t waiting to see their names in the paper because of something nice they did. They were waiting to make sure that my grandparents remained alive.

If we were living in really desperate times, we’d see the people come together like that. We aren’t there yet. And we won’t go there again. We have progressed to aspire to a mindset of empirical abundance at all times. Even when there isn’t material abundance, surely there is emotional.

So what if the shirt I give you is form my closet and not off my back, is it any less profound or meaningful a gesture? Let’s accept where we are in evolution and pay attention to Change.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.