Laureen is a All in the Attitude
A few days ago, I received this email from a coworker of mine. Ed is an amazing guy; a seriously positive human being, despite being from the Bronx and threatening to break kneecaps sometimes. Ed has a tendency to drop these little gems of wisdom around and not even realize he’s done it. I’m not sure if it isn’t just a case of “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”, but Ed’s unconscious commentary on life and how to live it has helped me out more than once.
Here’s an excerpt from a note he sent our team:
You’re all probably wondering why my continuing series of South America travelogue reports ended after my first dispatch from Buenos Aires. I thought that the cruise ship we were on would allow me to send you daily emails through my laptop. The ship had a number of wireless hotspots, but they weren’t all that hot. In fact, I was only able to start a wireless session one time and for just a few minutes at that. Initially, I thought this was a physics issue — perhaps the electrons got perturbed on their way to and from the antipodes — but the wired desktop machines on the cruise ship worked well. However, even though the desktop machines worked, I couldn’t get connected to our Sun mail system.
I’m sure sometime over the last two weeks most of you thought that indeed the world is flat and that I fell off the edge as I neared Cape Horn. But try as I might, I could not find the edge (BTW, I still haven’t found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow either).
The reason I can now contact you is that the cruise ended this morning in Santos Brazil and once again I’m sitting in a hotel room that has a reliable Internet service. To get here, Rita and I took a long taxi ride through traffic-choked Sao Paolo. Unfortunately, Sao Paolo lives up to its reputation as sprawling, ugly, and chaotic. I’m sure there are nice areas of this city, but much of what we saw today in this city was favela (shantytown) upon favela.
But let’s get to the positive. Our cruise was simply wonderful. Rita and I have done quite a bit of cruising. I think this is our tenth. But we’ve never been aboard a ship with such an international set of passengers. We met folks from everywhere — even a young couple from Swaziland. We also saw some memorable places: from the the Alpine beauty of Ushuaia Argentina to the talcum-fine sands of the beaches in Punta Del Este Uruguay. And yes Christine, I did have a Pisco Sour in Chile — it went straight to my head!
I think as Americans we tend be a bit parochial and see the entire world fitting into the area between New York and California . But the world is a much bigger place with a multitude of extremely interesting people and sights. If you have a chance to travel beyond our borders, I strongly encourage you to do it.
And there you have it. Positive, positive, positive. Ed is a citizen of the world, and at 60+ years of age, he’s still throwing himself into new experiences all over the world, and encouraging the rest of us to jump in, the water’s fine.
I honestly don’t know which comes first; the fascination with the world that creates the personal vibrancy, or a certain vitality that allows one to be so incredibly eager to have new experiences in new places with other people. All I know is that in a world where people are ruled by fear and negativity, where bigotry and hatred are standard items on the nightly news, where travel is largely considered to be dangerous and where the world is portrayed as a scary place full of foreigners that hate us, Ed’s ability to do his own thing and wave back at the rest of us is a constant inspiration to me. He’s a breathing example of the idea that you create your own reality, and attract to you that which you put out.
