When a subject becomes obsolete,
we make it a required course. 
Peter Drucker

What happens when two opposing and equally capable forces collide? In one corner we have the reigning champion with, a track record from the past, declining competence, but the power of all of the belts. In the other corner we have the challenger with little experience, smarter, faster, a future orientation and great ambition.

The Boomers vs the Millennials.

Silence becomes cowardice
when occasion demands
speaking out the whole truth
and acting accordingly.
Mahatma Gandhi

Whoever’s in charge of our spiritual airwaves must be pulling their hair out. The exponential growth in traffic for our thoughts and prayers, moments of silence has long ago exceeded the allotted bandwidth. Moments crashing into prayers and thoughts being obliterated by silence. It’s hard to keep up with the crisis of the moment. Our hearts have whiplash, scar tissue and calluses. And we don’t know what to think or how to feel.

I’m finding these “moments of silence” so meaningless. I believe in silence. I believe in the power of stillness and the ability to reflect on one’s thoughts, one’s behaviors and one’s potential actions. For self-improvement and for contributions to the greater good.

“I was thinking about the GPS in my car. It never gets annoyed at me. If I make a mistake, it says, “Recalculating,” Sylvia Boorstein said recently on the On Being podcast. Isn’t that wonderful!

“Recalculating” should be our theme and mindset. Technology does not judge us, it merely attempts to serve. Yet we judge technology all of the time. We express our impatience, even our anger at our inert devices for their lack of instantaneous perfection. We curse spellcheck even though it is usually our big thumbs creating the stream of errata. No gratitude. Our technology is much kinder than we are! More forgiving. We need to be more like technology sometimes. Less emotional, more predictable and always recalculating.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward. Joel Osteen

But what door are we looking for? There are clues that have always been there. There are things that are generating intellectual and emotional heat within you. Dreams of your childhood. These are difficult to fully express, so seeing examples, understanding possibilities, finding the words are often hidden behind doors right in front of you.

But we can’t keep settling.

Most of us are grateful for the privilege we have. The sacrifices that have been made for us to be here. We must appreciate all that. So, privilege and gratitude require us to be grateful for everything that got us here. The successes and the failures.