Anniversaries

It is almost 5 years, to the day, from when I first came to California. My circumstances back then were much different. I was working as the Change Management Lead for a project for Ace Insurance in downtown Philadelphia.

It was my job to document all the internal I.T. processes for the company, develop, write and test code (yes in this case I actually wrote the simple code needed to develop the software) and oversee all efforts to prove Ace's internal business processes met the legislative dictates of Sarbanes-Oxley -- a law written primarily as a corporate compliance measure in the wake of financial scandals like Enron -- where I was also once a contract executive.

I, personally, (this is true) wrote The Disaster Recovery Plan for Enron and was also, for a time, the Customer Satisfaction Manager for the entire company.

But that is another story . . . and yes, at the time, I was a direct report to the Executive V.P. of CSC Energy Services (who secured a 1.1 Billion Dollar outsourcing contract) and I warned him that things weren't all kosher within the internal infrastructure of what was then hailed as the most innovative company in the world.

But all that is background. In February, 2005, I was leaving my fancy office on the 19th floor overlooking Philadelphia's City Hall to come west to help develop internal business processes and controls for Kaiser Permanente's 4 Billion (since ballooned to perhaps 7 or 8 Billion) Dollar initiative -- HealthConnect -- to automate and digitize all internal medical records. The money was simply too great ($140.00 am hour) to pass up.

I was also engaged -- to a woman I met while working in 2003-2004 in northern Virginia. So Beth, and her daughter Elise, made the trek with me, came to California to begin a somewhat troubled existence isolated in a big house in the 'burbs with only a bare minimum of furniture and soon Beth was both homesick and pregnant, a volatile mix.

I was determined to stay in my $5600 a week job, Beth was determined to go back to Virginia and wanted me to quit. I tried to explain that these jobs didn't grow on trees but her experience of me was exactly the opposite. She had over the past 2 years seen me get progressively bigger and more lucrative contracts every six months or so and perhaps her expectation was that next time I would get $200 an hour and we could still live on the East Coast.

Anyway . . . a deal was made. I accepted a permanent position at Kaiser in order to get health insurance. We would stay until the baby was born, wait a few months until Elise finished school and then, poof, adios California and on to Atlanta, where we had a beautiful custom-built home ready and waiting . . .

A lot of you know the story from there -- at least the highlights. The baby, our darling little Lehna, was stillborn. I made the decision a few months later not to marry Beth and leave California but instead stayed with Kaiser and said adios to a woman I was truly in love with.

I was at the door step of self-destruction and leaving Beth was an obvious (although I didn't recognize it at the time) first step towards unraveling my storybook life . . . also I needed "space". Primarily because I was grieving but, in retrospect, to "wash the corporate" off me and get back in touch with the "psychic gifts" I had tried to turn off 15 years earlier.

I am bringing this up because on a symbolic level I think my path over the past 5 years mirrors in an almost eerie sense the path of the United States. Bloated on prosperity, blind to any possibility of failure, I saw my productivity come to an end and I began living on the fumes from my past success, eating myself from within. I think this is also happening on a national level.

It was the beginning of President Bush's second term. There was a sense of something not quite right but the housing bubble was expanding and a false sense of optimism was in the air. I knew early on that this "correction" was going to happen . . . but ideas of "Manifest Destiny" and "God is on OUR side" still clang loudest in most American hearts and minds.

There is a growing awareness, though, that not all is well in the Kingdom anymore. The Emperor has clothes, but they are dissolving, and each new stitch in time is made with cheap thread. It is going to unravel.

In my case, I choose to focus on the light within and, increasingly, turn away from the day to day and look more at God and matters of the "Spirit". On a national level, we are all going through this collective "Dark Night of the Soul" . . . it is my hope that we, as a collective, will wake up from this darkness and find a light shining within, that we will wake up to a sense of joy and compassion.

But I am not so sure that will be . . . and my prediction is this. I believe 2010 is a "crisis" year -- a year in which skeletons locked safely away begin rattling in their cage. It is a time of scandal and self-revelation . . . a time when the hopes fade and a new sense of reality begins to appear.

This year is America's "Dark Night" . . .