Barry's Blog

Don Williams, the former chief executive officer and chairman of Trammell Crow Company (now merged with CB Richard Ellis), once had an "epiphany" years ago as he was traveling around the world brokering deals. One Friday night, as he was changing planes in New York after a whirlwind trip that took him from Dallas to Brazil to Paris to Cairo to Tehran in a matter of a few days, he describes what happened to him:

"I flew into New York's JFK Airport in the midst of a major snowstorm and found that I had only a few minutes to catch the last flight to Dallas...I took off on foot toward the Braniff terminal. Running with a suitcase in one hand and a loaded briefcase in the other, I slipped and fell, then slid along my belly and landed spread-eagle and face-down in the snow. At that moment, I asked myself, 'What am I doing with my life?' Lying there in the snow, I came to realize that I was a workaholic, comsumed and driven primarily by work and ambition...I was neglecting not only my wife and five children, but also my spiritual life...I believe I was called to work, ... (but) what I learned is that if you put work in perspective, there's a...peace...that comes to you and actually allows you to make better business decisions and better use of your time...I didn't think about it at the time as an epiphany, but looking back on it, I think it was. In the end this is only business; this isn't your life. This isn't your ultimate destiny, and...that was a bit of an insight to me."

"How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see everything so clearly? Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane?"

-Walker Percy, The Second Coming

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow