It certainly would be easy enough to click off a litany of events and activities that describe 1995. There were trips - local, domestic, even international. There were concerts as well as performances. And there were certainly more than my fair share of family events to savor. However, there are broader aspects of 1995 which say more about this year and what it has meant to me.
On very tragic notes, I lost two friends and contemporaries, Keith Mehlan and Anne Harper. Keith was a tuba player in my brass quintet, The Quintessential Brass Repertoire. Keith was 33 years old and a husband and vital father to two children. His professional music career was reaching full stride when he was struck down by a congenital heart defect. Anne was a bright young student and family friend dating back to the mid-80's. Anne was 20 years old and on full academic scholarship to Hollins College. Her future sparkled in anticipation of all she was yet to achieve before she was killed in a yet unsolved homicide. Like so many friends and family members, I grieve these tragedies.
In the midst of this chaos and sorrow, I found myself looking for ways to make sense out of events which just made no sense to me. Keith's life was cut short by a health condition he could not control. Anne's life was taken from her. Two horrible deaths, two extreme examples of the lack of control we ultimately have in our lives. I don't want to unnecessarily focus on tragedies in this yearly roundup, but the proximity of these events triggered an unavoidable momentum in my thinking. The thought which eventually galvanized is that I must live my life with urgency, because there is no guarantee that health and events will go as long or as well as I imagine.
I had plenty of time for these issues during a six-week leave of absence from Andersen Consulting in late summer. It was during my leave of absence that I began to realize a need to re-focus my priorities, values, and dreams. Simply put, I began to feel more anxious than ever to align my actions with my values. As one may imagine, this is an evolving process, but in short order, these events helped me to shake off much of the ambivalence which has shadowed me over the past decade (the same sort of ambivalence which seems an unavoidable part of being 20-something). Urgency has served to focus me, to help me be more decisive, and to accept that I can't "do it all."
A great example of this is the decision I made in 1995 not to pursue a professional music career -- not now, and probably not ever. I put to rest a 10-year internal struggle by resolving to be my own patron in the arts rather than depending on anyone or anything else for opportunities. It means letting go of some long-held dreams and replacing them with new ones, it means redirecting personal goals, it means that I will struggle with change -- but the liberation is an enormous relief and seems well worth it. I am also rewarded in that my career at Andersen Consulting has absolutely caught fire following this decision.
Increasingly, my attitude in every endeavor is one of 100% commitment or none at all. As I re-examine the activities and relationships in my life, it is getting easier and easier to let go of things to which I cannot commit my best effort. And if I do things that do not align with my values, I am much more quick to react and change.
Much of this thinking is predicated on focus, simplicity, and (once again) urgency. I continue to literally practice these ideas, and I feel a growing excitement for the direction it is leading.
In short, urgency has led me to a renewed sense of empowerment in my life. Quite ironic that events of chaos have so strongly reminded me of how much control I can choose to exercise in my life. For the first time, I understand and appreciate that my energies, my talents, and especially my time are finite entities. All that I have done and all that I can do -- all of this has a finite quality which I can no longer overlook.
So, here is to the hope that can ultimately transpire in the face of tragedy. Here is to the peace and love we all seek. Here is to the power each of us have to transform aspects of our lives. Here is to the joy which comes as we share in these experiences. Here is to each day and another chance. Here is to 1996.
David Craig Welch
Bühl, Germany
31 December 1995
"We shouldn't need a tragedy to tap the best that is within us." -- Diana Nyad (former championship swimmer)
"Sitting here, performing in front of this orchestra who is playing music I have (written and) arranged is the closest thing to being God that I know." -- Mel Torme (famed jazz vocalist at a live performance in Washington, D.C.)
"I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right." -- from the movie I.Q.
"What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so." -- Emerson, Spiritual Laws (1841)
"If you are 20 and are not a liberal, you have no heart. If you are 40 and are not a conservative, you have no brain."
-- Winston Churchill
"Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise." -- Michael Jordan
"...getting and spending, we lay waste our lives..." -- William Wordsworth
"Eat when you are hungry. Sleep when you are tired." -- Buddhist Proverb
"Practice your ideals." -- Anne Frank
"To be truly healthy, you need to invest as much energy in remaining well as you do in getting well when you are sick." -- HealthPlus Magazine
"God, I wish I were smarter." -- Rich Concia (a friend of mine who happens to be very smart)
"After living and breathing tennis for my entire life, it was time to get serious about it. What a radical concept."
-- Andre Agassi (after attaining his #1 tennis ranking)
"There is no special trick to it (song-writing). It's a kind of energy that will not be suppressed. You do it or you don't do it at all." -- Gordon Lightfoot (popular musician)
"All of our memories give the present moment the shape it has now. The gift of remembering is that, without that gift, we would be utterly different beings." -- Paraphrased from a Memorial-Day sermon by Rev. C. Neal Goldsborough
"If you don't live it, you don't believe it." -- Anonymous
"When a man knows he is to be hanged within a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." -- Samuel Johnson
"I don't want to spend my life explaining myself. You either get it or you don't." -- Frank Zappa (musician)
"None of us is more fragile than others; we simply break in different places." -- Anonymous
"Character is more important than intelligence." -- Felicia Courtney (friend)
"Reacting calmly and constructively to a mistake is not the same as taking it lightly."
-- Bill Gates (Chairman & CEO of Microsoft)
"I work very hard as a mother not to give 'unasked-for' advice." -- Paula Rutherford (friend)
"Your Volare is even more effective than the pill for preventing pregnancy."
-- Susan Miller (my Mother, upon my 10-year anniversary of driving a 1977 Volare stationwagon)
"(For the general public,) the desire to see live arts is becoming diminished."
-- Dr. P.A. Distler (Alumni Distinguished Professor and Head of the Division of Performing Arts, Virginia Tech)
"People have a natural tendency to create their own problems." -- Kari Hillstrom (friend)
"What are you spending your dreams on?" -- David Welch
"Americans are working harder than ever, spending more (money) than ever, and still looking for happiness."
-- Paraphrased from a National Public Radio report
"95% of the population is non-datable." -- Jerry Seinfeld (comedian)
"In an age where sex has become such a skittish proposition, Cindy Crawford makes it look like good clean fun again. Yes, she seems to say in her calendar poses -- always provocative, never sleazy -- this is what bodies are made for."
-- (Anonymous) review of model Cindy Crawford
"...believers need skeptics. We need people to ask us why community and a good moral value system aren't enough and why do we need God? Skeptics challenge doctrine and piety and authoritarian belief systems and remind us to think for ourselves. They understand religion to be the business of making sense and not of embracing nonsense. And when life comes along and threatens or shatters the faith of a believer, a skeptic can be there and say 'yes, I know how that is' and not urge you to just have stronger faith." -- Susan Gresinger (Associate Rector, St. Mark's Episcopal Church)
"Tragedy is the inertial force of the mind." -- Stephen Crane (poet)
"Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in your lifetime." -- Craig Barnes (Pastor, National Presbyterian Church)
"Most of nostalgia is a search for what we think we lost: innocence." -- Mort Sahl (musician)
"I may be getting older, but it sure beats the alternative." -- Howard H. Welch (Grandfather)
"Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." -- William Morris
"The Life So Short; the Craft So Long to Learn." -- Gustav Stickley
"Art is not a thing separate and apart -- art is only the beautiful way of doing things."
-- Elbert Hubbard (salesman-turned-writer/publisher and founder of the Crafts Colony 'Roycroft')
"I saw the native homes in Japan as a supreme study in elimination...of the insignificant...I saw nothing meaningless in the Japanese home and could find very little added in the way of ornament...By heaven, here was a house used by those who made it with just that naturalness with which a turtle uses his shell." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
"People do not pay attention to their lives." -- Stephen Dunn (poet)
"I wouldn't go back to being 21 again for anything -- not unless I could take my 50-year-old brain with me."
-- Lauren Hutton (actress)
"Unless you have (an) inner necessity to create, you'll probably never do anything of brilliance. Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you'll never make (a) breakthrough. The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It's the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It's a form of madness." -- Leon Botstein (composer)
"Much has been written about contemporary society's sensory overload, its ability to fracture and disenfranchise people from their families, their values, their selves. More and more, we feel naked against a world that goes only faster and harder, louder and emptier. We ache for a frame of reference. It is why we are not surprised to find ourselves, when nobody else is around, pulling out a worn copy of Dr. Seuss and reading it aloud, simply to find the lovely, warm place it takes us: 'I do not like green eggs and ham/I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.' We are in our cocoon. We are safe.
"Outside, everything is too fast, too hyper. Our reservoir of wonder has been tapped dry. People want to race snowmobiles, not build snowmen. We grow steroid tomatoes year-round, reveling in the convenience, diluting the perfection of a single, smallish tomato plucked right from the vine in late summer.
"What's left? You can no longer even discover a fundamental force of nature. There are only four and they've all been found. Physicists are on the brink of coming up with a 'Theory of Everything,' meaning a final theory that, once installed, explains everything, and then all the physicists can go home.
"Hope takes a beating as the years go by. We look about us and we see so few successes -- so few loving marriages, well-adjusted children, singularly happy people -- that we realize that success seems, at least, a highly improbable alignment of skill, forbearance, hard work, blind luck and Providence. We see how many opportunities life gives us to buckle at the knees. We wonder if life's default mode is failure. We become tired.
"Calvin never, ever became tired. And he never lost hope because he never lost imagination."
-- Frank Ahrens (writing about the final edition of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip after a brilliant 10-year run)
