Managing Leadership^®

When I was young, we lived in a neighborhood where people felt completely safe leaving their doors unlocked. It didn’t matter who was home or not, alone or not. You could read a book in the back yard, stop over to the next-door neighbor for a chat, or even make a quick run to the store. It wasn’t that big a deal. The intruders we feared most were mosquitoes.

Things are different, now, of course. More of us in more places are careful to lock our doors even when we are all home in full force – even at work, sometimes.

But there is something about our dwellings and our workplaces that is pretty much the same, then as now.

It’s the walls. You see, whether their doors are open or not, it is the sturdy brick or wood, steel or glass, the walls within which we live and work that give us comfort, security, allowing us even to forget the often stormy world outside. Knowing they are there allows us to get on with our lives.

We do tend to try to push them away, though, to give ourselves as much room as possible to exercise our freedom without bumping up against their constraining limits. And once established, once we are secure in their presence and strength – well, we forget about them, just as we forget about what they do for us.

American society is like that, too. It has walls, but ones knitted together of stuff wondrously more fragile and resilient.

We have always preferred that they bar our foes on the latter’s soil, and they have always sailed off to do that.

In their absence, we indulge our imagined lack of them, our complete freedom – a land without limit. More accurately, we tend to forget them – even on the day appointed on our cultural calendar for honoring those who could not sail back.

Ironically, that is precisely as it should be. They do not, after all, seek the limelight like prominent landmarks. They don’t ostentatiously creak or moan under the weight of their work, melodramatically sway or threaten to buckle as they strive to keep back the unceasing threats to our loved ones, our hopes and ambitions, ourselves.

They just stand there. And when one falls, ladies and gentlemen, another steps up to fill the gap.

Ordinarily you would never note them at all. Perhaps someone might catch a glimpse of a link in this awful breastwork, skylined on a lonely but vital mountainside in some desolate corner of the world. But that person wouldn’t be you – unless you were there sharing the burden, yourself.

An irony here is that these most formidable walls, upon which so much depends – and within, and even due to their presence without which, so much good is done – are themselves drawn from the very cloth of which our society itself is woven, and which they serve to protect: You. Us.

Do enjoy this long weekend, secure and safe under the blissfully distant but vigilant protection of our children, our brothers and sisters. You are, in fact, at liberty to forget that those walls are there.

Because they are there.

And those among us who form up those walls today – they will tend the graves of those who went before.

Sure: that’s as it should be. But perhaps you could spare them a moment for a quiet thought, couldn’t you? Just a thank you from the calm in which you dwell, amidst the unseen, unheard, unfelt storms they keep at bay.

Happy Memorial Day. See you on Tuesday.

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