Two Mentors on the Yellow Brick Road

Two Mentors on the Yellow Brick Road
Roberto Clemente and Steve Jobs

Interestingly, this article is a follow-up on the last two essays. The first essay discusses the importance of mentors. The most recent essay, The Great One, is about Roberto Clemente's drive both on and off the field. I ended the article with this old video of Clemente being interviewed by David Frost.

Clemente verbalized his feeling of having been burned by racial profiling while growing up. As an adult, he fought for justice and equality for racial minorities. The Great One didn’t verbalize his drive to help others passively. Clemente’s attitude was that he would fight for justice against racists. Period. He said, “Anytime you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world, and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.”

Today’s article deals with Steve Jobs and his dance with death. This is the part of his commencement address at Stanford that dealt with death.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.

Jobs learned that dancing with death is the only teacher to inform a person on the yellow brick road of life. We all know that we will all go belly-up...in the abstract. Someday in the distant future we will die. That database is equivalent to knowing that creation occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

I had four years of college, four years of grad school, and another four years of post-graduate education. However, in 2008, I learned the most important datapoint in life. They were the two best teaching moments in my life. I nearly died due to a subdural hematoma after falling from a ladder. I also had a prostatectomy, which found that my cancer had spread beyond my prostate.

Death is no longer an abstract reality. It is present in my life. It changed my Weltanschauung, worldview. Clemente and Jobs are both dealing with that reality. We are not immortal. We need to address that reality. Don’t waste any time because your clock is ticking.

Two-thirds of the world lives in varying degrees of poverty. Over a dozen years ago, I discovered my family near Inle Lake. I have helped my family cope with life in the developing country of Myanmar. There is no nobility in caring for one's family financially. If you traveled overseas and discovered a part of your family, you would have done the same. Sharing with your family is a given.

A half dozen years ago, we went on a family tour together to many places that tourists rarely visit or even know about. Such a place was the small village called Set Set Yo. My children are tour guides, and they had two reasons to stop at Set Set Yo. They wanted me to see the top-knot hairstyle worn by younger children. The other reason was to give money to the local monks as an offering to assist them as a small monastery at Set Set Yo.

I busied myself flipping some young children. I have flipped young children all over the world. Watch this video for two children in particular. My youngest granddaughter got in line to be flipped even though she is too tall to flip. That part is in the middle of the video. At the end of the video, there was a very young toddler. Watch what she does after I flipped her.

The remainder of our visit, I carried an infant around who wasn’t quite one year old. This is a photo of an infant and an old man nearly eighty years older than she. Look at her expression, trying to process what was happening.

I called her the little one and carried her around for all the time we spent at Set Set Yo. I finally asked my daughter how to say the little one in Burmese. It is A Ngal Lay. During our brief moment in time, I realized that I had just met my great-granddaughter. Since then, I w/t funds to her when I send monthly support to my family.

Reflecting upon my time at Set Set Yo, Clemente’s statement resonates in my brain. “Anytime you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world, and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.”

I also grasp what Jobs said about death...“death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent.” All of our clocks are ticking louder and louder. Live in the moment by helping others. Some day we won’t have any moments left.

This video is of 60 Minutes on Steve Jobs.