Jul 20
17
(3) IN THE BEGINNING
I had just returned to the U.S. in August of 2001 – having been invited by the president of a small manufacturing company in Las Vegas, Nevada, to take on a market expansion project on a consulting basis.
The offer had been attractive and my writing assignment with the Lake Victoria Free Trade Zone in east/central Africa was winding down. The photograph of “an early Brad Cullen Small Group Meeting” in the introduction and chapter (1) was during that period …and until this little journey down memory lane I had forgotten the connection.
The little groups, I’d started in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, during that previous year had taken on beautiful lives of their own. So while I’d miss the people, they were fairly well spread out and I probably wouldn’t see any of them again, during this lifetime, anyway. I was ready to come home.
I’d been recommended to the manufacturer by a former client, a company that I’d successfully helped to expand from a relatively small distributor of hydraulic and lubricating systems in the Pacific Northwest to doing business in much of the U.S. southwest, including Southern California, Phoenix/Tucson, D/FW and west Texas.
The manufacturer in Las Vegas had become a large customer of my former client and the two company heads had become friends and the former client made the recommendation. The president of the company in Las Vegas tracked me down by phone while I was in Mombasa, Kenya and made the initial inquiry, as to my possible interest, and we finally negotiated a contract by email.
He had set me up in a small office with phone and access to the company computer system just down a hallway from the reception area. I’d arrived in early August of 2001 and things were moving along, actually well ahead of what either of us had anticipated when we had struck a deal.
It was all going smoothly; little did I know what was rushing at me on several fronts that would bring about endings and new beginnings.
Interestingly the name of the receptionist just came back to me, Jane. The hallway led to a door that went out onto the floor of the plant and along both sides of the long hallway were a number of other offices including the one occupied by the president.
Jane’s scream to turn on the TV because a jetliner had just crashed into a building in New York, was a general call. I didn’t have a TV in my little closet of an office, so I jumped up and ran up to the reception area …and got the first glimpses of what was to be a day that was the end of the world for about 4,000 people in New York and was certainly the end of one era and a new beginning for the rest of the world.
A totally unexpected disruption, for me, to some well-laid plans for the future; and now, almost twenty years later, here we go again, COVID-19.
Not only is COVID-19 bringing death and destruction to many human lives and certainly far more than 9/11, but also it is far more disruptive to what had been the beginning of a thriving economy and business climate.
What will this bring to each of us, to which we will much later look back and refer to it as “In the Beginning?”
Instead of hand-wringing, we can look at it differently, because that’s all it takes to see opportunity in the midst of every tragedy, a different point of view.
We don’t have to be insensitive to the suffering and pain the tragedy is causing, but neither does it have to be our singular focus.
This moment, right now, is the first moment of the rest of eternity, the plans I made yesterday, last week or last year simply don’t apply, but if I know where to point the question, “What now?” A whole new beginning will be laid out for me, am I ready to ask the question?