Being By Believing

  Remembering the Living on Memorial Day By an Air Force Mom Department of Veterans Affairs statistics show there are more than 22 million veterans in the United States, nearly 10 percent of them women. The majority of surviving veterans today are from the Vietnam War era, though within the next decade Gulf War veterans are expected to become the largest group. Those numbers stunned me. Like many Americans, I grew up thinking of veterans primarily as the generation that fought in World War II. Movies, documentaries, and history books shaped my understanding of war and sacrifice. But statistics have a way of making history suddenly feel very personal. Today, just over one million WWII veterans are still living, and hundreds pass away every day. What Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” is disappearing before our eyes. It is difficult to imagine that in another twenty or thirty years, we will be saying the same thing about Vietnam veterans. It makes me wonder: Wi...

  The year was 1729 when Margaret “Peggy” Lawrence stood before a court in Middlesex County, England, accused of theft. She was nineteen years old. The items she stole were worth little by today’s standards, yet the punishment at the time was death. Facing execution, Peggy pleaded for mercy, asking the court to consider her youth. Instead of hanging her, the judge sentenced her to a different fate: She would be sent to America. In the 1700s, England commonly transported convicts and the unwanted poor to the colonies as indentured servants or slaves. Peggy became one of them. Originally sentenced to death for theft at nineteen years old, she was instead granted “mercy” by being shipped across the Atlantic to America. She became one of more than one hundred prisoners forced aboard a transport ship bound for the colonies. Many did not survive those crossings. Peggy did. According to family history, she was sold in Virginia to tobacco planter Tobias Phillips and taken to ...

  The Secret of Letting Go by Guy Finley contains the statement: “No human being controls life — his or hers or anyone else’s.” When I first read that line, my immediate reaction was disagreement. Of course I control my life. I decide who I am. I decide what kind of person I want to be. And in some ways, that’s true. Other people do not get to define your worth. They do not get to decide your character, your heart, or the kind of person you become. Who we are is shaped over years of experiences — by the people who inspire us, the people who hurt us, the lessons we learn, and the choices we make afterward. The person we become is constantly being created and refined. But then I stopped and reread the statement: “No human being controls life.” That part was harder to argue with. If I truly controlled life — especially my own — I would probably spend my days traveling the world, chasing adventures, meeting fascinating people, and never worrying about money again. I cert...

  The latest trend in business culture seems to be measuring absolutely everything through surveys. Attend a conference? Survey. Complete a training? Survey. Talk to customer service for three minutes? Survey. Every interaction now comes with a follow-up email asking us to rate our experience, our satisfaction, and apparently the emotional quality of the office carpeting. Where I worked, nearly every interaction with clients, volunteers, attendees, or coworkers generated some form of survey. Even more concerning, employee evaluations, promotions, and raises were often tied to these anonymous responses. So naturally, I believed the surveys would reflect the positive experiences people expressed in person. The events I coordinated were on time, within budget, organized, and generally successful. Attendees smiled, thanked us, praised the speakers, enjoyed the workshops, and repeatedly told us what a great experience they had. Then I sent out the surveys. I have never s...

Exactly a year ago, I cleaned up my house, put everything into storage, listed my home for sale, and moved to Oklahoma to care for my mother during what we believed would be the last year of her life. She was on hospice and wasn’t expected to live much longer. Before I arrived, we had already dealt with neighbors stealing her retirement money, her car, family heirlooms, and draining her bank accounts. What I wasn’t prepared for was the condition she was living in. My children had arranged in-home care for her and assured me she was being taken care of, that everything was fine. It wasn’t fine. The house was filled with urine, dirty adult diapers, feces, mice, cockroaches, garbage, and overwhelming filth. My mother had wasted away to skin and bones. On top of that, dementia had changed her completely. She became cruel in ways I still struggle to process, and some of the things she said to me continue to haunt me. I had imagined arriving to find her bedridden and mostly unaware. Instead,...

This morning I received another job rejection. What made this one different is that the hiring committee had already told me I interviewed well and had strong experience for the role. But like several other interviews over the past few months, the result was the same. It’s hard not to start asking bigger questions about what is happening in the hiring process today. Many companies and organizations are now using AI-driven tools to filter applications before a human ever reviews them. These systems are designed to increase efficiency, but they also raise an important question: what happens when algorithms start deciding which candidates are “ideal”? I’ve also had conversations with several friends and colleagues over 40 who are experiencing the same pattern. Strong resumes. Positive interviews. Then a final rejection after in-person meetings. It makes you wonder if we are unintentionally overlooking one of the most valuable assets in the workforce: experience. Experienced p...