Let's take a sanity break

Where are the customer's yachts?

A stock broker, trying to impress a new client, took him to the pier where the heads of his firm docked their yachts, as If to say, look what investing in stocks can do.

“Here’s the Anderson’s yacht.” The customer looked up, amazed.

“And here’s the Diamond’s yacht.” Now the customer was hooked.

“And here’s the Bernstein’s yacht.”

The customer, sold on the power of Wall Street to make him rich, asked,

“And where are the customers’ yachts?”

Joe Dominguez told this story in his live seminars on which the book, Your Money or Your Life, was based.

Our point. Are we faithful to a system that is not faithful to us? And if not, what can now guide our lives?

We offered a transformational alternative to the hamster wheel of work and spend and never arrive.

The key to it was Joe’s brilliant reframe of money. Whatever money might be for the winners in the capitalism game, for each of us, our primary currency is the hours of our all too brief lives.

Money, being a fiction, can be infinitely manipulated. Our lives, however, are limited, so where do we want to “invest” those hours?

By what lights do I navigate my life?

The foundation of our response to this moment in America and the world has to be based in our core values, not in a set of options that are all toxic. As individuals or even small groups, we can’t steer the untenable system we have towards safety, well being, the sort any kindergartner knows is fair - where there is enough for everyone and everyone has enough. We’ve passed that point of no return and are wildly out of balance.

At times like these, and today in specific, I return to “my simple self” - what I call the one inside who is always present, spacious, and generous. From this space I wrote a Desiderata in 2021 and revisited it in 2025 to find it still holds water. I often return to it when entangled in the nets floating in the sea of political chicanery that rob us of our life energy.

I invite you to write your own Desiderata

Step back from the rawness of the hate, confusion, and fear that are growing in the spaces between us. Step back from trying to pick a side, a team. Step back, even, from planning your next steps given what’s happening.

Rest in your own good will. Rest in what you long for, in your heart of hearts. Go deeper than the strategies about locations, jobs, mates, investments - given the craziness out there. Let yourself be sane, if only for a few moments of respite.

From this feeling of rest, ask, “What do I truly want? What do I truly care about? What are the principles that always true my course, no matter the disappointments in the past or fears of the future?

Let the answers float up.

Nourish yourself with a return to your own true desires.

No matter what has happened, is happening, may happen, what do I believe? What is the heartbeat of my life? What truths do I come back to? When I’ve felt most myself, most free, what have I believed about life?

If you care to share it with me, I will cherish it. I will hold it as another light out there on the vast sea. I will allow it to en-courage me.

Thank you.