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February, 2008 Enewsletter

In this month’s Enote:

You Can’t Go Home Again, by Michael Kroth

How Leaders Shape Culture, by Lisa Haneberg

One day the headlines may read, "Next New Prescription – Laughter."by Judy L. Young

Recipe For Bookmarking Success Is Del.icio.us, by Bob Grassberger, Ph.D.

You Can’t Go Home Again, by Michael Kroth

I grew up in Kansas. My elementary school was Carter, in Wichita, and the family farm where my sisters Mary and Amy and my brother David often spent the summer was just a few miles south, outside Winfield.

Last year I had the opportunity to speak at an American Society for Training and Development chapter meeting in Wichita (where I met this month’s Laughter author, Judy Young). I decided to visit our home there, the first place I really remember, and the farm, where we had learned to drive, on a tractor; to swim, in the creek; to sing, loud and without shame in our little white church with a steeple; and to do all the myriad farming chores youngsters help with.

Years before on a trip I tried to find our home in Olathe, Kansas where I’d gone to high school. I remember combing the streets for hours. Olathe, a perfect little town of 20,000 when I’d lived there, had grown into another suburb of Kansas City. It occurred to me that sometimes you literally can’t go home again. That saddened me.

Things change. Companies with which you thought you’d retire let you go or rearrange your career opportunities. Friends move on or move in to your life. A new interest captures your imagination. Children metamorph your world. You can’t go back to what you once were.

Transformation is irreversible. You can’t unlearn something or unexperience something or take back a thought. Once your mind is opened to new ways of looking at the world you can never go back to not-knowing. Once you’ve experienced life in a helpful or destructive way you are always changed – you can never go back to not-perceiving. Once you’ve felt joy or peace or pain or pleasure or angst or fear you can never go back to not-having-felt.

Much as we would like to think that transformation is good and that we go through phases that cause us to be more thoughtful, more understanding, and our beliefs more open - it isn’t always true. I may have a much darker, pessimistic, closed view of the world once I’ve felt pain or seen destruction. My optimistic, sunny naiveté might be transformed, my entire frame of reference modified, when I move away from my cloistered life at home. You can’t go back to what you once were.

As I drove toward our little home in Wichita I wondered what it would be like. I remembered so many happy days, playing kick-the-can, roaming the streets, growing up. I turned onto the street and realized that although I had changed so much over 40 years, it had not. Perhaps my mind was playing games, but it seemed like it had deteriorated, become smaller. I didn’t want to come home here again.

An hour later I was on a rural road approaching the old homestead, Grandview Ranch. My grandma had to sell it after grandpa died early. If you’ve ever had to sell your family farm you know the scars only cover a ripping apart of your soul from the land that never really heals. You can’t go home again. You can’t go back.

I stopped along the side of the road and reminisced about home made ice cream and holding roman candles over the fields on Fourth of Julys past. I thought about my grandfather and how he affects us still, years after his death. I remembered the time a horse reared up with my dad astride and fell back, the saddle horn gouging into his side. I remembered and I remembered.

The farm had changed though and so had I. The very dirt of course was different. My thoughts and hopes and perspectives had moved on, and as I pointed my camera over the hood of my car I realized it was good that I couldn’t go home again. It could never be the same because I could never be the same. You can’t go home again, I thought this time, looking out over beautiful Kansas farmlands, and I wouldn’t want to.

Too many people I meet have a victim mentality – they wish for the past and believe someone has taken it away. They remember the old company fondly, forgetting that they complained about it at the time. They grouse about new technology, forgetting how much easier most things are these days.

When I was in Ireland a few years ago I visited, as many do, the castles. It was an awakening for me. To realize that the royalty of that era lived in circumstances that we would consider impoverished and unhealthy in every way was astonishing. Do you really want to go back home again? What was it really like?

The homes of our past reside within our souls. You can’t go home again, because in the best of ways our home travels with us no matter where we go.