Running Late
March 31, 2026
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I am on a pre-Easter retreat –Thursday to Sunday – at the Trappist monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts, so I’m posting this essay from October 2015 because it does a decent job of capturing the experience as well as my mindset a decade ago.
I’ve exhausted whole decades of my career running from project to project, meeting to meeting, event to event, commitment to commitment. Running, so I wouldn’t be late.
Now, as I celebrate a birthday whose number is as revolting as Voldemort, I am still running: two bed-and-breakfasts . . . two books published in the past year and five more in various stages of development . . . a weekly blog posting . . . a weekly column in an online magazine . . . three corporate clients on two coasts.
I am running to do it all—before the time comes for me to go. I hope to catch up with myself during these days of silence..
Thomas J. Watson, Sr., transformed the tiny Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company into what was once the world’s most revered corporation—IBM. His slogan, which was the centerpiece of all the company’s endeavors, from research to sales to service, was the simple, single word: THINK.
I spent almost twenty years at IBM with the ubiquitous THINK slogan font of mind.
Tom Watson isn’t the only business superstar who paid obeisance to the worth of formalized thinking. Here’s what Warren Buffett—arguably history’s most successful equities investor—has to say:
"I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business."
I wish he had shared that thought with me a long time ago.
To quote Thomas Merton, that most famous Trappist monk:
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?”
In my novella, Billy of the Tulips,
a teenaged boy, tormented by a brutish father, finds peace in “an inner room, in his mind and in his heart, where he hid his thoughts and where he kept his affections. This room was always with him, wherever he was, and it was always a secret place, where only God entered.”
During the coming week, I will try to cross that abyss and find my inner room.