Pilgrim's progress

It's a cold and fairly quiet night here in Lower Manhattan. The transit strike is over, but there's no rumble of the subway yet beneath Broad Street. The wind is still and voices carry, so much so that walking my dog, I could hear not only a New York Stock Exchange security guard talking on his cell phone across the street, but his wife on the other end as well.

The gargantuan Christmas tree out front of the exchange--with all of its multicolored lights of red and green and blue and yellow--reminds me of how my childhood home was this time of year. Of course, children love Christmas, and well they should, especially the ones who have a home and a tree and two parents and presents. But it's the ones doing without that I'm thinking of now as I count my blessings and a strange and somewhat disconcerting 2005 winds down to single digits.

This year I learned that in business you can be the best in what you do and still end up on the underside of down if you’re not always careful. In addition to hard work and perseverance, making it is all about luck and money, really, luck in making the right connections at the right time and money in having enough of it to see you out of the red and into the black. A little more of the former makes a little more of the latter, and with both I'm cautiously optimistic I'll grow my company in 2006. The building I’m in now was sold and is going co-op, so it looks like I’ll be moving across the East River to Brooklyn in April, unless someone wants to lend me $805,000 to buy the space I’m in now. (I didn’t think so.)

On a personal level, this year I saw two friendships fizzle over Iraq and Hurricane Katrina (as if I was calling the shots in Washington). The left has got to learn to cool its jets. Self-righteous indignation never gets you anywhere.

In June a trusted coworker bolted the company before we had it out of park. That event remains a mystery. I'm still learning the ropes of running a business, and every once in a while I run hot. But I'm not that bad.

I used to dwell on misfortune. But like the thousands of commuters walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to work during the transit strike this morning, I’ve learned that when hard times come knocking, it’s best to just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.

A musician who hasn’t let politics get in the way of our friendship e-mailed me a great mp3 this afternoon. Kris Kristofferson, another relic of the ‘60s, has a new album coming out in March called “This Old Road.” If the other songs are half as good as the one that blew me away today, it’ll be a classic.

Am I young enough
To believe in revolution
Am I strong enough
To get down on my knees and pray
And am I high enough
On the chain of evolution
To respect myself
And my brother and my sister
And perfect myself
In my own peculiar way
--"Pilgrim's Progress," Kris Kristofferson