Walking the other morning along the river, I watched the early morning light wash across the lit torch of the Statue of Liberty.
This is the Lady Liberty of my early childhood.
Memorialized by the memories of my grandfather that ties me personally to this image, this city, this need for strength and resilience in this incredible time for the world.
Pop came into the harbor some 115 years ago after a long solitary journey by boat from Russia. As a small Yiddish speaking kid, I can only imagine going through the naturalization process at Ellis island under the then massive image of Lady Liberty.
Pre the bridges, the tunnels, the cargo cranes, pre everything except a mass of immigrant humanity pouring into this city.
He came from the shetls of of Eastern Europe to find something better. More so, he was sent to discover a new life unavailable to him in his homeland, to bring relatives over after him and to create something new.
Stepping completely into the unknown.
It’s hard not to romanticize this story and my profound love for this hard working, quiet, cigar smoking man so prominent at one end of the kitchen table in our home growing up.
But as the entire world has been brought to its knees by a tiny microbe and we sit at the era of something unknown, I stare at the statue wrapped in so many childhood memories and think about the uncertainty of that time.
Of his strength, of the innate connection between immigrant willpower and myself, still an entrepreneur at this stage in my life. Sitting and thinking of what the reality of the situation has for all of us that is positive.
It is now obvious to me that the order we build our lives and businesses upon is in a way, an illusion. I nor anyone could imagine that it could literally crumble in a few months and the idea that this is a phase, like a massive cultural cold, unlikely.
The thing of interest to me in this image of the statue, this slow motion black and white film of my grandfather and my earliest childhood is to say not only ‘buck up’ but to realize that normal was never really just that.
Sure Pop and my parents did things in a world completely unhinged from their own pasts. They stumbled forward and as a multi generational coalition of immigrants and 1st generation New Yorkers, gave rise to the working middle class and the basis of the boomer generation which I was, in retrospect, so fortunate to be a product of.
I didn’t start this post thinking of an equivalence between then and now, equating the building of NY then and the reimagining of it now–but maybe at a more primal level that is the truth of it.
Pop facing a new world with rules of humanity and family and little else, and all of us today facing something similar in a way that is not just metaphorical, holds some profound truth.
Waiting for patterns. Waiting for a new normal to surface and in between biding our time is a waste.
We need to realize that it’s an open book of change here to be rewritten.
There is a lot of really hard shit going down in the financial markets, the lack of coherence in politics and the painful dissolution of our health systems. I have my share of pain in some of this.
But today, at this extended moment in communal time, I’m thinking of Lady Liberty.
Once the largest thing in the harbor, dwarfing the very ships themselves. Immigrants as individuals miniscule in her wake.
Now physically a relic but as it appears to me, in spirit, in truth, in the reality of what my grandfather faced back then, just life how it is. As it always has been.
You can shuck it off and if fortunate wait it out I guess and bake bread, self observe to the point of inanity or respond and adjust and find something new.
And embrace the change that is ongoing that we don’t know yet. Embrace that we all need to do something to heal our relationship to nature. And embrace that what we build as business people or hypothesize as thinkers will certainly be in response to today, though not a waiting for it to be over.
Take from this what works for you.
For me, I’m going to take it as a lesson from the generations I came out of.
Be strong. Be creative. Make the world that you want to live in and do something about it.
It is always hard. It is always possible.
Big nod to my grandfather.
Samuel Rubin, horse drawn cab entrepreneur in the teens of last century, factory worker and union organizer in the garment district. Lover of family and a good man.
One of the coolest guys I can remember who after all this time, as I recreate him over and over in my memory is still is teaching me to work hard, be creative, and expect only what you can make yourself.
