Seven swans-a-swimming

On the seventh day of Christmas, we should take a rest
from struggling and striving, remember we're blessed,
for blessings enrich us when handled with care
and with those who don't have them always be shared.

I shiver at the thought, not because of the weather. The winters in these parts are getting milder, but the cold, hard cash that drives too much of our thinking these days is more than enough reason to seek more warmth. But where can we find it?

It's hard to talk about money without talking about success. For too many people, the measure of success is a person's net value, and when it's about money, it soon ends up being about "me". Like spoiled children, we hear the cries of "Mine! That's mine! You can't have it. No, mine!" Spoiled children are sad enough. Spoiled adults are even worse.

We also like to think, and we're told often enough, that what we have are the rewards of our own efforts. I didn't realize that inheritance was such hard work, but I don't know everything, yet most of the super-rich these days didn't earn their fortunes themselves. There are folks who did "earn" theirs, say Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but does anyone think that Bill Gates worked harder than they did, especially those aspiring to get into the rich club? I doubt it, and so there is an apparent discrepancy between working hard and getting ahead. What about luck? What about being at the right place at the right time? These aren't things you can plan for and they have a strong influence on the difference between success and failure. But, worst of all, we are led to believe that they did it all on their own. And this is one of the biggest untruths in the history of propaganda.

You don't have to believe me. Try Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers for a behind-the-scenes look at what is really happening: being in the right place at the right time is more important than anything, and practice is more important than talent. These individuals then tend to get more than their share of support from everyone else, making success more of a collective than solitary effort. This is borne out in biology and evolution. David Sloan Wilson argues quite convincingly in his 3 August 2011, New Scientist article on selfless evolution that cooperation, not competition, is the strategic, that is, long-term evolutionary mechanism. Humans survive best and longest if they cooperate. Competition is destructive, and this is certainly the effects that we are seeing from the latest economic catastrophe.

Put more succinctly, "we" is much more important than "me", at least when thought about in the long-run. Nature knows this, but we seem to have forgotten. Our forebears, though, were also forced by nature to come together, to huddle together in search of warmth and hope for the year to come. It was a part of their experience. We haven't outgrown the experience nor have we found a worthy substitute for it, but the Twelve Days of Christmas give us the chance to regain that experience once more.