The financial collapse was not quick. Nor did it happen in one place. It would have been nice if it had happened that way, like getting shot with a bullet. But it was nothing like that.
Virtue waited only at the end, which as it turned out, was a beginning.
I did occasionally hear from the girl. I tried to make myself happy for her when she told me about her latest lover.
We had reconnected and the natural flow of our conversation sealed the friendship which never did more than hide beneath the surface of our separate lives. I began to realize that the only thing that kept us off the phone for hours, was the pain I felt at her absence and knowing she shared her deepest passions with anyone else besides me. But such was our friendship, such was my respect for her that I was able to give my heart to her and my loyalty without asking for anything more in return than her friendship. I was willing to live without more, or so I thought. She was repairing New Orleans and enjoying a good life with wealth while I watched my financial empire crumbling around me.
Fortunately, my casino project was moving forward and since my remaining real estate was positioned to provide housing first for the contractors and then for the guests.
But there were any number of potential problems with that moving forward, a small event might not stop it, but another storm could kill the project. There was no storm on the horizon, but my fear fed my imagination. But even my imagination would not predict what happened which was much worse than another storm.
The other item, which it would take some time before I could acknowledge to myself was my envy. I was not envious of the rich, except for one man who'd I'd never met who was the new love of her life. I did not even realize this for years later, but it was there nonetheless.
The world seemed to be offering me nothing, not giving anything, taking everything.
I found myself floating in my hot tub wishing I could die, but I didn't die. You see, I wasn't just broke, I owed huge debts, At the time I was so confused, that I thought the money and the banks controlled me. Things which were essentially inadequate objects had become real to me and I had given them force over me. They did not even want it.
And I had not yet realized that all of this would give me a power over life that I had never realized possible. But for the moment, I was dazed, I went through life like anyone else, seeing the events of life that everyone else saw, but in the background my mind was doing calculations, figuring the dollars owed, the assets remaining, the bills due and the dwindling supply of money to pay them, the conduction of litigation, the negotiations with the bank and somehow, despite all of this there was still a strange spark of light. I did not know till much later what the light was, but it came from that night long ago, when I was able to extend myself to show compassion to the girl, me with all of the problems which I thought that I had, put them all aside for a moment and extended compassion to someone else who needed it. Someone else who was heart sick had needed me and I was able to be there. In this unrealized memory, lay the seeds for my salvation.
One day while I was shopping, the background of counting measured against the cost of the food, I picked up a religious pamphlet. There is no god, perhaps, but the theme caught my eye. My world of money was collapsing around me and in front of me was a pamphlet that asked the question, "Why are you here?" Why indeed.
When you discovery what is important something happens. I had not reached this point yet, but it was coming. When you discover what is really important, you may turn on everything that came before, everything you believed was real, you realize the foundation of the world may be different from what you imagined. You may question this but you would not question a slave waking up one day and rejecting slavery. He looked around at the white faces at the table before him. At least, you wouldn't if you were the slave.
It can be one thing or it can be many things, but in the moment of clarity that is virtue, I was not there yet, but when it came I could see many things that were important to me that I had known but never properly prioritized before. This can be a manifesto, it can be a hundred things. But for me, eventually one thing, one person would be the defining statement of virtue.
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