Faith.

Faith, at least in my strangled neck of the woods, was always hard to come by.

I’ll start close to a macro. 

How can you believe in love when your own parents beat the stuffing out of you. Then made you feel like they did nothing wrong and you had asked for it.

Now, let’s go up a couple levels.

How can you believe in god when that supposed powerful being did nothing while millions were shot, millions more gassed, and still millions more worked to death.

Down a level.

How can you believe in your nation, allegedly “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” when that same nation denies so much to so many with such arrogance, cruelty and violence.

Finally, down about 29 levels.

Advertising.

How do you believe in it after the wholesale destruction of the industry by holding company oligarchs? How do you believe in it when what wins awards never even runs? How do you believe in it when giant hairballs and cream-soda scented ass-wipes are regarded as acceptable—even good?

How do you believe in advertising when so few people engaged in the profession haven’t the vaguest idea of how a) communication works or b) advertising works or c) how the brain works. How do you believe in advertising when so many people in the industry don’t even believe advertising has to be interesting and different in order to work?

How can you believe in anything—god, family, country, work—when the only thing that makes sense in most circumstances today is that absolutely nothing makes sense.

Among so many people faith has always been hard come by.

When you’re leading major pieces of business and making your company money and then you’re fired—it’s hard to any longer believe in the status quo.

When you see robber barons like sorrell interviewed as if he is a sage builder of businesses (when he eviscerated WPP and is in the process of wringing out S4 Capital) it’s hard to have faith. Likewise when you see robber barons like wren getting a $69,300,000 payday because he successfully cut $1,000,000,000 in salaries, it’s hard to have faith. When you see robber barons like rose—though she served on WPP’s board for ten years say she had nothing to do with its current parlous state, while praising read’s disastrous leadership as successful, it’s hard to have faith.

Without faith it’s hard to live.

And faith is hard to come by.

But it’s there.

It’s there in the people who help you. Who recommend you. Who tell friends.

It’s there in people with shoulders you can cry on. It’s there in people who believe in you, even though most often you believe in nothing.

It’s there almost seven years into running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company when what seems like bleak is lit by a blaze of hope. A phone call, an assignment, a comforting word.

It’s there most often, you’ll discover, when you judge it gone forever.

Some reserve you have inside.

That keeps you going.

Keeps you writing.

Keeps you thinking, working, turning over rocks. Or pushing them up hill.

It’s there in your fortitude.

I’ve read the Dostoevsky above about sixty-two-hundred times in my life and after all those times and all those readings I’m not sure I’m any closer to understanding it now than I was when I first read The Brothers Karamazov as a sullen teenager.

But faith is faith.

You don’t have to understand it to have it.

In fact, you don’t even have to have it to have it.

You just have to know, somehow, that often the door nailed shut the tightest is the one that swings open with the loudest bang.

I think that’s what this all means.