With Purpose Success, part 77

Some years, we've concluded that everything is going just fine, while others require serious discussion-maybe even an argument or two- before we can align our needs and commitments again. We also have practical discussions of what our relationship needs more of or less of. 

As our lives have unfolded, these "pauses" have focused on everything from our anxieties over the impending birth of each of our two children, a few work failures and humorous successes, the death of Maddy's dad, and most recently, how we intend to cope with becoming empty nesters and the painful financial reckoning that has seized the world. This annual ritual has proven a great way for us to stay connected, and when the moment comes when we face each other and say "I do," it never fails to help us remember the things that made us fall in love in the first place while allowing us to take notice of all the reasons we love each other still. 

We try not to make a big chore of these occasions and have found that the simpler we keep them, the more we can focus on each other and on the continually evolving purpose of our bond. From time to time, when people learn about our remarriage history, they ask us why we would do something as odd as that. We simply respond, "You should try it! We bet you'll be moved by the experience." 

Giving-It's Also about 

What You Get

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

-Joseph Campbell 

In June 2006, Warren Buffett, the second richest person alive, pledged 85 percent of his personal fortune-$31 billion-to the Bill and Melinda 

Gates Foundation. The world of philanthropy had never seen anything like it, and Buffett was roundly applauded not just for his outsized generosity but his humility as well. He could have built himself a shrine in Dubai, or he could have established the world's largest foundation in his own name to live on forever as a monument to his riches. He could have pulled a Leona Helmsley and left $5 billion "for the care and welfare of dogs," or whatever his handpicked goals might be. But Buffett chose otherwise; he handed his money to a friend whom he trusted to more effectively distribute his life's accumulation. In the eyes of the world it was a singular act of selflessness, and a clarion call for others to follow his lead. 

So only a refreshingly honest and irascible Scotsman like Sir Thomas Hunter, a self-made billionaire philanthropist himself, could see Buffett's largesse as anything less than magnanimous. Buffett, argues Hunter, may have taken the easy way out. "If you've been clever enough to make $31 billion, you're wired differently from 99 percent of the population," 

Hunter explained to me. "And I would love to have your thinking in trying to solve the world's seemingly intractable problems."