Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that Tiger Woods should be nominated “person of the year”. Why? Because the chasm between his public persona and his frenzied personal antics and peccadilloes seems emblematic of a rather tawdry decade, book-ended by Enron and Woods, with Iraq war fictions and sub-prime meltdowns in between.

We have reached that period where people truly cannot distinguish between “status” and “stature”. More’s the pity. Nonsense eventually reveals itself, and the debacle of the “Me” decade where we sought personal identity from retail logos and gadgets, impoverishing our discernment and perhaps our souls in the process, is now before us. The debris of reality-avoidance and narcissistic self-indulgence, of chastising political candidates who make us think and mulishly following those who beat their chests, is everywhere.

But if these icons have been shown to be incontestably hollow, where does that leave us? Do we rend our garments, flagellate ourselves, what?

Maybe it’s time to remember instead that human progress has depended on substance, not spin. It is the evolution of social institutions, the wide scale dissemination of education, Gutenberg and the printing press, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the expansion of voting, Civil Rights and more. None of these came from congratulating ourselves for fluff and having role models who had to parade themselves as paragons for the rest of us to build esteem vicariously from.

Let’s get back to education. Let’s demand accountability from leaders. Let’s rise to the responsibility of active citizenship. Let’s rebuild families rather than using electronic babysitters for our kids. Let’s balance budgets, personal ones and national ones, and let’s restore common sense. Let’s not be bought off by pyrotechnics, in war or in economics.

It has been said that life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think. We need to feel more passionately and think more clearly.

It’s time to get real.

The hope was that President Obama’s election was an augury of a new decade to come. But not if we think we can delegate our future prospects to him or any other leader.

We have to live the words so beloved to Nelson Mandela from the poem Invictus,  “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”  It’s time to reclaim that mastery and leadership.

Baby steps are fine. But let’s break ground on a better, more worthy decade!

Relationships matter now more than ever.

This is sometimes assumed to be a tropism, a natural or innate tendency.

It’s not. It’s a cultivated skill, propensity and reflex. To relate to someone is to first understand them and connect with them on their own terms. It is secondarily to understand how to be helpful to them in appropriate ways, not excessively or obsequiously, not pandering to them, but just seeking to be of value.

And in establishing that rapport, trust and credibility, to be eligible to also be understood and connected with in turn, to also hopefully be someone reciprocally cared about and also potentially added value to.

Harvey Mackay put it poignantly, “dig the well before you’re thirsty.” In other words, relationships have to precede our need for them. And whatever it is we seek, be it respect, or understanding, love, or value, we had best offer it ourselves, passionately, authentically and unstintingly. People who do seem to outlay these things proactively, invite and seem to enjoy abundance. Those that cling to these things, doling them out reluctantly and parsimoniously, seem to invite a corresponding poverty into their lives.

The play IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the Vibrator Play) is a saucy, juicy, provocative, titillating (if occasionally a bit too extended) tale of Victorian repression and how women (and “artistic” men) came to doctors to be cured of “hysteria” (emotional anguish leading to a deadening of physical responses) by virtue of “paroxysms” (today referred to by other names with more recreational than therapeutic implications) brought about by vibrators.

But the play is really about personal fulfillment, the right to need emotions and self-expression, and the  default drive to find substitutes (if we must) for the love, passion and intimacy we really seek. But it isn’t just about vibrators. There are all kinds of toys we turn to,  and varieties of what has been called “cheap grace” from booze, to drugs, to consumerism, to promiscuity (the other extreme of repression).

Relationships are at essence about our need to touch and be touched…emotionally and physically. Let us open ourselves up over this period in particular, to giving in expanded ways…and receiving. And indeed these will then be, happy holidays! And the period will “vibrate” with far more expansive positive paroxysms (as well as gentler fulfillments) of all kinds than ever before.