Humility II

An interesting thing happened yesterday, something along the lines of coincidences that seem to fill my life: I had lunch with visitors. Now, these were not just any visitors. They were from the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana (see the post below on Humility). They had been invited by one our my junior managers because we might subcontract part of one our projects to them. Listening to them describe their activities was interesting, I am told, by that manager and his assistants. Therefore, he thought I might like to join them for lunch.

Might I? People from a center with the name of Mike Mansfield, someone to whom I have looked up for dozens of years? Was it at all surprising then that I was the first to arrive?

Once the people from the center arrived, along with my team, I started comparing notes about how Montana has changed since the time that I lived there. Then, finally, we got around the name of the center. Yes, indeed, the center had been named after Mansfield who had been a long-term-on-sabbatical professor at the University of Montana. That was to be expected; however, I found out that the director had worked with Mansfield in Japan when he was an ambassador there. So many stories! I shared my little story with her. She acknowledged that this was "just like Mike."

What a lovely lunch! Even lovelier because it was unexpected. And then there is that reminder about humility...