I am grateful to be working with Ali and the refugee children, and now also with Red, the ambassador to connection. I recognize the selfishness of this work, as perhaps many of you do. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the hatred and destructiveness in the world, and this works helps me to shed it and live around it, to live a life that is expansive enough to transcend it, at least most of the time.

Hatred and destructiveness are everywhere, in me, our political system, our media, in the left and the right, and all over the technological world of social media. There is not a day when someone does not send me a hateful message (or a loving one, to be fair.)

I am particularly affected by the hatred and destructiveness that targets helpless and innocent children like the refugees and immigrants above, and their families. Destructiveness often ruined their families, drove them from their homes, burned down their building last year.

They are the antithesis of hatred and destruction for me, this the way in which I cope with the hatred of our times. They are a way for me to do good, rather than for me to hate. That is quite a gift.

I ask myself almost every day, how can I live with this in a positive and meaningful way, without succumbing to it? In his very important book “Escape To Freedom,” Erich Fromm, the writer, analyst and social scientist writes presciently about our times and the challenge for everyone who seeks humanity rather than conflict, anyone who wishes to keep his or her heart from turning to stone.

Hatred and destructiveness of the kind we see in our country almost every day is rooted, says Fromm, “in the unbearableness of individual powerless and isolation.”

Any even casual observer of personal relations in modern American can hardly help but be struck with the amount of anger and destructiveness to be found everywhere. There is virtually nothing that is not being used  as a rationalization for destructiveness, cruelty and hatred. Just look at the daily spewings of the “left” and the “right.”

Love, duty, conscience, humanity, patriotism, empathy are all being used as disguises, writes Fromm, to destroy others or corrode the better angels of ourselves. I was struck by Fromm’s suggested explanation for this destructiveness and also for his implicit solution for living with it.

It has certainly been helpful for me.

“It would seem,” he wrote, “that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportonate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not  refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire, but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s sensuous, emotional and intellectual capacities.”

Life, he suggests, has an inner dynamism of its own, it tends to grow, to be expressed, to believed. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction and rage.

The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards anger and destruction. The more life is realized, the weaker is the impulse and need for destruction. Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

This so eerily fits my own life, it almost brings me to tears, thus is it important to share. What is creativity, after al, but the expansion of one’s own life, a way to grow, to express oneself, to be believed? When this tendency was thwarted, I nearly destroyed myself and did much harm to others. In expanding my life – this work with the refugees and the Mansion is a manifestation of that – I am giving rebirth to myself and helping others.

Even then, Fromm wrote that the root of destructiveness in working people is the isolation of the individidual and the suppression of individual expensiveness. How on earth is the average person to expand his or her life when their own work is trivialized and considered a fraction of the hedge fund manager, when their income declines, when they can’t afford their own health care and security?

I knew that I had to expand my life or perish, and it has saved me. I recommend a fulfilled life highly. For me, it has been the path to living meaningfully in an angry and often destructive world. I do not believe in living a life dictated to me by others, or for the profit of others. T.S. Eliot called it the “hollow life.” Joseph Campbell called it the “substitute life.”

I remember thinking that I must l live my own life or be lost forever.