Happy Birthday #34
Resurgo
I have two tattoos.
The first is a small sunset I had tattooed on my back at the age of 19. It was meant to be a vow: whatever the future might bring, however I should grow and mature and evolve, I swore to never forget the transcendent glory of sunsets, the daily spectacle of heaven melting into earth.
Some things change, and some things never do — and what could be more beautiful than the rise and fall of a sun?
I got the second tattoo a month after my Mom died in the spring of 2016.
It is a single word, in the tiniest of fonts — no wider than my thumbnail, no taller than a grain of rice — notched just atop my shoulder-blade, barely visible out of the corner of my eye.
Resurgo.
“I Shall Rise Again,” it means in Latin; a motto handed down to my mother and to me from her Scotch-Irish ancestors, the McFalls. It comes with a family crest — a phoenix — that has been in the family for hundreds of years.
When I was young my mother gave me a signet ring with the phoenix crest and the word Resurgo engraved in gold. I was foolish and careless and promptly lost the heirloom. After her diagnosis, as she got her affairs in order, she arranged to have a second set of rings cast for me and my brother, and presented them to us in a touchingly ceremonial fashion one summer evening in our backyard. I was older by then but apparently not any wiser; heartbreakingly, I managed to lose that ring, as well.
Thus the tattoo… may ink prove more permanent than gold. For as long as I’m alive, I won’t lose this one.
Tattoos live on the surface of our skin; and on the surface, at least, it made sense to commemorate my mother with Resurgo.
It was meant to stand for legacy, for heritage, and (I believed) for her indomitability, the staying power of her soul beyond the confines of the mortal. Resurgo, I thought to myself — may she rise again! A strong woman and a stronger spirit still — she is dead but never gone; on my skin, in the corner of my eye, for the rest of my life, she is eternal. The sun sets, and rises again the next day; why shouldn’t my mother as well?
A nice thought, of course, but like so many nice thoughts it fails miserably to describe things as they are.
Mom won’t rise again. Strictly as a matter of fact, in this world at least, she is both dead and gone. She isn’t coming back. To deny that would be to foist upon her an immortality — an unnaturalness — that she herself would have found foolishly clingy and distasteful.
This is not to say that her imagination was bound by materialism — far from it! Often and indulgently she would speculate about the existence of loving ghosts, or the quantum transformation of souls into energy, set free to soar around the universe on cool and cosmic adventures.
It is simply that having lived a most extraordinary and inspiring life, she inspired me most of all with the grace that she showed in the face of death. Not a fighting spirit, not a determined will to survive, not a flame of resistance. She did not rage against the dying of the light. She embraced it — with grace and humor and curiosity and peace.
She did not die to one day rise again. She didn’t die to do anything — she just died, because that’s what humans do.
Sure, she was classy about it, but a classy death does not a resurrection make. Some things change, and some things never do.
I went this year for the first time to Burning Man. It’s a week-long party cum mystical retreat in the desert that handily serves as both a cultural cliche and a genuine exploration of human possibility.
Every year they build there, far out in the desert playa, a Temple: a grand, hollow home for our memories and attachments to those that are gone. All day and all night, people gather there to pray and cry and remember and transcend, to weave hymns of sand for those we’ve lost. At the end of the week, the Temple burns.
Perhaps only at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem have I witnessed so much spiritual energy — so much raw human emotion — concentrated with such focus into a single space that it almost condenses into physical energy, a palpable current of electrical sorrow.
From the instant I entered that space, I was in tears.
Not for Mom, or for myself, but for that greater sadness that we all must feel, the sadness of certain loss, the pain common to mortals who can possess only in moments, yet yearn in eternities.
It was a greater sadness born, I hope, of a greater love.
And it was through those tears that I realized it:
I’m okay with mom being gone now.
I still feel sadness, of course, and I still feel pain — but I am no longer in grief.
I miss her (oh how I miss her!) — but I no longer mourn her.
It’s been over two years now. I can love her, and let her go.
And in that, another revelation still:
Resurgo.
It wasn’t her that was meant to rise again. It was me.
It was there all along, of course, like any good mystical truth, the conjugation written in plain ink on my skin: Resurgo — I shall rise again.
Resurgo doesn’t celebrate human triumph over death; that’s a fantasy. It celebrates human triumph over grief. Mom is not a phoenix, rising unscathed from the ashes of mortality. I am a phoenix, rising from the ashes of loss.
And what could be more beautiful than the fall and rise of a son?
Dear friends, it is with pleasure and pride that I can report that on my 34th birthday I am the most happy, confident, energized, optimistic, and in-my-element that I’ve been in years.
I can feel the darkness receding, the light of a new dawn on the horizon. We may very well be on the brink of Rechtmanaissance.
Here’s a long-winded update:
Professionally, I am moving up the value chain with a mission.
I continue to interpret for important meetings and cool people, but I’m also diversifying and upgrading my freelance work for lower volume and higher impact.
I’ve begun accepting more engagements as a speaker and bilingual event host; at this point I’m MC-ing or speaking at several events a month now, typically on cross-border communications, tech, investment, entrepreneurship, and social impact. (Thought-leadership got a nice bump last week when an article I wrote on A.I. versus human translators was published first by the World Economic Forum blog and then syndicated by TechNode!)
More exciting still is an executive coaching business I’ve been building over the last year, which draws on my decade of experience in VIP cross-cultural communications to help the C-suites of Chinese multinationals craft and present their message to foreign audiences (PR/IR/GR + internal comms). This work combines my love of language, brand strategy, business logic, and charisma and has given me the opportunity to work extensively 1–1 with some of China’s most influential and well-respected founders and CEOs. It’s very cool (and lucrative!).
In addition to these revenue-generating businesses, I’m continuing to build equity value in a growing portfolio of projects and people I believe in.
Cadence Translate has come so far in the past year; all the numbers have just gone up and to the right, and most importantly the team is stronger and more professional then ever before. Special thanks to my business partner and Cadence CEO Matt Conger for steering the ship through chaos and calm alike. If you ever need an interpreter for a business meeting or phone call, in any language, please keep us in mind!
I’m excited to take on a new role this year as a partner at iAsk, a media and investment firm founded by one of China’s leading tech-finance talkshow hosts, Gloria Ai. I’ll be helping to internationalize her content and scout VC/PE deals in global media-tech for her fund. Lots of opportunities to learn and leverage here — watch this space.
I’m also excited to be investing as an LP (a first for me) in a new venture fund that invests in women-impact startups across Asia. Led by Lean In China founder Virginia Tan, it’s the first gender-lens fund of its kind in the region, focusing not exclusively on female founders but rather on technologies and business models that empower women as entrepreneurs, as decision-makers, and as users and consumers. Happy to put you in touch if you want to learn more.
And (see selfies below) I’m still really into my lifestyle portfolio favs Mantra Eyewear and The Hatchery. Go ahead, buy yourself a cool pair of shades! Beta-test an F&B concept in Beijing! Live a little!
(Oh that reminds me — last year I asked you to buy yourself Mantras for my birthday. That was awesome. This year I want to ask you — as a birthday gift to me — to buy yourself a copy of my father’s newly published book! It’s a super-savvy, page-turner political thriller about a neo-con plot to hijack the U.S. Supreme Court (I think he wrote it as fiction but it’s hard to tell these days!). The Ashwander Rules, by Neal Rechtman, just released, available now on Amazon and iBooks. Buy it, read it, share it — it’ll be the best birthday gift this boy could ever ask for!)
Ok, in addition to plugging the business and pleading for gifts, I do want to give a quick update on how I’m staying active on the non-profit side of things, as well.
A community project I started last year, Attitude of Gratitude, is my favorite for its elegant simplicity: every day, share 3 things you are grateful for with 3 people for 33 days. That’s it.
The AoG model has taken off like crazy, with over a thousand participants from around the world sharing gratitude daily in small chat groups, and was recently accepted into the inaugural batch of the Transformative Technologies Academy. We’re about to celebrate our one-year anniversary and launch our next round of sharing on Nov. 1 — if you want to cultivate a happy daily habit of appreciation using just one minute a day, come join us! (Currently on WeChat only).
I’ve also spent a lot of time and thought this year articulating my personal values —the existential imperatives that make me me. My cousin Jeff Rechtman and I have worked on this together and we check in with each other weekly to see if we’re living life according to our JR Values! Take a peek at our newly updated values, share feedback, and join us for weekly Values check-ins (yours or ours) if you think that might be helpful in aligning yourself with yourself!
On the more institutional side of things, I was recently invited to serve as a mentor at the prestigious Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University, and as a startup mentor at Chinaccelerator, one of the largest VC/accelerators in the region. I finally got kicked out of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community (they put you out to pasture after five years) but on my way out I was honored by my peers with the Beijing Hub’s inaugural Klaus Schwab Award for Improving the State of Society, an honor I feel I scarcely deserve but promise to work hard to live up to.
But not work too hard — I value my leisure, after all, and a big part of my “rise” this year has been reinvesting in my health, happiness, and quality of life.
I’ve made a conscious effort to cut back on travel this year, which has done wonders for my social life in Beijing (I’m hosting so many events at my apartment these days that a loving friend custom-printed “JR Productions” t-shirts for my guests!).
Less time on planes also means more time for new hobbies. I started learning tennis and piano from scratch six months ago and can now hit a decent ball on the court and play the opening to Fur Elise.
I have acquired a fish tank and four pet goldfish, the biggest and brightest of which I call my Mom Fish in loving memory. The fish die every couple weeks, of course, but I just buy more fish. Some things never change, etc.
(I hope you don’t find all of this unbearably morbid… I find it quite humorous and think my Mom would, too. She delighted in morbidity. I imagine the two of us sharing a wicked chuckle at all of this, and I smile.)
(The freedom to laugh at one’s pain, incidentally, is a delicious feeling. Emerging from grief feels a bit like ending a bad relationship —the newfound liberty is exhilarating, but there’s a sadistic and giggling desire to poke at it every once and a while just to make sure it’s really over. If you wince, it might not be. If you laugh, and laugh truly, you might just be over it).
Anyyyyyway…
As I start this next lap around the sun, I feel rich with friends, suffused with love, free from grief, and unbearably fortunate.
When Mom died, I fell.
Now I rise again.
Though I say this each year, it is no less true: I could not have done it without you. Yes you, my dearest friends and family, my allies and alibis, my errant mentors and long-suffering supports.
You. I am rising because you lift me.
For that my heart holds a gratitude that you can’t possibly know and I can’t possibly express.
I hope you kind of get the picture, anyway.
With a greater love, I am yours truly,
Jonathan
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