Me. We.

I was invited into a banquet hall at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York for a chance to meet privately with my childhood hero, Muhammad Ali.

His Parkinsons was advanced and I kneeled by his wheelchair and held his hand and thanked him for the gift he had given me simply by his existence. I said to him, “me, we” and he squeezed my hand tight as I spoke those words.

In 1975, Ali had gone to Harvard and was asked for a poem. He gave them those two words.

“Me. We.”

It has been called shortest poem ever written. Harvard’s own history records Ali as that year’s Class Day speaker.

I have thought about that poem for years because they contain everything.

Me.

We.

I exist. You exist. We are here together. We are.

Not we do, or we have, or we want, or we need, or we lost… but we are.

Much of modern life is organized around convincing us that something is missing and that someone is to blame. Our need for more. More money, more status, more sex, more followers, more power, more recognition. Our certainty that its absence is someone else’s fault and that if we only had it, we would be enough.

A person who believes he is incomplete is profitable and dangerous as he will do almost anything to feel complete. Promise him the missing piece and he will keep reaching for it.

Politics and war offer another political or national enemy whose defeat will finally make everything right.

The gambling machine says the next hand will change everything. Pornography promises another fantasy. The algorithm promises another little reward.

The promise is always tomorrow, the relief is always one acquisition or domination away -- but it never arrives, and in the process, it drives ever increasing extremes in risk taking, consumption and destruction.

I see the same thing in the strange performance of masculinity that has become so common. The money. The women. The cars. The domination. The public humiliation of weaker people. The endless need to prove strength.

But that isn’t strength, it is insecurity with resources.

The strongest men I have known rarely needed to demonstrate that they were strong.

Italy taught me something about this too.

Go south to Naples and watch a man flirt with a woman walking past a café. He looks at her. She catches him looking. He smiles. She smiles back. There is a sparkle between two people who may never see each other again.

Then she keeps walking.

Nothing happened, there was no conquest, no manipulation, no expectation that the moment had to become sex, ownership or possession. A man enjoyed being a man. A woman enjoyed being a woman. For a few seconds they recognized something delightful in each other and then returned to their lives. The connected to the joy of being human.

This is enough.

There is something radical about that now.

If being alive is already meaningful, you are much less inclined to steal, corrupt or compromise the welfare of strangers for the benefit of your own misguided search to be “enough.”

This is why I believe that underneath the corruption, greed, self-dealing and manipulation in our government and in our society is something much simpler.

A spiritual void.

Not religion in the institutional sense, something more basic.

The understanding that there is a power greater than any one of us, that we are connected to that power always, and we are connected to one another whether we acknowledge it or not.

The understanding that your value is not created by your bank account, title, the number of people afraid of you, or the size of the audience watching you.

You were alive before you acquired any of those things, you will lose all of those things. But you matter before anybody applauds and you matter long after they stop.

More can never solve the feeling of not being enough.

There is no political or economic policy that can establish this grounding place. Only a spiritual solution.

Ali put it into two words. Me. We.