Utagawa Hiroshige II (Shigenobu)
Entrance to the Gankirō Tea House in the Miyozaki District,
Yokohama, Bushu
(3rd month, 1859)

"…to identify an opportunity to prosper when it inevitably presents itself as a different-shaped guitar."


Prosperity seems to come and go on something akin to Sandberg’s little cat feet, though everyone who ever owned a cat, little or otherwise, knows just how loud their arrivals and departures can sound. Our cats, Max and Molly, hit the floor with a distinct plop so far from stealthy that nobody can smell stealthy from there. They proceed to march down the upstairs hall, for they most often come and go via a second-story window they access by climbing up the back trellis and storming up the kitchen roof. I hear each footfall as they “creep” down the stairs, and can audibly follow their progress through the front hall and the dining room, even though both rooms’ floors are covered with shock-absorbing vinyl planking, before taking their final launch up and onto the kitchen table, where they hope I’ve left them some kitty treats. I usually have. These cats have learned that their Prosperity reliably exists on the kitchen table, and they are not the least bit shy about directly pursuing it there.

My Prosperities do not seem to come so reliably or noisily. Even acknowledging that mine have never precisely come on little cat feet, either, I am most often guilty through anticipation. I misdirect my attention somewhere other than to where my next Prosperity later seems as though it should have seemed more likely to appear. I’m staring South as it slips in unnoticed from the East. This amounts to an honest mistake, for what should I anticipate besides some slight variant of the Prosperity I’ve most recently imprinted on? I should know better at my age, but I cannot seem to reliably expect any unexpected, as if anyone ever could. So my next Prosperity will very likely surprise me, just after I sense that my Prosperities have abandoned me again. So many of these sensations ultimately turn out to be illusions that I should know better than to trust them. I might have faith in emergence instead, but I usually don’t. Maybe my palate needs some cleansing before I can appreciate the upcoming course.

My friend George announced on yesterday’s Friday Zoom Chat that he had finally taken his accountant’s advice and closed down his business. He reported that he had savings and Social Security and had been feeling increasingly guilty about taking business from more needy practitioners, anyway. It seemed clear to me that he had just reported on losing a significant piece of his identity, a source of his past Prosperity. This has happened to everybody, or will most certainly happen if it hasn’t quite happened yet. These events often fuel the infamous mid-life crisis. I, myself, experienced them early and often throughout my many careers. Each Prosperity ultimately bit its dust, it seemed. None seemed to prove even half as permanent as I might have initially imagined. These lost Prosperities were not necessarily failures. They were, on reflection, merely plot twists, though in the moment they occurred, they each felt like utter failures.

My seven-year career as a singer/songwriter served as my first Prosperity to abandon me—or was it me that abandoned it? I ultimately acknowledged that even if I succeeded on the terms I’d initially envisioned, it would feel more like a failure by then. My situation had changed. I was no longer an unattached, relatively carefree seventeen-year-old, but a married man still working casual labor gigs as he neared twenty-five, with a wife whose baby alarm didn’t feature a snooze function. I reluctantly sold my PA system as a symbol of acceptance, and enrolled in university to study to become the businessman I never would be. People who heard my story would inevitably try to comfort me, insisting that it sure seemed like a shame that I was no longer performing. Except I was performing. I came to understand that whatever I had been doing when I was performing was such an honest expression of who I was that it was never artifice. I realized that I employed the same skills I’d honed crafting and performing songs in whatever activity I had been employed. I’d explain to those who felt moved to grieve for my loss that, as far as I was concerned, I was just playing a different-shaped guitar.

This Prosperity story fully qualifies as a different-shaped guitar. I employed the same set of skills producing it that attracted my first Prosperity to me. I always will. In this startlingly strange way, my Prosperities were never truly able to abandon me, for each seemed to imprint some element that ultimately became an inseparable component of whatever continued. Sure, I rarely actually perform, accompanying myself on my guitar these days, and I have never once lived through a day since then without employing the skills I learned back when I still considered myself a working troubadour. The adage insists that we should bloom wherever we are, though this, like many adages, seems just a tad too clever for serious consideration. It’s not really advice if I don’t feel capable of fulfilling its injunction. Besides, I can’t always imagine Blooming in every context, especially when feeling bereft right after abandoning another well-accustomed guitar shape. I imprint on the instances of my Prosperities to the detriment of my ability to identify an opportunity to prosper when it inevitably presents itself as a different-shaped guitar.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz