I hope you don't mind my re-sending this to all of you. The words are just as true now as they were a year and a half ago on my 40th radio anniversary here in the Hudson Valley. Today is my final show, as I respond to the needs of my personal life and family. All is well, don't worry, and this is my own decision. Everyone here at the radio station has been enormously supportive. It's just time. I'll surface on social media now and then and look forward to sharing the next chapter with all of you!
To all my many listeners,
Since my first day in the Hudson Valley you have honored me with your continued attention. It has given me a happy and fulfilling career. I enjoy it even more today than when I first began. That alone would be reason enough for gratitude. But there is something bigger, much better.
I meet so many people doing what I do. Some of you I’ve known for almost my entire career. Some of you I’ve only just met. Through these countless small relationships (and some not so small), at the level of person to person, whether I met you at an event or you called or visited the Morning Show, or now, more recently, my Saturday show, I have been privileged to witness the most incredible capacities for love, kindness, generosity, sacrifice, dedicated faithfulness, resiliency and perseverance, sometimes amid very challenging circumstances. I’ve also seen humility, joy, good humor, a huge capacity for fun and lightheartedness, sometimes downright silliness. It’s been grand.
The circle of your care often extends far beyond the boundaries of yourselves and your families to include the needs and concerns of your communities and the world itself. You bring an incredible amount of compassion and reasoned action to bear on issues that involve all of us in the great interweaving of our lives here on earth. Some of you work quietly and unobserved behind the scenes of your lives, some of you are very front-line, but all of you navigate life with courage and fortitude. None of us is perfect—I’m not saying that—but, marvelously, perfection is entirely irrelevant. I’ve witnessed Goodness. Over and over and over again. Even someone as thick as I could not help but be instructed and inspired. And so I was. And am.
It has been what you have given to me that I have in a small way tried to return to you. I am happy to say that it seems you have felt my deep respect, care and admiration. My greatest pleasure is to make you smile or laugh and also to help you feel accompanied, not just by me, but by each other.
What I take with me from this point on is not just many treasured relationships, but the capacity to see relationships everywhere. That enlivens this crossroads in my life with the most exhilarating sense of hope and potential—NOT for the accumulation of more memories to become dusty relics in my attic and mind—but with the strong impulse to bring whatever capacities I have to every encounter life brings me from here on out. I look forward to the future, not with any sense of diminishment or sadness over the time left (I am 67 after all, so the thought occurs), but with the hope, faith and vitality that finds time a useless reference point and hoping and praying (literally) that I be able to continue to touch and be touched by all the miraculous lives with whom it will be my great grace and privilege to encounter.
So, to each of you, and to the great Benevolence that holds all of us, I say a most earnest and sincere THANK YOU.
Joe