Neal Ostman | Home

My passion is to introduce and collaborate on building better pathways for our 21st century. With clarity on the grit, bridges, and pathways needed, we can begin to transform decision-making methods across arenas encompassing public policy, government, business engagement, and education.

I hope you find the information and ideas valuable. I encourage feedback, discussion, and challenges to the information I will offer. Let me start with some information on the ‘man behind the curtain’.

I am in my 3rd Career – Giving Back, so this site is a way for me to present suggestions and information and engage in actions I am promoting. Since I have retired from the commercial world, the focus is on all the experiences and insights I have garnered in my lifetime- business, geopolitics, metaphysics, poetry, and living a life. I have framed this by using the triad – Translator, Pathfinder, Poet.

Translator

I and others, Boomers, are ‘tweeners’, growing up and living between the 20th and 21st centuries. Wow, what changes we have seen and lived! In fact, I maintain, this new 21st century is an era change unlike anything in hundreds of years – much more on this later. So much has changed; many people struggle to come to grips with the swirling events of this era. This is where I will act as a Translator – clarifying fundamental truisms and explaining changing relationships across these times. When we grew up in the wild and crazy sixties and seventies, many young people acted and were enticed to ‘throw out the old’; it was a time of promise and change! As we move further into the 21st century, many people have adopted ideas, some recycled theories, that hold that hope is all about rejecting the structures and ways of the past. The counsel I will share follows the phrase “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” I will suggest that “the baby” carries our best hope for a better future.

Pathfinder

I have found many websites, blogs, and well-written articles that address serious cultural and political issues, but are very short on solutions. They chronical events and personalities that led to the catastrophe and crisis of the day, but fail to offer considered steps to rectify the problem. They seem to stoke anger, call for tearing down, shouting down, ripping out, name-calling, and some with milder calls to join ‘the community, and at the least contact your representative. In my posts, I will offer recommendations for measurements and steps that can improve the state of things and the processes underlying them. These suggestions start by establishing the foundational and geometric nature of things. Then, using realistic, process-oriented views, moves to recommended actions that leverage today’s tools.

Poet

It is my view that poems should speak for themselves. One of the beauties of poetry is that each reader/listener can take away that which speaks to them. From this view, as I post any of my poems, I won’t be offering more than that. I am appreciative of the guidance and critiques received from poet friends and associations that I have been involved with since the late 1990’s. To this point, I’ve never made the rigorous effort to be published; work and life have taken precedence. Still, I have been published in four countries outside the USA and in several journals and anthologies. I want to produce quality poetry. I love words. They come from the metaphysic, for they are merely symbols and signifiers of what we know and think we understand. In this blog, I will share and discuss poetry. Also, there will be discussions on theology and faith, for in these poetry is present.