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All this year, Michigan Radio’s Morning Edition host Christina Shockley has been asking people across the state what three things they think we can all do to help improve Michigan. Today, we hear from Doug Stanton. He’s author of, “Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.”

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Doug’s first idea is to happily live in the midst of complexity; life isn’t as simple as wrong or right.

He believes that “it’s time for us to live in a world of consensus, bringing people around the table, and working for the common good. As opposed to say, your own team, which you may be fighting for in a very partisan manner.” Stanton thinks that great art “leaves you kind of left to your own senses, to find your own way to the solution of problems.” He uses Picasso’s Guernica painted in 1937 about the Spanish Civil War to illustrate this idea, “I look at this painting and I’m confused; it’s beautiful and rapturous and terrifying, and in fact, it’s a lot like life.” Doug sees life as a story that doesn’t follow any pre-conceived narrative and that everyone has to find and live their own story.

Having been unemployed himself, he urges Michigan workers to “not become blocked by the circumstances that have been dropped in your path. Be adaptive, move around them and just keep marching on; something’s got to happen…because things have been bad that also means that at some point they’ve got to get good again. We hope.”

His second idea has to do with meditation and communication.

Stanton recommends that we go fishing, read, and take a break. “The fact that the outdoors doesn’t really care who you are, what you’re doing, and what you’re circumstances are. It’s a great cleanser to go outside, and to sit and read… sit on the bank and fish with one of your family members….The next day come home and read that passage that you might have been reading on the riverbank to your family and talk about it.” Stanton is concerned with the importance of communication, the written word, and narrative, “What’s the story we’re telling everyday in our lives in the way we act and the way we treat other people.”

Stanton believes this idea will help the state of Michigan because of how it flows into his third idea “that you leave more on the table than you take.”

Stanton’s grandfather owned a Shell station in Reed City, Michigan. The stores labor and profits were shared equally among the three employees, and from his grandfather he learned in his words, “What’s good for me is good for you, and, if you live like that, no matter what your station in life karma comes around. Even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter, you’re still going to be happy because you’re not acting like a jerk.”