Unplugged connection

Yesterday I feel like a traveled back in time. I caught the train into the city to meet a friend. No blackberry. On the train I read a book. A real paper book. Not a blog or an E book on a smartphone or tablet. We sat on her couch and on her bed like we used to when we were 15 (yes I have known her that long) and we talked. We didn’t communally watch TV, play a game, sms, or update our  Facebook pages. We even let our phones go to voicemail. Oh the horror. We went to lunch at a local cafe and had pies, not some elegantly put together tossed salad, and enjoyed tea and soft drink. No diet or artificial sweetener to be seen. We even shared the best chocolate éclair ever! Yumm.

I read some more on the trip home on the train and when I had the carriage to myself I called a long distance friend to catch up with her. On the walk home I picked up some ingredients for dinner and actually visited a ‘video store’! Two DVDs later (two of my faves) I went home to cook dinner and watch DVDs curled up on the couch with my husband, under a hand-made patchwork quilt no less!

It felt fantastic to just connect. Not connect in the über modern sense of knowing what your friends had for lunch thanks to twitter, or where there are thanks to foursquare, what they did during the week thanks to their Facebook pics. But real connection, to hear the wobble in their voice when they talk about something difficult, to see the smile crinkle the corners of their eyes in a way that an emoticon simply can’t convey. To laugh with someone. To feel that genuine connection, where so much is conveyed between the words.

I don’t know about you, but pretty much every young woman [20 to 35] I care about has been on an emotional roller coaster recently. And we seem to be stuck in the big dipper part swinging from low to lower, with an occasional sharp upswing. The thing that is keeping me (and I know a lot of them) sane, is female connection. Its power simply cannot be underestimated. It is like alchemy for the soul!

Have you thanked your ‘girls’ recently? Mine know who they are… love you guys! xxx

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How to know what is an illusion

So much of what you ‘lurve’ every day is smoke. It is fantastical and transitory and ungrounded and illusionary. The certainty you love; imaginary. The coffee you would be useless without; replaceable. The colleagues you laugh with daily; largely unimportant. The email signature that denotes your place in the world of business; temporary. Your Facebook friends; frauds and your Twitter followers; strangers.

You aren’t alone in this predicament. In fact this predicament is overloaded with people so ‘connected’ to our networks that we broadcast what we eat for lunch, and yet so disconnected that we  would be lucky to have 10 people to really rely on when the shit hits the fan.

We are so dedicated to the worship of technology and networking that we have forgotten that when it comes down to the wire they are as useful as a maxed out credit card. What is real are connections of the heart. Our families, our passions, our friends, our legacies.

We are all different, yes, but we are all human. As humans we need connection, support, love, touch, nourishment. Below is my litmus test. Only what passes the test deserve my ‘lurve’, attention and dedication all else is to be taken lightly.

The friendship is illusionary if:

• you don’t call to say ‘Happy Birthday’, but send them a Facebook message only instead
• you have never held their hand  in celebration or commiseration
• you don’t share with them when your grandmother gets Alzheimer’s or you’re facing depression
• you wouldn’t fly across the country to visit them at a moment’s notice if they needed you
• you couldn’t ask them to dislodge a stuck diaphragm or drive you to a feared Doctor appointment
• you wouldn’t invite them to your wedding

An illusion is:

• something that isn’t true all the time
• something fickle or transitory
• something wouldn’t take with you to the proverbial desert island
• something based in what others think of you and not in who you are
• something that would be dwarfed by terrible news

How do you tell the difference? What is your litmus test?

Our parents’ mistakes

I am really struggling at the moment with this notion that productivity equals worth. As a society we are lengthening our work days and taking side projects like consulting, blogging and even second jobs. What I find most astounding is that it is Gen-Y who is leading the charge. What the? Yes we are in our twenties and building the foundations of our careers and indeed our lives but wasn’t it us that vowed never to repeat our parents’ mistake of putting work before fulfillment and happiness?

I feel like we are being duped. We say we are chasing our dreams and living life on our own terms – really? Hands up who dreamed as a child of working 80 hour weeks? Hands up who dreamed of feeling the need to schedule time in order to feel comfortable relaxing? It sounds a whole lot like we are chasing the job, so we feel good about our title on Linkedin and the money to buy the stuff that we see in ads and on recommendations from Twitter and Facebook.

I don’t mean to sound judgemental really I don’t. My biggest struggle when I took time off to have a baby was that I didn’t feel productive enough. But I have since detoxed from the addiction that is feeling constantly rushed and busy.

By all means chase your dreams, create your empire, but have perspective. The art of going with the flow, the skill of remaining calm in a chaotic world, the mastery of the ego’s need to feel constantly important will bode you just as well as a side project or kudos for working overtime – but they won’t break you in the process.

Spring Clean

So today is September 1; officially Spring. The time if renewal, anticipation of the fun, heat and festivities of Summer and the beginning of the end of the current year. There is nothing better than starting Spring afresh, (that goes for Autumn too, if you reside in the Northern Hemisphere) using this transitory season to get things sorted, ordered, cleaned, organised and lined up in a row.

I’m not talking just about cleaning the junk out of old cupboards, but spring cleaning your loose ends, relationships, projects and goals. For me, knowing that I am on track and that I wont end up on New Years Eve making the resolution to sort out this years messes is liberating and leaves me feeling positive. Leaving it to the start of Summer and I always feel like I am playing catch up.

So without further ado, my internal Spring Clean.

• Tick the completed items off your someday list*
• Add any new items to your someday list*
• Delete anything that has been sitting on your ‘to-do’ list for longer than a month – its not that important. Or move it to your someday list* f it is.
• Scroll through the contacts on your mobile/email/Facebook. Message anyone you have been meaning to catch up with.
• Delete any old contacts on your mobile/email/Facebook that you no longer need.
• Review your 2009 goals. Amend them if they aren’t relevant. Action plan them if they are.
• Think of your close friends. Are there any rifts, favours, borrowed items etc that can be repaired or returned? If so, do it.
• If you haven’t spoken to you Mum/Grandmother for longer than a month, call them already!

Now to the hard part. For this you need to be honest with yourself.

• Think of all the things that make you genuinely sad. Make a list. For each of the items decide if there is something you can do to make the situation any better, if so do it. If there is nothing you can do then pray/meditate or whatever you do to make peace with the situation.
• Repeat for Angry, Depressed, Hurt, Guilty, Fearful, Lonely, Rejected, Jealous & Frustrated.

I’d love to hear how you go with this, or what you like to do at the turn of the seasons.

* A Someday list is an adaptation of the ‘Someday/Maybe’ items in David Allens’s How To Get Things Done organisational system. A book I highly recommend. In essence anything that you would like to do some day & any project you would like to begin but don’t currently have the time, resources or inclination to begin belong on this list.

Facebook’s saving grace

It took me forever to embrace Facebook. Now I use it daily, but initially I had no intention of using it. I saw no point in publicly messaging friends I would much rather call or have coffee with. The lure of seeing what old school classmates were doing and voyeuristically peering at their personal photos seemed creepy to me.

But alas, a friend posted the photos of her newborn on Facebook and I had to become a ‘Friend’ to view them. So I manically created a profile planning on deleting it as soon as I had seen her beautiful baby. It didn’t quite pan out that way – I spelt my own name wrong, and couldn’t figure out how to delete the damn profile before my friends found me.

Since that fateful day I have witnessed Facebook bring out the worst in people the way a 50% sale does in shopaholics. We passively view each other lives, post and make comments on the drunken photos, judge people by the size of their friends list and post photos of our engagement rings as profile pictures. Although Facebook can be used for good the lure of the dark side is just so powerful. There are apps that force you to inflict random, often unflattering, polls on your friends in order to view the results of a poll about you.

Despite the darkness interwoven in Facebook we have an uneasy truce. An old photo was posted of me on Facebook. Initially I was mortified. Not just in the ‘OMG I don’t believe I wore that’ way either. This photo was taken from a time when I used to sing country music and line dance every Tuesday night. (I don’t believe I admitted that in a blog)  Worse still was the fact that the other girls in the picture were all more beautiful, skinnier and more talented than me.

Then I actually looked at the picture. I looked at the figures on the screen and not the images as tainted by memory. I glowed with genuine joy, I looked innocent, beautiful and nothing like the chubby girl in my mind. I was flabbergasted. I had never seen myself that way before. Facebook’s saving grace – it reflects you. Good, bad or ugly.

Catching up

Do you feel like you are getting left behind? Like your life is whizzing past faster than you can keep up with? How often do you use the phrase ‘catching up’? We catch up for coffee, catch up on paperwork, catch up with family, catch up on the shows we missed when we were catching up with colleagues for drinks.

The culture of busy-ness and hurrying is a multi-faceted beast. It arises in part out of the information age and the resultant tirade of information and part out of the demise of rites of passage.

The information age, which to 20somethings like myself is the only age we have ever known, bombards us with thousands of media messages each day. This is additional to the work we do, the family responsibilities we have, the Facebook updates and Twitter feeds, the SMSs and calls we get on our mobiles, home lines, work phones and Skype. We do our best to surf the crest of the information (and thus expectation) wave. Some days we go to bed feeling like we failed our loved ones when we declined invitations, left emails unread, status updates unresponded to and messages not returned.

Then we are told, often by coaches like myself, that keeping our head above water isn’t enough. Even if you did accept the invitation, read the emails, respond to the updates and return the messages, did you engage in your world on a meaningful level? Did you connect with loved ones or take calls all the way through dinner? We resolve to do better, but the cycle of bombardment, response and lingering feeling of falling behind is unrelenting. So we try again to ‘catch up’.

In the good ‘ol days there were fewer messages yes, but the days and years were broken up with meaningful rites of passage. Times to celebrate, reflect and connect with those around us; Weddings, Christenings, 21st Birthdays, Sweet Sixteenths, Anniversaries, Kitchen Teas. Yes these events still happen and we mark them with a party but I think they have lost the element of reflection. What once were rites have become invitations and photos we review on Facebook. The wisdom they once held has evaporated.

So if you are tired of running behind your life, catching up here and there only to be overwhelmed again why not try something different. Put away the phones and laptops and have dinner and talk. Have a get together and talk about times past and notice how different you are ‘now’ to ‘then’. Punctuate the merry-go-round with something different. Create memories. Go places. Meet people. Perhaps then the information age ‘pressure’ to connect won’t overwhelm us.

Grace under slander

This morning saw the resurrection of my 15 year old self. For those of you who never had the pleasure; she was a brash, fearsome and opinionated. She rarely took a breath and if you found her somewhere other than atop her soap-box you took a photo to preserve the memory.

I was living the illusion that the 15 year old me was safely living in old photo albums and dusty boxes of mementos. So needless to say her appearance this morning took me by surprise. The most shocking part was how simple it was to provoke her. Facebook, bloody Facebook! Trust a social media to ignite the socially awkward, chubby over achiever in me.

The rousing of the dead went like this: I awoke and, as usual, checked my Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. But this morning my face flushed, my stomach turned to lead; genuine teenage angst flooded my veins. The comment spoke to the deepest fears of my youthful self. A single petty comment from someone I haven’t spoken to in a decade took the bounce from my step and replaced it with the dragging feet of impending embarrassment.

The 15 year old in me wanted to respond with an equally below the belt wall-to-wall comment laden with spite and malice. The more compassionate 21 year old in me voted for Direct Messaging the person and asking what insecurity inspired such pettiness. It took me a deep breath and a minute or so for my current incarnation to take centre stage. When she did I got clear. My lessons:

• The world is getting smaller, our networks are getting bigger and off-hand comments now reach more than the 2 or 3 girlfriends they used to; they reach the world, they are recorded on the web forever.
• Not everyone will like me, not everybody should like me. If everybody likes me I am not living my truth, because personal truth lived with passion is bound to rub someone the wrong way.
• Most of all it’s none of my business what other people think of me.

So my eventual reaction once my 15 and 21 year old selves were safely back in their boxes? The graceful path; I did nothing. Other than this blog.

Please note: I wrote this blog months ago and held it back, for obvious reasons.