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

Image credit

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.

The female connection

When I moved back to Sydney I had a dream about a kitchen table. And a couch. But the table was the important part. I desperately wanted a table that people [read female friends] would gather around and share, connect, eat and laugh.

It didn’t quite happen that way.

I am persistant and determined, some may even say stubborn. So I tried to artifically create my dream by holding ‘women’s circles’. It didn’t work becase it wasn’t the spontaneous, authentic connection I (I’d like to think we) wanted. So I gave up for a while.

I believe there is something immesurably powerful in women connecting with other women. Sharing, teaching, supporting eachother. In times gone by this kind of connection and support was inherent in the way our societies were organised. The gathering of women was vital to the passing down of wisdom; about womens bodies, cycles, birthing, childraising, relationships. Femininity was respected, honoured, revered and even feared. It was fear that drove the religious aristocracy to foster competition amoung women  & stamp out  women’s gatherings.

We may have been out in the wilderness for hundreds of years, but we are coming back. Instead of gathering in ceremony we attned conferences and womens networking events. Instead of cooking over the hearth we are meeting for coffee. We are bringing birth back into our homes and entursting our babies to midwives. We gather. We connect. We harness the power of Web 2.0.

Yes we are women of a new millennium, but we have ancient bones. We still deeply yearn for female connection and the power we generate when together is a force to be reckoned with.

Cast your net wide

Watching a slideshow of Afghanistan explained by a soldier just returned from active duty puts my personal issues in perspective. So did having a hot chocolate at the Sheraton on the Park (with the Connect2Mums crew).

We all have issues. If you breathe and you live, you are bound to have issues. Even his Holiness the Dali Lama has drama to contend with. How we experience drama is subjective.

I am not saying that your issues are insignificant because ‘there is always somebody out there worse off than you’. What I am saying is that the narrower your focus the larger problems will appear.

High school is a great example of this. Our years at high school are characterised by us continually making mountains out of mole hills. A single off-hand comment could quickly turn into friendship groups divided and months of arguments and drama. Our immaturity was partially responsible but so was that fact that the school yard, and its occupants, were our whole world.

A work-a-holic will always experience work related dramas as devastating and dramatic because work swallows most of their attention and focus. A new mother’s day hangs entirely on whether her baby sleeps and eats well. She knows that the world is at war and people are dying of poverty and disease, but the tiny bundle in her arms is her whole world. New lovers can be happy together even if their lives are crumbling around them because the relationship alone is their focus; but when the relationship crumbles they are lost.

My awareness was broadened recently when an old friend stayed with us. He took my focus from local to global reminding me of, and personalizing, the war in Afghanistan. Realising that carrying a weapon just to take your morning jog and laying fellow soldiers to rest is a personal reality for a gentle man my son calls ‘Uncle’ reminded me that it is my personal bias that dictates the size of my problems. How easily we become blinkered by the privilege that is inherent our (read my) life.

You don’t need to know a soldier to put your troubles into perspective. All you need to do is to exercise your inherent compassion. How? Connect with other people on a real level. Get to know the difficulties another is facing – not to compare or even to ‘fix’ them but to empathise with them and witness the journey of another. Don’t restrict yourself only to connecting with people whose journey mirrors your own. Connect with older & younger people in your city and across the globe. This is the true value of online communities and how they enhance our lives.

Cast your net wide. Value diversity. Difference is like sunlight that shines on the facets of your life and makes them shine.

* This post first appeared on http://connect2mums.ning.com

Image credit Larryzou@

Lessons from Cooking

I love to cook. It hasn’t always been that way. In the 80′s when I was growing up there were a flood of cookbooks titled “Microwave cookery” and every new microwave came with a cookbook to teach you how to use the new kitchen contraption. Anything that helped, predominately women, to avoid using pots and pans and the subsequent washing up was the future of cooking. So other than occasions at my Nan’s house I didn’t see much cooking go on in my kitchen. Time spent cooking was wasted time that could have been netter spend doing something else. Or so I was taught.

It was a surprise to me when I moved out that I enjoyed the process of selecting produce and cooking a feast. The time spent cooking was pure delight. I decked myself out with good (read expensive) non stick fry pans. There were no shortage of TV advertisements touting the latest ad greatest advances in Teflon which I felt I had no choice but to take advantage of or else ruin my food. When I had a mid-week dinner to get on the table I used the hottest setting the stove had to hasten the cooking time knowing that the food wouldn’t stick to the pan.

Last month I bought myself a good (read quality) stainless steel pan and an enormous (read I can’t wait to cook paella) cast iron pan. I am using lower settings, producing better food and I am yet to burn a dish or stick anything to the pan.

Lesson:  Don’t buy into others pervasive fears even if those fears are accepted or in vogue. If you stick to quality and your values you will always come out on top.

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.