Archive for September, 2011

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Till Death Do Us Part

Till death do us part.

An often parodied yet iconic line that came to fame at wedding ceremonies through The Book of Common Prayer dating back to the mid-1500s. Clearly its sentiment and versions of the line were used for centuries before – but print made it real and helped to spread its practice – printed books…an early form of social networking coupled with word of mouth…

Today – Sunday – we celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary (I’m travelling…what else is new…) and counted our blessings of daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren. Not a bad blessing at all!

Having said that we also commemorated the anniversaries of the deaths of two dear friends – one who died of natural causes, after his great, all-embracing heart gave out after rounds of terrible chemo, and one who was murdered when his great, all-embracing heart propelled him up the stairs of Tower Two on 9/11 to save his friends’ lives.

Till death do us part started to take on new meaning for me because over ten years later these two friends still influence and inspire my life and the lives of others as well – way beyond their immediate families.

Not to get too maudlin – but this got me thinking about today and the world we live in. Where the data trails we leave will in fact live forever – way beyond the lifespan of a marriage or the healthiest of elders…who get older and live longer every year. Our relatively short analog existence is no match for the data lifespan – or is it?

Think Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, the Great Sprit, Zeus, Odin – all alive in our minds and some of them in many people’s prayers. There was no Internet and data stream to track them – just stories and deeds – good and bad – yet live they do.

Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare – all spread through the most powerful of social networks – analog as it might have been.

And of course the Bible (in all its versions) and the Koran leave “data” trails that stretch back millennia….

As I pondered this I came across the notion of Japanese Temples being built of wood because the analog trappings around them are ephemeral but the divine spirit within (think digital) is eternal.

And there you have it – analog and digital – one dies; evaporates – the other lives on forever…whatever that might be… “I didn’t know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.” Richard Brautigan

I was reminded of the time I took my older daughter to France for her 16th birthday and we went to Pere Lachaise – the cemetery of Paris – to visit Jim Morrison’s grave – that is Jim Morrison of the Doors (my favorite group of all time). We got lost and an old man started yelling at us in French how could we so desecrate such a place by looking for a nobody when Voltaire and Moliere were buried right where we were standing….I guess Jim’s digital trail wasn’t long enough…

All of this resonates as we look at data storage issues, privacy, ownership of data – for sure but what intrigues me is the notion of immortality created simply because there is a digital record vs. the immortality created by deed and action – good and bad.

There are new services – for example, 4SquareAnd7yearsago – that were created expressly to help people track their historical data trail and aggregate any date you really wanted to remember.

In other words, if you wanted to relive last September 26, it would aggregate all your tweets and posts and sign-ins and whatevers so you could remember that you got your shoes wet in the rain or had a bad piece of sushi.

OK – I am being a bit facetious – but I hope you see my point – do we really create a better immortality of remembering someone or something of influence because we now have a digital trail? Will that become a surrogate for the myth building that has kept stories alive since the dawn of time? Are we shortchanging ourselves and our memories by linking them to Twitter?

As I think of my 33 years and I look at my photos – analog and digital – I am grateful that so much of what makes me smile is mine alone – and as I think of my two dear friends, I am comforted that I have my own memories to share and store.

I guess the bottom line is that the digital shelf does not guarantee immortality – for that you need people who love you for who you are and what you achieved.

I was inspired by my own musings (hope you don’t mind) but also by the following and its source…Listen:

“In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about.” Eric Schmidt

So as we all tweet and post and blog and upload and overload today – think about what it and you and I look like way after our analog gigs are up.

Till death do us part…

What’s your view?

Posted by David on 09/26 at 06:43 PM
Monday, September 19th, 2011

Are you impatient?

Are you impatient?

Seriously impatient?

Do you have the kind of impatience you can taste? Feel?

The kind that burns you up and keeps you awake at night and restless during the day impatience?

Impatience that you can share?

Impatience that you act on…..

Excellent!

But, here is the thing – not all impatience is good impatience…sometimes maybe it’s not impatience at all…

What I mean is:

What sometimes masquerades as impatience is laziness – a lack of desire to put in the time and thinking needed to make a difference – a shortcut for no reason other than to lessen a workload.

Some impatience is merely a lack of interest – a loss of desire – a let’s just get it over with attitude.

And, some impatience is just sheer ignorance – an absence of knowledge – with no real desire to learn more or go deeper.

Here is the thing – notice what my three examples have in common when describing negative impatience?

Lack of desire; loss of desire; no real desire…

The way I view impatience; the way I value impatience is by passion.

True passion fuels the kind of impatience that can change the world…or any little part of it.

Impatience should be articulated as “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGIY5Vyj4YM

Watch the clip – if you didn’t – it’s worth it – listen to him carefully – it all begins with passion – passion moves mountains; has changed empires; has created true marvels….

Think about all the dispassionate impatience that you know – Wall Street for one – and ask yourself if that’s how you want your own impatience to be channeled – to be articulated.

Is yours the impatience of running a red traffic light and causing an accident or is it the “I’m as mad as hell” type?

Personally I struggle. We all get caught up in the get me out of the line quickly syndrome; the I don’t need to wait at the corner – no other car is coming… sadly how many dead people had that as a last thought… I wonder.

And sometimes the notion of patience being a virtue seems so old fashioned that it’s almost embarrassing – unless you recast the very notion of it as follows…listen:

“Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.”
Guy Kawasaki

Frankly, I found this to be an interesting lesson in leadership. However, it must be coupled with passion.

And to that end I submit the following…listen:

“He who is not impatient is not in love.” Italian Proverb

And there you have it. Be in love – with what you believe in; what you do every day; what you care for; what you hope to achieve/become; what you are…don’t embrace the impatience of the path of least resistance….

This, to me, is the simple impatience with negative thinking; negative people – what is more positively passionate than love?

And, my sense is that this is the impatience that makes all the difference.

Special thanks to MDM for inspiring me…

What’s your view?

How impatient are you?

 

 

 

Posted by David on 09/19 at 03:24 PM
Monday, September 12th, 2011

Nine Eleven

I’m on a plane.

On my way home from STREAM 2011 in Greece…a story for another day…

Nothing unusual about that – being on a plane that is – for me…and rarely ever worth mentioning.

Except that today is September 11, 2011 – the tenth anniversary of the mass murders in the Twin Towers in New York.

I went to bed last night watching the memorial services in the United States and the car bomb alert in New York on CNN and woke this morning to the same, wishing I was in New York where I was on 9/11.

Got to the airport early as I expected long security lines – questioning, searching and scanning.

Spent a lot of time at the airport…as there was nothing more than the ordinary.

Opened the International Herald Tribune – my outside the U.S. substitute for The New York Times…yes, despite my over-deviced life and multitude of feeds, I still am a sucker for a Morning Paper paper….

Read the lead story – “A Day that’s Never Ended” – essentially about the fact that around the world 9/11 means many different things – has complex layers of meaning – most having little to do with the close to 3,000 murdered victims.

Buried in the paper was a small piece on the car bomb alert in New York.

Waited at the gate – nervous “joking” from some of the Americans on the plane – wondering if we were nuts to fly today – as we all surreptitiously scanned the gate area profiling our fellow passengers.

On the plane we had our first U.S. encounter of the day – the pilot told us there would be a delay because traffic into New York was slowing down due to heightened security and terrorist attack scares.

Actually – he made me feel a little better as the dose of reality he delivered seemed closer to the truth of it than all the articles on 9/11 being the true beginning of the 21st century or the ones on how Al-Qaeda and the radical killers have been marginalized and such – tell that to people all over the world who are still cowering in fear today, not knowing who might enter their Mosque, Church or Synagogue and blow them up – who might attack their children’s school or spray a family wedding party with bullets – who might leave a car packed with explosives and ball bearings, nails and other bits of sharp metals (to do more damage) in a crowded marketplace filled with women and children and families out shopping. You get the picture – you see the same daily news that I do and some of you are affected daily by the worry.

So here I sit halfway through the flight – and all I can think of is my friend Andrew (read his story here)  who gave his life to save others as he ran back up into the tower to find his colleagues who were not on the stairs going down with the rest. He did find them – I imagine – for eternity – as his ashes and all the rest are mixed and mingled and spread all over New York and by now all over the world – I believe – mixed with those of all the other victims in the long chain of violence and hatred that still connects us to 9/11 and before and will continue – I believe – until we stop looking for excuses and just confront the damned problem of baseless hatred and intolerance.

Many of you have your own Andrew to mourn and remember – 3,000 is a big number, and if you add to it all the victims before and since, it’s even harder to grasp. Holding on to a memory, a person, an incident makes it all seem so much more tangible.

Listen:

“Their silent wounds have speech
More eloquent than men;
Their tones can deeper reach
Than human voice or pen.”
William Woodman

For me – Andrew is my touchstone – will always be – nothing that I can write or say is as eloquent as his pure memory. So with that thought I toast his memory, not in sadness but in hope.

What’s your view?

Who is your Andrew?

Posted by David on 09/12 at 05:18 PM