Tag: Kübler-Ross model

Socially connected

The inner ring then the outer ones.

We learn to trust, to collaborate.

Great things cannot be achieved alone.

That’s why the President tweets. That’s why we tweet.

Do you know someone who needs our services?

Or some place who is hiring so our students can apply.

We need those links and those leads.

People need people.

On LinkedIn, we keep seeing so and so is now connected with so and so.

The social graph keeps getting denser. Pretty soon, the net (shaped in our image) will be big enough to carry us to safety *unlike our social safety net which is in need of mending).

New world order, fashioned after our image and likings.

I have come across issues and images I would never have come across on my own.

Thanks to the net economy and taxonomy; yes, I can.

Let’s see if Twitter will tip the election (Kennedy election was a close call as well).

I suspect that it will.

We are not back in 2000. We are in 2012.

Apocalyptic year.

And we have made it thus far pass Labor Day.

Penn State lost 2 games out of the gate.

And the economy, especially in Europe, is still puttering.

Hard times. Like those Post Recession black and white phoros (migrant Madonna).

Something is to be done but then everything has been done.

Together we can. Can’t we.

More than ever before, we are socially connected.

More than ever before, we are doing worse.

What paradox!

What predicament!

All the tools in the world All the help in the world.

Yet still stuck in lower gear.

If we apply the five stages of grief  to the situation, we are now somewhere pass Anger and Denial.

We are in Compromise and Depression.

When people compromised, they ask for less  in return.

And when they are in depression, nothing gets done. Hitting the blank wall. Everything shuts down.

Socially connected or not, let’s remind one another to quickly Accept (acknowledge the Elephant in the room), and move one. Get out and vote . Get some fresh air. Go travel and spend money. Fall is a good time to catch up on some spending and yes, reading (Tom Wolfe is coming out with his voluminous piece again). Turn the chapter to “your life 2.o”.

Learn from Penn State, even with its first two losses. Ouch!

Trust again

People with bad experiences go through various phases in recovery.

Some need a lifetime. Others could trust again in no time.

All depends how the mind plays tricks. If pain recedes deep into long-term memory, then it takes longer to process pain.

Short or long-term memory, bad experiences stay. They surface on unsuspected occasion (Murphy’s Law).

Mine is about to happen again. The post-traumatic disorder. The pain of separation, of loss and of reunion.

It has been a long time . Long enough to look at it with academic detached eyes. Culture shock, reverse culture shock and personal acceptance.

No one can undo his or her past. No one can predict his/her future.

Only the moment. Cherish it. The usual. That predictable cup of coffee. A familiar face in the crowd. One simple joy of a child’s smile. Trust again.

Music often evokes those feelings e.g. a broken relationship, a lost connection.

Pain of an unraveled relationship.

People hurting people. Policies that destroy instead of building up.

Mistakes committed and opportunities lost.

We fear not new things. We fear that new things will evoke or add to bad memories.

We project the past unto the unknown. We no longer want to take risks.

To trust again.

Could that place, this person do me any good? Or just harm?

Leave me alone and let me retire to familiar pain.

Institutions often fall into this trap as well. Back to basics. Back to safe practices. Operating on marginal cost etc….Yet as counter-intuitive as it may seem, to survive, institution and individual need to take risks (The Innovator’s Dilemma).  Life is like riding the bicycle, so you need to keep moving ahead, says Einstein.

So I charge ahead. Trust again. And say a prayer. This morning. This moment.

This very day. That’s the only moment in time I am granted to grow and learn. And to trust again.

Time to heal

Of the 5 stages of grief, the first one goes away the quickest (denial). The last stage, acceptance, takes the longest (not without some relapses). I wass at my parent’s graves this past Thanksgiving. A bit of acceptance there.

Trophies, college degrees and even old business cards showed our accomplishments. But they are not indicators of present success (there was PBS piece about an Ivy League graduate working as a clerk inputting license plate numbers of violators into the system – a job that could easily be automated).

We rushed from agricultural society to the information age, thinking that these flat screens will show larger bank balances. No they don’t. In fact, it shows less.

People who stay on the farm, hard as it is, hire more help right on site, not thousand of miles away. I remember a title “Acres of diamond”. Something about the value resides in each of us.

In the East, we have a similar story. It was about a mandarin who told his pulpit to keep dipping into the ink and copying down tons of books (no Google book-scan back then).

When the pulpit came back from earning his degrees (= lifetime job appointment), he asked his master where the diamond was (purported to be at the bottom of the ink vase). The diamond, as it turned out, had already been attached to the cap he was then wearing.

In fairy tales, input=output, Bond got the girl at the end.

We are living in a time when input might not equal output.

Put a coin in the vending machine, the coke comes out.

Ring the bell, shoppers will stop.

Many of us believed this mechanistic universe will never fail us (except for a few incidents such as the Challenger, Three Mile Island etc..whose cause were all “human”).

Put your money on “securitization”, then sit back . GE thought so as well, and joined the Maytag man to take a nap.

Hope 1.0, hope 2.0 etc….

The dream lives on with governor Moon Beam in California, but not else where. It’s all austerity in Greece and Spain.

Here in the US, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  W have the Saints quarterback to lift us our of our Katrina dilemma.

Some wounds won’t heal completely. Most will take time. In a mechanistic universe,

when a production run is on and time is exactly what we cannot afford to lose. As of this edit, the market is bullish again.