Ahem.  You may now refer to this college dropout as “Professor.”

(If you speak at TED University  that’s what they call you.)

(That photo was lifted from Flickr, shot by James Duncan Davidson for TED.)

Maybe sometime next week I’ll upload the script and my faaaaabulous slides, which were conceived and produced by the world’s foremost curator of interestingness, Maria Popova .

(This is the thing I thought would be fun but threatened to turn into “work” until Maria made it fun again.)

It was very challenging to put myself through this experience.  How’d it go? Not a disaster.  That is good enough for me.

Oh, I love the movie Bedazzled .  Not the one with Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser  - no knock on the performers.  It’s just that Peter Cook  and Dudley Moore  achieved such perfection that it’s really hard for anyone else to riff successfully on it.

The premise is that poor Stanley sells his soul to the devil for a guaranteed Happily-Ever-After with the object of his affection. But the Devil being the Devil, there’s always a catch.  No matter how specific Stanley’s wishes become, no matter how many loopholes he closes, no matter how many contingencies he provides for in his wish, the Devil is always one step ahead with a detail Stanley overlooked, and therefore Stanley’s life is a perpetual Hell.

So, you thought the person who specified exactly what was wanted (in yesterday’s post)  had covered every base, every eventuality, every detail?

Today I received an urgent message, grateful for the many interesting respondents. However, the plea came,

Could I please add  ”NEW YORK CITY ONLY?”

I wrote back: 

I am going to encourage you to consider beginning more than one relationship, including long distance, via Skype.  I think this is proving the power of electronic communication and my best advice to you is to look at the bounty the Universe is trying to lay at your feet and see if you might not say “NO!” But “YES! And….” Are you willing to think BIGGER and just say “NYC PREFERRED?

And the response came:

“While I’d love to meet ALL the interesting people who wrote to me, and turn them all into my coaches-friends-mommys-and-daddies, there won’t be enough of me to barter for their services!  The essence of this is face-to-face, since it is NYC that I need to adapt myself to – the subcultural niches, the collectives, the opportunities.”

And there you have it.  I am updating yesterday’s post to reflect this edit, so if you forwarded before, keep going if you are so inclined.

Are you tempted to pass judgment on this person? I’m grateful for the reminder that if specifics are essential, you must be very sure that you have covered EVERY specific that is important to you, and never dismiss the possibility that you have overlooked something truly obvious.  I try to ask at least one other person if I have missed anything obvious. 

Have I?

Did you know that when people are in the process of dying, they might stop breathing for several minutes, and then gasp for breath again?

I learned this several years ago from a helpful instruction manual given to us by the caring and sensitive people from the hospice  that provided end-of-life care for someone close to us. Their educational materials were very enlightening to me in helping our loved one make her passage. Believe me, that one tip I just gave you was REALLY IMPORTANT.

Today another loved one is in the care of hospice in another part of the country, and I am grateful for every donor and volunteer who created the organization that is serving us now.

And I support another hospice as well, one that helped educate an entire community about the hospice experience and which has guided several of my dear ones through the end of their lives.

I got the sad news last night of another death, this one of a nonprofit to which I have contributed  and whose work is life-changing and good for the economy.  It was sudden and immediate.  They just couldn’t raise enough money for their exemplary work in these difficult times.

Reminder to self: Contribute to those nonprofits whose existence might not be important to me today, but that I want to be sure are still around if I do need them.  Hospice, for example.  Just a few small and faithful contributions from a large number of people can keep a nonprofit alive .

It’s true: You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

I’m not Catholic, but many people in my family are, and I attended Mass with my grandmother and my aunt when I was a child. My aunt said the Rosary every night before she went to sleep, and when I spent the night with her, I would listen quietly while she whispered her prayers. I know how to pray the Rosary.

A person who was raised in the Catholic faith has asked for my prayers and I am praying the Rosary for her.

She is entering hospice care.

My prayers are accompanied by my tears.

I am comforted by praying the familiar prayers, imagining my aunt, long gone from this life, whispering in the dark.

I am making these wishes known publicly.  No heroic measures. End it as soon as possible.  If I am ever in a physical or mental state that…well, let’s just say that YOU wouldn’t want to be in, let me go and if I need help to go, help me to go.

My husband wants the exact opposite. Spend every last dime to keep him alive in any physical or mental condition because there is always hope as long as you’re alive.  Why take a chance on checking out when they could come up with your cure the next day?

I’m so glad we are having these discussions now, before anybody has to guess about what someone wants. We have these things in writing. If you haven’t got a living will, health care directives, and trusted representatives with the legal authority to carry out your wishes, you could become a very difficult problem for a large number of people.

I’m now in my 60s (as of a couple of weeks ago) and I know how important this is.  I knew it was important when I was in my 20s, not just from experiences in my own circle, but because I was a health reporter.  I learned that two of the most important things a person can do at ANY age:  put your legal health care directives in writing and make sure the right people have a copy, and whatever luxuries you have to sacrifice to do it, get long term care insurance.  Nothing will destroy a family and its finances faster than a catstrophic medical situation where nobody knows what to do. And if your health conditions mean you can’t live unassisted at home, and this can happen to anyone at any age, you need long term care and it’s very expensive.

Yeah, this is not a cheerful conversation.  But the day may come for you, as it has for my family, that you are so, so, so very grateful that you had these conversations while these conversations could be had.

When you’re not working at a conference, it’s like not drinking at a kegger.  Everyone else’s behavior in stands out in sharper contrast.  The nuances of intoxication become glaringly apparent to the sober. Perhaps because I was abstaining from work, I had an overwhelming sense of being surrounded by aggressive alpha-hunter behavior in fellow attendees at the recent Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City.

There I was, a spectator on sabbatical in the midst of a highly passionate pack of professionals. There were columnists and pundits, aggregators and authors, software creators and political operatives. It seemed as if almost everybody had something to sell or promote - have you read my blogpost on that?  JUST KIDDING.

Do You Find This Post Helpful?

It reminded me of that cartoon I tore out of the New Yorker -  “Did you read my review on Amazon? Four out of five people found it helpful.” 

We kept hearing various opinions on how many hours of video are up on YouTube, how many blogs there are, how many apps are for sale, which underscored how futile it is to try to “keep up” or even to “catch up.” Never gonna happen.

There are so many voices clamoring to be heard, but if there was one overarching theme of PdF it was: enough talking, start DOING.  “Use the internet to get off the internet,” was one of the catchphrases.  Signing petitions is so last year.  Now, things happen because people get together in real life and take concrete steps to change the status quo.  The election of Barack Obama, the rise of the Tea Parties, the citizen participation in reporting on and finding solutions for the BP oil spill crisis – all these are happening because people got up from behind the keyboard and met up with other people in real life to do something constructive about the issues that are important to them.

This is becoming a theme – I think I read about it first in a Tara Hunt blogpost  -the number of “followers” or “friends” in your social network isn’t nearly as important as what you can actually get that network to DO. 

It’s a new metric of success for our time: how great is your influence to get others to take action?

Who knew so many people walk around with their eyes closed?

I am receiving an unusual number of private messages from people who relate to my penchant for walking with my eyes closed .  Several who wrote me told me they had experienced violent incidents of various kinds – you’d have to call some of them “survivors.” When these people close their eyes and put one foot forward, it is a trust-building or trust-affirming or trust-deficient exercise for them.  You could say their stories were an eye-opener for me.

Other people have told me that they do a variety of mundane and unusual things with their eyes closed.  I’ll be trying some of them! Which reminds me:  I do many more things with my eyes closed already, like brushing my teeth.  I use a self-timeing electric toothbrush, and it does all the work.  So I close my eyes.  Sometimes I’ll try to do a tree pose .  It’s a challenge to remember to keep my eyes closed for four whole minutes.

Today in yoga class, the instructor told us to close our eyes. He said, “If you’ve got your eyes open, I know you’re thinking.”

I know for a fact: there are a whole lot of us who also think with our eyes closed.

I deliberately leave out some of the details when I tell personal stories, and judging by the wild guesses hitting my inbox, your imagination is better than my real life. Your revelations amaze me.

Some people don’t have to guess what’s going on because I’ve reached out to tell them about the big changes I’m making. These decisions will affect a lot of people, and I’m trying to give a heads-up to the people I think need to hear the news directly from me. 

One of the roadblocks that I have allowed to prevent me from making big changes in the past was my concern about the impact my choices would inevitably have on others. 

At this stage of life, I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter what it might look like TO ME, people are having the experiences they need to have for reasons that are not known to me (and might not yet be known to them).  Everyone’s experiences, choices, decisions create a complex web of circumstances that affect untold numbers of people.

It’s not up to me to make decisions for other people.  When I try to read their minds, when I accidentally project what I would want instead of realizing I cannot possibly know what they might want, when I try to control others by managing circumstances that affect them, I’m not doing them any favors and in fact might be standing in the way of the growth they need to experience.

People in my life know the kind of circumstances in which I need to be lashed to the mast and they know I want to be stopped from anything resembling codependency, rigidity, judgment, spoiling, rescuing, arguing. 

This is not to say that I am not mindful of how my decisions affect others.  I do my best to make compassionate accommodations when I know others’ lives will be impacted by my actions.

 ”I’m sorry this is going to disappear,” I told someone last night as I broke the news. “I know you’ll miss it.” “I will, but things change,” came the amiable reply. “Things change. That’s what they do. They change.”

Change is not “good” or “bad” by definition – it just is, and it is what we make of it.  It’s a constant effort for me to stop labeling change, stop characterizing actions and circumstances, stop projecting on other people’s lives and make decisions based on what’s true for me.

My meditation for today is to use fewer adjectives.

Yes, in the light of a new day, yesterday’s radical decision still looks like a genius idea.

It’s already in motion.

I know everything will now shift to accommodate the new vision.

I just set a new record in my life for making the biggest decision in the shortest amount of time.