So my well-loved Macbook crashed for a total of 17 days.  My second stage of denial was long and painful, and luckily Apple was good enough to stop me at my third stage.  But looking back at the fit I threw.  Wow.

I think I have a lot to learn from this great new post on ZenHabits about unecesary drama:

“The word “drama” has taken on an interesting meaning in recent years, beyond the performance form of fiction it’s traditionally signified: “making a big deal over something unnecessarily”.

It’s about making a big production of something, when you could simply get on with things.

Interestingly, the word “drama” comes from the Greek word for “action”, which in itself derives from a word that means “to do”. And doing turns out to be the answer for unnecessary “drama” (which, by the way, you would be wise to save for your mama or other such parental figure, according to popular television).

What’s the problem with drama? For one, as the urban definition implies, it’s unnecessary. There’s no need for histrionics when you can talk about and deal with things calmly. There’s no need to get overly emotional when you can breathe, release the tensions, and focus on being happy, now, in the moment.

It complicates things, makes a big deal of little things, and ignores the little things that should be a big deal: little things like simple pleasures, and gratitude, and the simple wonderful existence of life.

Drama makes life harder. If you lose your job, you can go into a depression (perhaps understandably) and lose your home and have a hard time finding a job again — often because of the depression. But if instead you stay calm, perhaps take the view that this is a fresh start and a way to pursue the dream you’ve never had the time to pursue, look at it as a way to learn new skills and reinvent yourself … things won’t be so hard.”

I read an article titled Mid-Course correction - toward a sustainable enterprise the other night. It was written by Ray Anderson, the founder of a Interface which is a company that many regard as the pioneer of environmentally sustainable enterprise. No surprise that the main premise of the article was how and why companies should go green.

But as I read it, widely applicable truths and adages seemed to pop up everywhere even though the article was written for a completely different purpose.

As I read, I noticed how many times the same lessons I was reading now were repeated in history, across industries, in my personal life.

Some clips:

Doesn’t the market govern?
Yes, but does the market’s price cover the cost? Well, let’s see. Who has
paid for the military power that has been projected into the Middle East to
protect the oil at its source? Why, you have, in your taxes. And who is paying
for the damage done by storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes that result from
global warming? Why you are, of course, in your insurance premiums. And
who will pay for the losses in Florida and the cost of the flooded, abandoned
streets of Boston, New York, New Orleans and London someday in
the distant future? Future generations, your progeny, that’s who. (Bill
McDonough, former Dean of the School of Architecture at the University
of Virginia, and a leading proponent of ‘green’ architectural design for
many years, calls this ‘intergenerational tyranny’, the worst form of remote
tyranny, a kind of taxation without representation across the generations,
levied by us on those yet unborn.) And who pays for the diseases caused by
the toxic emissions all around us? Guess! Do you see how the revered
market system of the first industrial revolution allows companies like
mine to shift those costs to others, to externalize those costs, even to future
generations?

Positive, negative, whatever it is.  Things always come back full circle and that is beyond our control.  Whether we see it or not, our actions will affect us, people elsewhere, or the conditions of the future.  A proactive stance needs to be taken now because the repercussions of our actions will not disappear into thin air.

Someone has said, ‘A computer, now that’s mundane; but a tree, that’s
technology!’.

People will always have different interpretations of the same thing.  A dissenting view is not wrong.  During a talk the other night, Ken Lyotier, founder of United We Can said “The key is not to change people, but your perspective on them.”  I think that’s something a lot of us can work towards.

To complement and reinforce these new technologies, we will continue to
sensitize and engage all 5000 of our people in a common purpose, right
down to the factory floor and right out there face to face with our customers,
to do the thousands and thousands of little things – the environmentally
sensitive things, energy saved here, pollution avoided there – that
collectively are just as important as the five big technologies of the future:
solar energy, closed loop recycling, zero waste, harmless emissions, and
resource-efficient transportation.

Tax, the environment, unread Facebook notifications, my  messy room…They were all created through the collective power of many many little actions just adding up or building up over time. By that I mean the culmination of incidents that were actively carried out or the culmination of neglected actions. If we can harness this power in a good way, anything is possible.

If anything, this one artice just shows that advice, guidance, and direction can be found everywhere if we open our eyes to it.

So I fell into a summer rut.

Too many things to do + sunshine + going abroad + sickness and lack of mindspace/sleep = me neglecting far too many things in my life.

On the plus side, I learned one very important lesson and one amazing tip.

Lesson # 1: Lack of time is not a valid excuse for anything. You can always make time if you want to.

Tip # 1: Anything that you can get off your checklist within the next two minutes should be done right now.

So here is my two minute post.

I’d like to think this also signifies the end of my rut.

My friend told me that if I was planning on disappearing for a month, I should have given some warning. For that I’m sorry!

Blog posts take some time for me. It usually requires a day of daydreaming, followed by a string of drafts and deletes. And for those of you who know me well, I’ve immersed myself in a pretty packed summer schedule that has cut my daydream time tremendously.

Small updates while I’m here. My busy schedule this summer has really forced me to pack myself into short spans of free time. Which naturally means I’ve tried to be as much of a misfit as possible. Some new memories made:

- accidentally attended a hippie convention
- jumped off a bridge (and bounced back)
- made it onto 4 roofs in one night (watched a peaceful moon-set on one and got attacked by seagulls on another)
- been filmed in a ..film? and been mistaken for an auto commercial girl
- made banana kitkat pancakes
- explored down a (non-sewage) manhole only to have someone seal me in
- hijacked a canoe at midnight and rowed under the Granville bridge

Don’t wait till you’re 50 to start on your bucket list. It’s way more fun this way

I had a discussion with a good friend the other day about how we’re growing up in a generation without a core.

Where being friends to all but friends to none is becoming the norm.

Where we try so hard to accomplish everything that we accomplish nothing.

They say change happens when you push the boundaries and that the only place for change is at the edges. That is more than true.

But it’s just as important to pause.

Breathe.

Take a good look at where we started and where we’re going.

Are we staying true, genuine, grounded?

Take a moment to write down the 5 people and the 5 things or activities in your life that matter the most. Can you name 5 of each? Are you giving them the time, energy and love that they deserve?

If the answer is no, change something.

Because meaningful growth can’t be sustained without roots.

Suddenly I realized that I had become immersed in a world where quite often how you look than is more important that how you think . Where your net worth is more relevant than your self worth. Where success is measured by what you have not what you have to give.

It’s time to rewind the tracks.

Today is the start of a movement.

Young people have always been at the forefront of every major movement for social change.

In the moment you reach out to care for somebody, you’re tapping into the ultimate grace that we possess.

We are each capable of becoming a light for another person.

What an amazing gift.

On May 3. 2009, Paul Hawken made an unforgettable commencement address to the class of 2009 at the University of Portland.

So beautiful. It’s long so took the bits that moved me most and copied it below but I would highly highly encourage you to take a moment and read the whole speech here because I don’t think the bits I took can justify it.

But here goes:

“When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there. But let’s begin with the startling part.

Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.

We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering.

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich. The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation.

You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.“