I see the future

Last night I hit a real low. I’ve been worried for the past week or so that I might be slipping back into depression. I’ve been off antidepressants for almost two years now and thought I was doing really well. I’ve been through some very emotional times in the past two years and yet never felt the depression lurking – I felt grief, sorrow and despair, but not depression. But I’ve felt it again in the past two weeks. Hovering in the wings. And I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to go back onto medication.

I think I am a drama queen and an adrenaline junkie. When nothing is happening, nothing is changing as I would like it to, then I am vulnerable to the dark. I have never been content with the status quo because I’ve never been happy with it. It is a challenging lesson I need to learn here, about accepting things as they are.

I’ve felt drained and exhausted. Last weekend I just wanted to sleep the whole time. That scared me as I haven’t experienced that for a long time either. But I have been working very hard out of work hours and had a difficult and depressing interview so I guess it wasn’t totally inexplicable. I’ve been trying to force change in my life by applying for other jobs, without success so far. That rattled me too. So the question kept arising – where am I going? Where am I meant to be going? Nothing is happening and I’ve felt like I’m stagnating.

Funnily enough, the crunch came last night after spending three days at a documentary filmmakers conference … something I had really wanted to attend. You know they had a lot of sessions on cross platform media, and a whole strand on serious games and this is what drew me more than the actual film making itself. And in a bizarre way this fed into my depression last night? Why?

This may sound really arrogant but I don’t mean it to be. I was unimpressed with what I saw and heard regarding the use of multimedia to deliver content and education. One keynote speaker was talking about education of children and how inadequate it was. Everything she said were things I was thinking 10 years ago. Yet it was delivered as if new – a revelation. A colleague who was at the conference with me said to me that no, it wasn’t all completely obvious and no, everyone wasn’t thinking this way. She said that I am actually ahead of the pack in my thinking. I found a similar thing at a conference last April – somebody made a brilliant connection that had everyone gasping with wonder – and again it was something I had thought ten years ago. And this is why nothing I saw impressed me – I had expected much more innovative and brilliant ideas and they weren’t forthcoming – everything I saw seemed old hat to me. But again, my colleague was impressed with what she saw.

I feel as if I’m living in the future. Or seeing into the future. Thinking that I see as normal and everyday, others sees as futuristic and possibly impractical and unrealistic. This is incredibly disheartening for me. Because I can’t see an outlet or avenue for my thinking. In some ways it is great to see future possibilities but I am in no position to exploit them or drive them. Technology isn’t at the right level yet (or not in its accessibility to the mainstream anyway) but more importantly, people’s thinking isn’t at the same level. I have visions of what education should be for instance. But it is so different from what we have now that I have no idea how to bridge the gap even if I were in a position to do so. Which I am not. How do I get my ideas out there and in front of those people who can make a difference?

My colleague says I should write a paper and attempt to get it published. Perhaps that is the right avenue to pursue. I wonder how these people I see on the stage, speaking ideas I had ten years ago, got into the positions they are in. They are often in charge of innovation in their organisations or disciplines. I would very much like to be sitting in their shoes.

I keep mentioning ten years ago. That was a particularly creative and innovative time for me – I was studying multimedia, and I designed and developed an animated video and CDROM. It was shown at a conference and the reaction was incredibly favourable. Of course the product seems old hat and amateurish these days, and I am ashamed to show it now. But I forget that at the time it was quite novel and cutting edge. But I didn’t follow through. I had lots of time as a fulltime student to develop the product, but then I had to get a job and earn my living – and it wasn’t in the multimedia area. So that side of things fell away. My problem is I get motivated and incredibly focussed on something for a period of time and then I either get bored or distracted and don’t persevere. I need to learn to persevere and keep on applying myself.  Instead I get disheartened. I flit from thing to thing in life so it is no wonder I don’t get where I want to go. I’m sure these people I envy in their innovative roles kept on applying themselves to their field of interest and hence climbed to the position they are in now in a nice linear progression.

I’m not sure that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Well you can, I guess the thing is do I really want to force my focus into one thing and apply myself to that alone? When there are so many other interesting things to explore? I scatter my energies, I do not have a one pointed focus, I have a many pointed spray

I can see the future possibilities and it frustrates me how far we are from actualising those things. We talk and talk but never seem to get anywhere. Change is such a slow process and I get impatient and don’t wait around to help it along.

I see the future… but it doesn’t see me.

Better yet…

I’m pleased to say, too, that I am still feeling the flow of unconditional love through my system. It is such a lovely sensation. I’m just in love with nature so much at the moment.

Feeling love and compassion doesn’t mean everything else is gone – I still feel the lesser, not so positive emotions. Imagine living in a state of love and bliss all the time. Wow!

I believe that humanity is working at the moment to open the heart centre. That is our major challenge at this time. Then real love and compassion and empathy will flow through all of us and we’ll appreciate that we are all one. We are on a journey to recognise the Divine in all beings.

Bring it on…

Open to impression

My daily half hour meditations seem to be stretching to an hour these days. I just go off somewhere for parts of it, with no real conscious recollection of where. This is not ideal because the idea is to train the lower mind and brain consciousness to respond to impression from the higher realms.

However, I am finding that I have thoughts and insights on a much more regular basis. Reading something, chatting to someone, overhearing a comment – all of these can suddenly encourage things to click together in my mind giving me one of those wonderful ‘aha’ moments.

I have a sense of the distant future sometimes (I’m talking perhaps a few hundred years from now). And I am slowly starting to build a picture of how all my interests, passions and skills may come together into my ‘work’ or project. And the sense of urgency – that I’m running out of time – has eased greatly. Seen from the perspective of the soul and many incarnations there is no hurry. I feel I have to do things and do them right now. But no, I am just in training for future incarnations when the real work will begin. I can plant the seeds now and reap them later. This is a very reassuring thought.

I’ve often wondered if the reason I can’t find my ideal job is because it hasn’t been invented yet! That would explain a lot.

What can we expect?

What can we expect to emerge as we move into the future? The world has changed dramatically in such a short space of time. When I left school at the start of the 80’s, the personal computer didn’t exist, the internet was hidden away for the military and scientific communities and the World Wide Web hadn’t yet been born.  Computing consisted of feeding punched cards into huge mainframes – data storage was on huge spools of tape. Everything about computing was macro sized.

At that time I couldn’t conceive of the sort of work I do these days – website and portal design and development. I didn’t imagine the computing power and speed I’d have available to me on my desktop or laptop and I certainly didn’t imagine the enormous social power of the Web.

All of this has happened, by logical progression, over the space of a quarter of a century. That is not a long time in evolutionary terms. If so much has changed in 25 years, who can imagine the changes that will occur over the next 100 years?

User interface revolution

I’ve just returned from my evening walk. I am extremely lucky to live on the edge of suburbia and so I have the pleasure of walking each day through bush filled gullies full of kookaburras, galahs, magpies and other native birds. Tonight I was thinking about what to write in this post and what I wanted to say. I suddenly realised I was lost in my thoughts and almost oblivious to my wonderful surroundings. The setting sun cast a gorgeous rosy glow over everything and I was struck, as always, by the light shining on the pale pink bark of a gum tree. I refocussed my attention on the world around me and found myself connecting with nature. I have a great love for, and deep connection with the Australian bush and through that I find I relate to the Indigenous Australians and their exquisite sense of place. They knew how to live in harmony with nature.

I work in the IT business and so spend a great deal of my waking life in a climate controlled office building in front of a computer. There is nothing intuitive about the user interfaces we use – monitor, keyboard, mouse. I find I long for the day I can walk amongst the gum trees whilst working – perhaps dictating my requirements to the robot walking alongside me – perhaps a robotic dog I can take for a walk. Why must I sit all day (completely unnatural for humans) and contort my fingers into unnatural postures just to document my work? Can we clever humans reconnect with the world around us, the world we evolved to cope with, and design computer user interfaces that are natural and seamless?

My evening walk is for relaxation, pleasure and fitness – not for work. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could integrate our work into our lives so that we could be living in concert with nature and not snatching 30 minutes here and there?

What is natural for humans? What do we enjoy doing?

• Walking and moving – therefore let’s design interfaces that move with us like my robotic dog
• Talking and communicating – so let’s stop typing on a keyboard and clicking a mouse and start talking and writing with a stylus
• Spending time outdoors – why can’t I give a message to a tree to be passed on instead of writing an email?
• Looking at real things – ideas and concepts perhaps projected as holographic images in 3 dimensions in space
• Interacting with our surroundings – virtual and augmented reality but without the cumbersome helmets and gloves – ok I admit we need something but it should be unobtrusive, something we can wear all the time and forget about.

Life shouldn’t be spent tucked away from the natural world, straining our eyes and fingers in ways they were never meant to go. Evolution hasn’t kept up with our change of lifestyle, our bodies don’t cope well with this new way of working. I know there are brilliant people out there looking at different ways we can interact with computers in a more natural way (eg MIT Media Lab, HitLabNZ). I say bring it on – let us find ways to connect technology with nature in a naturalistic way to enhance our lives. Why don’t we start a revolution – throw away your monitors, keyboards, laptops and start walking and talking to robots, interacting with holograms and living the life augmented. One day…

Back at work

I find Paul’s post at Café Philos on achieving happiness to be especially relevant today as I return to work after 11 days off over the silly season. I like my job but I don’t feel it makes best use of my talents and it certainly doesn’t challenge me. And I am definitely not passionate about it. I’ve always felt like this about my paid employment but I’ve finally come to the conclusion, as Paul notes, that I need to do what I am passionate about regardless…

Finding what it is that you are passionate about isn’t always easy I find – although it should be. I love anything creative – writing, multimedia development, photography, painting. I love the good ol’ world wide web and web 2.0. I love anything futuristic. I love astrology, metaphysics, ideas and connecting in a deep and meaningful way. I’ve never found that stuff in a paid job so now I’m taking the first baby step to living my passion by starting up my blogs. My hope is that I can connect with many inspiring people out there  -and I already have – through writing and the web. I hope that between us we can find new ways to meet the needs of the world as a community as well as individually.

So thanks Paul, for the inspirational and timely post and for reminding me that we can indeed do what we are called to do and live authentically even whilst also holding down a job.

Telepathy

Recently I attended a sound and voice workshop. It struck me that is very easy to create sound using the human body – voice or clapping hands or slapping skin. It is a more active sense. But sight is much more passive – we can see but we cannot create visuals using our body alone. I wondered how long it will be before we humans can harness the power of the mind to actively create and project visual images for others to see. Think R2D2 in Star Wars (now I’m showing my age!). I guess I’m talking about telepathy – building an image in the mind and energising it to the point where we can telepathically project it into the ethers for others to see. I believe we have that latent capability. How long before we tap into it as a race and it becomes just another skill taught in schools?