Zen and Point of View

This parable illustrates the Zen teaching to accept life as it is without judging whether things are good or bad: A farmer’s horse runs away and his neighbors say, “Such bad luck,” to which the farmer replies, “Maybe.” The next day the horse returns with two wild horses. The neighbors say, “Such good luck,” to which the farmer replies, “Maybe.” The farmer’s son tries to ride one of the horses, but falls and breaks a leg. “Such bad luck,” the neighbors respond, which again meets with a reply of “Maybe.” The next day, soldiers come through the village and draft all of the healthy young men, except the farmer’s son with his broken leg.*

I can’t say that I was sorry to send 2009 packing and usher in 2010. Last year will not rank as one of my best. Yet when I reflect on the past 12 months, I find that what stands out for me is something rather nice. During 2009, I reconnected with quite a few friends and family members, some of whom I had not been in contact with for decades.

In many cases, we were brought back together by Facebook. The simple act of “friending” through social media has put me on their radar once again, allowed me to catch glimpses of their daily life and provided a fast and easy way to communicate with each other.

One of the main reasons I’m even on Facebook is because of something it’s hard not to view as negative. My work is drying up as traditional advertising vehicles are being abandoned for new media outlets. I need to become intimately familiar with social media to convince potential employers that I’m not a dinosaur in my field. So I’ve been dragged (just short of kicking and screaming) into the world of Facebook and Twitter, and yes, this blog.

Now that I’m here, I’m seeing not only how I can use social media to advertise my clients’ products and services, but also how I can use it to promote my own book. For example, I’m looking at using Craig’s List to advertise a promotional video on Facebook and You Tube that gets parents to see the value of my online novel so they’ll introduce it to their kids. And that’s just the beginning.

As much as I don’t like being drastically underemployed, it is forcing me to explore new avenues that will potentially benefit me down the road. So my situation is both a curse and a blessing, depending on how I choose to look at it.

This idea that everything in life has both its good side and bad side is central to my children’s novel, The Magic Hair. In the book, the heroine Nici has a mishap that causes her hair to grow to an unwieldy 20-foot length. Whenever she cuts off her tresses, they grow right back. Her unnaturally long locks provoke ridicule and fear, as well as making moving around terribly inconvenient.

When her hair becomes tangled in a horse’s hooves, Nici is sent flying into a river where she’s washed downstream and into a series of adventures. As she tries to find her way back home, she discovers the extraordinary power of her long locks and their ability to regenerate. At the end, Nici and her hair thwart a plot to overthrow the kingdom. So she becomes celebrated for the very thing that has caused her so much pain and turmoil along the way.

My hope is that children—or even adults—reading my story will learn to look at the negative things happening in their life (their parents’ divorce for example) and see that it also yields positive things (such as more attention from both parents).

It’s a view I’m trying to adopt myself. Because a healthier, more balanced take on life could help me enjoy the journey more.

Maybe.

*The story is sometimes called “The Farmer’s Luck” in the Western world. There’s a great children’s book titled Zen Shorts by John J. Muth that includes this and two other thought-provoking tales.

Cave Paintings and Instant Memorials

People first started illustrating cave walls around 32,000 years ago. While there’s some debate as to their original purpose—decorative, religious or instructional—these petroglyphs (carvings) and pictographs (paintings) continue to fascinate us, providing a connection to early humans.

My brother’s family had to have their beloved dog put to sleep last week. Gretchen the golden was 13, a good age for a dog her size. Still, the parting was sad, as it always is.

I found out about it in the morning when I opened my Facebook page. Fifteen minutes earlier and 3000 miles away, my niece had just posted “R.I.P. Gretchen” followed by a picture of the old girl. I clicked on Comments to offer my quick condolences and was shocked that I wasn’t the first to leave a sentiment. In the time it took my niece to type a response to me, another friend of hers had posted her sympathies.

Now I’m no stranger to the instantaneous nature of the Internet. Still, the speed with which this impromptu memorial sprung up and continued throughout the day astonished me.

This got me thinking about how much communication has—and hasn’t—changed since humans first started etching scenes from their lives on cave walls.

Our technology is so sophisticated these days, it’s easy to forget that it’s built on our ancestors’ ingenuity. We always use our past as a ladder to the future. Yet we’re so busy looking up that we sometimes forget to appreciate where we’ve been.

So here’s a quick look at a few of the clever inventions that made our modern interactions possible.

As noted above, humans began communicating in a permanent form using sharp stone tools, lumps of charcoal and berry-based paints on cave walls. The walls weren’t exactly portable, so later civilizations created clay tablets and a stylus made out of bone or bronze to engrave them. Depicting whole scenes in art form was pretty time-consuming (and wouldn’t fit on the tablets), so somebody had the great idea to use symbols to communicate rudimentary ideas.

The never-ending quest to improve the day’s technology led to the invention of papyrus, parchment and eventually paper. To write on these surfaces, people moved from sharpened reeds and bamboo shoots to quill pens—which dominated for a thousand years before being replaced by fountain and then ballpoint pens. Of course, the development of inks accompanied these innovations. And to further speed along our written exchanges, humans shifted from symbol-based writing systems to alphabets.

In short order, we added typewriters, electricity, miniaturization, logarithms and iPhones to our communications arsenal. All of which brings us to today and our amazing ability to instantly commune with others about our losses, loves and lessons learned.

An online memorial to a family dog clearly demonstrates how much our tools have evolved. But it also shows that the reason we communicate—to forge a connection with our fellow humans—is the same as it ever was. We just use a Facebook wall instead of a cave wall.

Pomegranates and Social Media

The pomegranate gets its name from the Latin “pomum” (apple) and “granatus” (seeded). Seems like a good name for a fruit that has reddish skin and around 600 seeds.

I took my friend out to lunch the other day to thank her for creating my online portfolio. Knowing my fondness for beer, she suggested a brewpub in between our two homes. It was a hot day, which made the pomegranate wheat beer on the menu all the more appealing.

Pomegranate is such a trendy cocktail ingredient these days. Pomtinis (the best name, if not concoction) Pom cosmos, margaritas, punch—you name it. The color alone draws you in like a magnet.

So of course, we both ordered the pomegranate beer.

It proved to be the perfect accompaniment to our conversation.

As 50-something women who have both made a living on the creative side of marketing, we are dismayed and shocked to be more-or-less out of work. Sure, a few little jobs drib and drab in. Sadly, they’re not enough to keep either of us from eyeing our savings.

It’s disheartening to think that this is happening despite the fact that I’ve been writing advertising for more than 25 years. For over 20 of those years, I’ve been a freelancer and kept myself quite gainfully employed. I can’t put a number on my friend’s years as a graphic artist, but suffice it to say, she’s earned a “senior” job title designation. Yet here we both are, trying to remember what it’s like to sign the back of a paycheck.

Our lunch conversation touched on how we’re trying to, not totally reinvent ourselves, but retool ourselves for today’s social-media-dominant world. That’s why my friend is in school learning how to develop websites. As print sinks, online rises. By adding HTML to her CMYK* skills, she’s able to cast a wider net for jobs.

I too, am finding a migration from traditional advertising vehicles to ones I’m just now dabbling in. I’m seeing a lot of job posts for copywriters who “understand social media like they were born into it.” I’m about 25 years too old to fit into that category. But I do have the “active social network” they request. It’s just in person, not on the Web.

So now I’m asking friends and family to follow me into the world of blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. to help prove that I know how to start a conversation, build a community, encourage participation and bring in friends of friends. Just like I’ve been doing since I was a kid. Only this time, it’s online.

Because I don’t want to totally change what I’ve spent my career doing. But I am willing to make myself more contemporary, more relevant. Willing to add a little pomegranate to my beer.

*That’s industry-speak for adding computer skills to her print production talents. HTML stands for hypertext markup language (which is a fancy way of saying the code that makes web pages do what they do). CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). These are known as process colors, or the colors used in the four-color process—the printing technique that makes the junk mail you receive so enticing.