June 18, 2005 – Dancing to the Rhythm of Life

June 18, 2005 – Dancing to the Rhythm of Life

This past week I drove a National Rental Car from San Jose to Anaheim for a trade show, which if it didn’t exist someone would have to have created it. This particular trade show has been on the verge of dying off since I first started going. The reason it hasn’t is because everyone who attends needs for it to exist. I’ve come to realize that every group needs a place where the members of that group can go and celebrate their membership. That’s what we all did last week. I went with a fist full of business cards and over the course of the three days I was there I traded most of them with folks I’ve known over the years but had fallen out of touch with for one reason or another.

We had all aged though we swore the other looked no different than the last time we saw one another. We were each at different stages in our life. Some were beginning families; some were starting over with a new significant other; some were shepherding the last of their children from home and off to college; some were on the verge of retiring; some had retired and decided to return because they couldn’t stomach the lack of stimulation; some had not shown up this year, the grim reaper’s harvest or following a different drummer down another path.

Over dinner tonight I relayed my experience in Anaheim to my wife IM, detailing who I had seen and what had become of them since we had last met. IM and I both realized that the secret of life is just how fleeting life really is—something you learn after watching your life race by and finally sensing its speed. As a child, you imagine life as an eternity with seemingly no end. About the time you have your first child and you see him/her enter school you then begin to see the speed at which life is actually traveling. You see it in the accelerating progress of year upon year from the first to the twelfth grade. The four years of college then zoom by and the next thing you know you’re by yourself watching your children begin the headlong rush you just experienced.

That’s what I saw at the conference. The vast majority of those I reconnected with were somewhere in that vortex of time being carried along pall mall without any way of altering the speed of their transit. And in the process, we all recall those fleeting moments telescoped back in time when we worked together in 2000, 1994, and 1986 or some other collection of years in the past. Now, at the end of this week another vanished fleeting moment when we spent an hour or two catching up over a lunch, a glass of wine in the evening, or an early morning breakfast. The one breakfast meeting I had was with a lovely woman I had last seen twenty years ago if not longer. Over pancakes and parfait, we each recalled others we knew in common and wondered what had become of them. Some had passed away, others had left the industry, and still others like us were still around doing much the same as we did a full score of years ago.

Like the constant rhythm of the sun’s rising and setting each day and the seasons’ arriving and departing, our lives have a similar repetitive rhythm; the other great insight time reveals in advancing years. Furthermore, the world around us follows the same recurring cadence: the vinyl record gives way to the compact disk; the 8-track tape gives way to the tape cassette; the VHS cassette gives way to the DVD; the television tube gives way to the flat screen TV; the almost-square low-quality TV gives way to the rectangular high-definition TV; the wired phone gives way to the wireless mobile phone. None of the functions has changed: recorded music, recorded motion pictures, long distance communications; even the computer is nothing more than an electronic calculator replacing paper and pencil with display screen and keyboard. We’re continually reinventing the same functions over and over again.

You would think that this revelation would engender despair, but in some way it’s comforting believing that by reinventing these functions over and over again, we are somehow perfecting them; that ultimately we may achieve some form of Nirvana, the perfect realization of excellence—much like the ballerina, who after years of devoted ritualistic practice finally achieves a flawless performance or the Zen master who achieves the perfect state of inner peace. It’s funny the insights you glean at a trade show.