Connection

So how does one reconnect with the world, renew a sense of belonging in the most positive and nurturing sense?

Consider touring your own town. Find the independent coffee shop or tea room, especially one with free wi-fi. You'll find people there relaxing, working on far more interesting projects than company assignments, and in lively conversation. It can be a central station for forward-thinking day people. Stay connected in the symbolic sense as well as the physical. Conversation will come to you if you don't initiate it first with your recharged sense of curiosity and comfortable fearlessness.

There will be an astonishingly large population of day people busy into their own developed passions, coming up for air and retuning their strings. You'll do the same in short order, after a reasonable time of detached and amused observation. Treat this as a prelude, a small and necessary step toward connection with the music of the universe.

Learn to carry your essentials with you, so you don't have to return home for any small excuse. Home is not your reward for venturing out. The reward is wherever you are and wherever you're going. For a gadget freak as myself, this is the ideal reinforcement for my wish come true.

They say be careful what you wish for, since the power of that thought will influence its outcome. i got lucky, eventually, after feeling years of containment and persecution. The day came, as destined, and i knew everything i had bought and hand-picked from online catalogs was going to be put to immediate use.

Let me back up here and give you the short of this chronology. As is easily surmised, my job was of personal service to physicians and medical staff, assisting with their publishing and presentation needs. Essentially, I helped them look good in front others by reformatting their content, and smoothing the delivery. It was a niche job that didn't pay very much, being a sub-department of one. This kept me under the spreadsheet radar for years, although the collective paranoia was refueled with every wave of restructuring and downsizing. Whole departments fell to the axe and yet I was untouched, presumably by someone at the occasional breakfast meeting that spoke up for my service. It didn't take more than a couple years of doctors' heads posted at the village gate to realize no one was exempt or unnoticed by the red flags of database.