Quirkyalone: It’s a mindset

1. Meet a friend at a café. Bring post-it notes.

2. Give your friend and yourself five post-it notes each. Tell your friend to write down the five most important things in his or her life, right now, at this moment. Do it yourself. You could write anything: a person, a feeling, a place, a way of being in the world, or a value.

3. After you have both written down your five things, lay them out on the table.

4. Now, you must give one of them up. Choose the first thing you would give away if you had to. What could you live without? Then, choose the second thing you would live without. Continue discarding things one by one.

5. The final post-it note is the one thing you don’t think you could live without. This is your life purpose, or you could also say, the most important thing in your life.

Where did this exercise come from? A new friend introduced it to me. My friend has been enormously successful as a doctor, academic, and biotech CEO, but the purpose of his life wasn’t completely self-evident to him until he went through a period of dedicated inquiry. He offered to do this exercise with me (he supplied the post-its) and explained that you can do the exercise repeatedly. The answers might change over time. He says the challenge is to live your life to truly serve that final post-it note (or rather, what you wrote in it) and to constantly ask yourself whether what you are doing is aligned with that which is most important to you. He’s on something of a mission to help other people drill down into their life purposes. He often encourages other CEOs (who think he’s crazy) to go through the post-it exercise. Their default most-important-thing is often to make money (to provide for their families), but a more specific answer is more of a guide.

I won’t tell you my life purpose because it seems more interesting to let that by mysterious, but I will say, It’s been an illuminating exercise that continues to resonate. I’ve been thinking about the last post-it I left on the table a few times a week, asking myself whether the things I am actually doing, day-to-day, express what I wrote. Keeping a central theme in mind makes life feel more sacred and less random.

The next morning, I couldn’t resist sharing this exercise with my roommate. And then with friends. So I wanted to share it with a larger audience, including you.

Order a latte and whip out some post-it notes. Bon courage.

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Here’s a preview of what’s to come has Quirkyalone expands to become a group blog. This piece is written by my fantastic, quirkytogether poet friend Elline Lipkin. It’s cross-posted on girlwpen.com.

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine piece to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight; although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well. Not so anymore. Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation). Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too”. Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more. But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple’s conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.” Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, “It turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.” Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family. Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring. My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

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Note: This piece also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Two weeks ago, on a Friday night around midnight, I was loitering on the sidewalk outside a San Francisco bar with two friends, about to head home but not quite ready to call it a night. A guy standing nearby on the sidewalk told us that that our red, green, and blue jackets, respectively, made us look like the lightbeams that create a color spectrum on television sets and computers. It’s hard to imagine a geekier pick-up line than “You look like RGB!” But that’s what passes for flirtation in 2009 San Francisco in the (waning?) era of web 2.0. He wanted to take a picture of us and upload it to Flickr.

As a writer who also works a product manager in social media, I know the web 2.0 type.

I quickly realized that this web 2.0 boy was part of the Twitter cult, or, as they call themselves, the Twitterati.

The Twitterati are in full effect in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, and Seattle, where members live their lives as performance art. They exist, therefore they tweet.

Whenever they watch a sunset, eat something delicious, or feel disappointed by a product, they tap out a message on their phones or laptops. Some of them tweet a few times a day, some as many as ten. Or they twitpic, uploading photos. They also seem to believe Twitter is going to revolutionize our lives.

I was looking for a bit more excitement to cap off my evening, and now I had found it. My friends went home and web 2.0 and I hung out on the sidewalk for another hour. First we talked about where we live and what we do, but then, about Twitter! His unself-conscious fervor fascinated me. I played anthropologist, listening to him gush about how Twitter was ushering in a new era of connection that we so desperately needed after the Bush era of fear and division.

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Courtesy of Mamzel*D on Flickr, licensed through Creative Commons

Profound thought while walking across the street on a beautiful, sunny afternoon in San Francisco, checking my email on my iPhone: Are we ever really alone anymore?

Taking long walks alone is something that I cherished in my pre-cell phone days, and something I lauded in Quirkyalone as a source of creative inspiration. Long walks alone are when we allow thoughts to form, to see where thoughts lead us. Before I even uttered “quirkyalone,”  I had the image of a woman walking alone, a mix of pride, melancholy, and contentment.

Now my walks alone are punctuated by my thumb punching “check email” on my phone, when suddenly, though no one is physically present, they may as well be. Mobile technology can be so seductive and addictive, the ability to constantly check messages and feel the presence of the world swarming around us in a million little missives. But at the end of the day, we don’t feel nearly as much alone. And I think in many ways that can also harm our ability to be together.

Granted, there are, gasp, people who don’t own cell phones. But we are going mobile, where everything will be checkable. In this era of “ambient knowledge” (everything my 362 Facebook friends “know” about me that I don’t remember sharing)  and camera phones (where every moment is sharable), cutting the cord from the Internets–and being alone–takes ever more willpower.  Of course, I am the one who hits “check email” directly after a movie, when I could be luxuriating in the closing music over the credits. There’s no question that I’m addicted to the “new,” to the sense that someone cares enough to reach out and touch me, whether through email, text, voice, tagged note!

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