INFORMATION, SPEED, AND PERFORMANCE

Speed is Good, Information Important, but Performance is King

JAPAN just launched a satellite today that as CNN states:

(CNN) -- "Japan launched a rocket Saturday carrying a satellite that will test new technology that promises to deliver "super high-speed Internet" service to homes and businesses around the world. " 2/22/2008.

Ah the wonders. Now an 80 hour work week can become a 100 hour work week as more is expected of you by the employer. Nothing short of heaven sent! AND, welcome rural China and other places that could never have sped up with the rest of us! All you need is a satellite dish and voila! You can have all we have faster than blinking your eyelids! (You should probably buy a refrigerator over a satellite dish first though. Keeping food longer in dishes you now own will help you live longer than dishes placed upon your roof.)

THE WORLD IS FLAT: Now we can sell anything to anyone! And, there are benefits. Information to enhance life such as medical, intellectual, spiritual, and in commerce will definitely be a plus for the deprived masses who do not live, as we do, 24/7 with the Internet.

The speed and output of the new satellite up-link connection is estimated at 1.2 gigabytes per second. One hundred years ago, a person connecting their Alexander Graham Bell talking device (phone) to another used "Mabel." (That would be a person with a wire and switchboard. ) A few minutes would go by, as you pondered upon the message and talking to a friend, loved one, or business associate. In fact, communicating across town or around the world was a treat!

Now it is an entitlement. In fact, now a person connects in real time faster than the time it takes to type in a telephone number on their keyboard.

Meaning? Time to access information is immediate. Speed to request it takes longer. If we expect performance to increase just because access to information does, we may be in for an anxiety-riddled reality check.

Those were the days -- rotary dial telephone. Our home number in a Southern California area code was 526-3104. Had that number forever. And when you asked a girl out for date you had enough time with the rotary dial to back out, or practice how you were going to ask her to go out. The nerves it took with all that time lapsing. How did we ever get anything done?

DRUGS: I can tell you we did it "all" without Prozac, other anti-depressants, and performance in personal areas of life didn't require "enhancing." (We had libraries, exercised through playing, walking, running, and adults who wished for intimate moments didn't need two bath tubs; aka the "Cialis" RX television commercial.) Information is like a drug for a brain constantly crying out for a faster way to connect, do, experience...

This is a shorter piece -- on purpose. My partner Mark Kastleman at http://www.powerthink.com/ and I are engaged in writing and creating audio on surviving and thriving in the modern age of mass communications, high speed demands, instant gratification, stimulation, and information overload; all creating more stress and anxiety than any other generation could have imagined.

"Power thinking" is introduced in my upcoming novel, "As a Man Thinketh...In His Heart." It is about a "heart-mind" alliance that maximizes the body's potential for using the right information in a high-tech world. The heart needs time, while the brain begs for more information in less time. With two competing vital organs, the human spirit needs some time as well, for meditative reflection just to sort things out. Life is coming at us fast and furious whether we want it to or not. If we simply absorb speed, information, and try to keep up in a performance mode, we will be headed for a super-cardiac arrest, not to mention spending more on RED BULL drinks and its competitors over food, just for the extra "kick" we want in order to "keep up."

Personal performance is what life really is all about. With the heart in the lead, and the brain obeying, the quality of life does not require the quantity of connections we have available to us now. We simply need to access information "use-full" to us. And, to make the point, "Mabel" down at the local telephone company, was a "new" invention a mere ten decades ago. Before that the telegram had it's day in the sun for fifty years, and before that there was the horse.

When personal performance is at stake, it isn't how much in gigabytes you get in a second, but which information available is most important and useful. The "right" information, the right use of it, will always enhance life, bring peace in high stress times, and focus attention on the "best" in personal performance. Power Thinking is an answer. More on its way...

"MOM, I'M HOME!"

MOM Passed Away Today... Super Tuesday Feb. 5, 2008.

I've been a bit worried about Mom. She's been lonely without Dad. Been 14 years now. Readers of my books heralding their teachings and strengths know I owe DAD's final words to me, and MOM's final words to him for creating the writer.

The winter has been cold and brutal in Idaho. Thankfully my older sister, Karen lives next door and checks on her. We also email quite abit. She's been deaf for forty years, so emailing has been like a blessing from heaven. We talked about "passing on" twice this week. She was turning 86, and yet didn't seem to comprehend it. She was as much the girl and Mom with all the cares, insecurities, and yet faith, love, and mix of baggage that she'd shouldered her entire life. But she expressed saddness that others she knew were leaving, and that she was stuck in a painfilled body; and though grateful for adult children and their children who kept in touch, felt she was missing another kind of "home" - the kind one finds in the care and comfort of familiar love of husband and others of her generation.

The morning of her death I opened my email and read about her confusion of a dream she had where she had missed a bus that Dad was on. The bus station attendant had told her, "The next bus arrives at 5-12," he said.

"What do you think 5-12 means, Jim?" I replied with a tease, "I guess the bus is coming in 2012, when the Mayan calendar ends." She replied, "Oh well, I guess I can wait that long."

"Time Tested Values -- Oatmeal It Sticks to Your Ribs" -- my post of Jan. 21st, 2008 means more to me now. I hope you will read it and share with others, who, through my words, knew MOM and loved her. It's hard to pay tribute more than I have in the book I dedicated to her while she lived: MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs, so I think I'll live the rest of my life like she wanted me to; like she trusted me to, right up to the last time we shared "I love yous" in our last emails.

Back to the email. I'd like to share her last one with you. See what you read, between the lines:

Dear Jim and Jeanne:
Did i sound sad in my letter? i suppose maybe a little, when we are here and able to still do--------it is hard to give up and let go, so i sense this bit of sadness, but i do not feel a regret at all about going when it is truly, my time. Honestly, I think I can see the handwriting on the wall, already. My children are all going to make it, i will go when the lord says, it's enough.

Jim, did you think I don't believe in the resurrection? Of course, I do. If Dad had not had the promise of choosing his time to go, and had gone that same weekend, I would have known somehow that he had chosen, simply because it became such an overpowering experience for me.

For myself, i still think that dream I had a couple weeks after Dad died could be valid as for when I might go. "The next bus from the Genealogy library would not be back until 5-12????I don't think about that a whole lot and I don't dream such explicite dates either or times.

Then she ended with some personal words and "Love you lots, MOM."

I got a call on my cell from my older sister Janean around 6:00 pm, while waiting for an ordered pizza, (taking it to share with friends who are rather political -- Super Tuesday in full swing, like a good football game, you know.) Janean had just gotten a call from Karen in Idaho. She had found Mom, on the floor, barely breathing. She lifted her into the bed and she took a few more breaths and then passed on.

The next day I talked again to Janean. I asked her, "Do you remember the time Mom passed away?" She answered, "Oh yes. Karen called me at 5:12 pm."

I guess Mom was right in the beginning when she counseled me about the "oatmeal sticking to my ribs" and in the end about timing when she said that she had, "no regret at all about going when it is truly, my time."

Good bye Mom. I love you. And wherever I am, there you are in my heart. Just like I used to say as a kid busting though the front door on Christine Ave. in Simi Valley, I know, with you I can still say, "Mom! I'm home!"