The Secret Forum  »   Lessons Learned in 2009

Even though I already posted my thoughts on the last year, I wanted to open up the discussion and here a little about what you learned in the past year.

I've pasted my blog post below:

What I Learned In 2009

• It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there: Yes, Los Angeles. Everyone who knows me is sick to death about hearing about this by now, but it is worth marking the lesson learned. There were a number of good and bad things about the move to and from L.A. We still miss the scenery, the weather, and the friends we made out there. I miss my team at Mahalo, and the challenge of the work at the company. I do not miss the long, long hours, the constant conflict between work and family time, watching my children struggle in a school system riddled with major problems, living in a shoebox, and watching cops chase armed felons through our housing complex. This leads to the next point…

• Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home: Being back in Cleveland is a relief, a joy, and terribly frustrating at the same time. We love being back with family and old friends. We love the familiar places, but with returning comes the familiar problems, the things we disliked enough to try moving to another city to escape. The entire family has felt it, and we’re working through dealing with them day by day.

• Things that change you do not change others: We went to California as one group of people, we returned as another. We learned, we grew, we changed. But…for folks back in Cleveland, we were not gone all that long; how much could have happened? Just because you change, don’t expect that others will understand or even recognize the changes.

• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: Not long ago, I ended nearly all of my personal projects. This was liberating. I’m able to concentrate on my family, and not on who needs what from me out there on the Interwebs. There’s no pressure to constantly be checking email, Twitter, message boards, etc to get ahead, make a name, swimming upstream ceaselessly. Projects are only worthwhile when you are passionate about them. After that, they’re just baggage. Best to leave them to the passionate people, and move on to new vistas.

• Disconnect: I ditched my G1 (Android Phone) this month and went back to a normal phone. I’ve stopped tweeting other than when I post a new entry on this blog. I read my email once every couple of days. Living offline is much more interesting and vibrant than constantly watching a screen, be it on a laptop, television, or cell phone. The reality is, none of you need to know every 140 character thought that enters my brain. I’m not promoting anything other than asking that you make time to be out of touch for a while this year. The “social” part of the current Internet vibe is more than a little creepy. There needs to be room for silence, isolation, contemplation, and introspection. No one needs to know where you are at all times. Relax. Cut yourself loose.

• They aren’t here to make your life better: Think about how much information Google and Facebook and other sites know about you. Google, for instance, knows what you are searching. If you have Gmail, they can read all your email. If you use Google Voice, they have your voice mail messages. If you are using Android, they know your contacts and their information, and depending on the apps you use, they can know where you are, where you’re going, what you are listening to, and who you talk to the most. Now…I admit I sound a little paranoid when I talk about this, but is it really a good thing for any business entity to know that much about you? If it came out tomorrow that the government was keeping track of your calls, eavesdropping on your email, and monitoring your web searching habits, would you be pleased with it? Why are we so trusting of a business, which has less oversight and less accountability that the government? The simple truth is this: a business is not providing services to be nice to you. It is not trying to help you. It is trying to find a way to make money for its shareholders. That’s the point of a business: making money — maximizing value. Ask yourself, it if were suddenly in Google’s best interest to build a map of your life using the data they have and sell it to a third party, what would stop them? Or, more interestingly, how comfortable would you be walking into a mall and having the billboard change and address you by name, because they could read the RFID in your ID or credit card, then hit a database service exposing data about your searching and buying habits, creating a custom message just for you? Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I find that incredibly creepy, and since I take a dim view of marketers to begin with1, I want no part of it. I’m opting out.

• In the silence, there is Truth: One of my favorite stories comes from the Old Testament of the Bible. From I Kings 19:11-12, when Elijah is looking for the Lord:

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice…

After this tumultuous year, I have taken time away from everything. In that silence, I have found parts of myself I thought lost. That is what the New Year has brought me: the voice in the silence, reminding me than I am more than the code I write, more than the sites I create. There is that stillness in all of us, reminding us of the important things, giving us creative vision that spawn great passions, leading us to places we need to go to grow and develop as healthy human beings. I have spent the last decade chasing technology. The silence reminds of what I loved before the tech, before the storm of activity that carried me to where I am now. The silence shows me that now is the time to revisit these older things, to rekindle fires which once burned brightly.

Right there with you. I've always heard that one should never talk about a project before it's complete...it saps the energy of the work in progress.

Does this mean we'll see some fiction from you this year, Kris?

2009 will go down in my personal history as one of the more stressful and trying years of my life. There have certainly been worse periods (2002-03 were difficult in general for Kris and me, and losing my dad in Dec. 2006 was a tragedy), but I cannot remember a specific year in which I stopped to think, as often as I did this fall, "Please, God, get me through these last few months so I can be DONE with [2009]." Kris mentioned to me the other day that he was thinking of writing a "year in review" blog post, and all I could do was wrinkle my nose. The details of the specific events would certainly bore and possibly depress any reader, so I'll try to just boil it down to lessons and insights (as Chris has artfully done):

1. Casual gatherings of friends do a lot to keep my mood up.

I never realized how social I enjoy being until our Game Night became a regular fixture of the Johnson household. It is wonderful to have a small but dependable bunch of intelligent, funny, and laid-back, easy-to-entertain folks to hang around with on a regular basis. I love that these people come, bringing games and goodies and humor, and just make themselves right at home here for a few hours on a Tuesday night. I love that I don't have to impress them, apologize for my housekeeping (although I sometimes still do), worry about what I'm wearing or how my hair looks, or struggle in vain to keep my kid quiet and out of everyone's way. Kris and I have never been great entertainers -- we don't do big parties well -- but we look forward to our Game Night gatherings, even if no "serious" gaming is done and people just sit around and gab. Many times last year, getting ready for Game Night prevented me from spending another day and night on the couch in a funk.

2. Death is a good reminder that I need to really live.

I went to a lot of funerals in 2009. My church was the site of four of them and a fifth significant funeral was in Michigan. Three members of my church family that we laid to rest were elderly ladies who had been pillars of the congregation for many years. All three were incredibly dedicated to our church for decades and were examples to me of faithfulness, generosity, and grace. I adored these little church ladies. One in particular had been a mentor to me and always sat in the pew right in front of me. I now sit in her place. Losing all of them in the first half of 2009, which was also the first half of my first term as congregation president, was almost unbelievable. As for the fifth funeral in Michigan, that one was also almost unbelievable. I wish, for the sake of everyone still reeling from the senseless tragedy, that it were possible to disbelieve any of it happened.

3. I really struggle to be patient.

St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians lists patience among the nine "fruits of the Spirit." Apparently, that fruit hasn't ripened in me yet. In 2009 I found myself praying (begging) for patience -- and often forgiveness for my impatience -- more than I ever remember doing. It goes without saying that mothering a preschooler tests the limits of any woman, but I also found my patience tested frequently by several adults. I have failed the test on too many occasions. My mother has a sign hanging in her kitchen, a quote from St. Augustine: "Patience is the companion of wisdom." I wish Mom would redecorate.

4. It is absolutely shameful how little I read and write.

My husband has devoured books this past year and has written thousands and thousands of words in blog posts about many of those books and just about everything else. I have not been able to finish the first book in Zelazny's Amber series, which, as Chris Miller pointed out rather incredulously, is VERY short. What has this English literature and creative writing major morphed into? Steps will have to be taken to reclaim my passions. I will finish the Zelazny book as soon as I dig it out from under the leftover wrapping paper. It's now a matter of principle, you know. I also think I need to read a lot more David Sedaris. Kris surmised that I would enjoy Sedaris and has been subtly placing one of his books within my reach. I picked it up eventually and was delighted to have it reinforced to me that my husband always knows what I will like. As for doing more writing, I do apologize for the length of these comments. And I'm working on launching a blog of my own.

I have never really come up with a "concise phrase" (or phrases) for a lesson(s) learned in any year, and I am really impressed and somewhat inspired that you have. Usually years just wash past and I don't stop to pick a specific thing I pulled from the experience of living through a year. I will say that losing my vacation & sick time last year made me appreciate it more (and pray that it is returned). I learned, I guess, that serving others must be a priority, and what you devote your time to is a choice that shows your priorities, and that is a lesson I am still learning and will probably always be learning.

Ooooo.. CindarellaMan is back on a podcast? Sign me up! Feed URL, please?