Back in January,  I wrote a post based on an article I read in the first 2009 issue of O Magazine. This afternoon, I found a torn out page from the magazine on my desk with some of my notes on it and it reminded me that I had read something else in that issue that moved me. Timothy Hutton (p.57) was reflecting upon an aha moment he had in his life and he wrote, “…I realized I didn’t have anywhere I actually needed to be; therefore, it was time to be somewhere else.” I’m not sure I agree…

I’ve moved around a lot in the short time I’ve spent renting room on this planet, and not just the kind of moving around that backpacking adventurers do during a summer of freedom. No, the kind of moving I decided to do was a bit more expensive, emotionally arduous and uprooting – I moved my home many times, changed addresses, purchased mailboxes, rerouted phone numbers, the whole lot.  If there was a reward program for Ikea customers I’d have the international platinum account! And I’ve done it more than once.

Why am I bringing this up? Because moving around means that at some point, you’re faced with the “cliff moment” – there are either two places you can go if you find yourself on the edge of a proverbial cliff: either jump off the cliff into the unknown and just do your best to keep the faith that you made the right decision, or start retreating from the edge and go back to what you know. When faced with that decision, you may find yourself wondering what there is to gain, and what there is to loose. In the process, you might ask yourself, “Is there anything left for me here? Do I have any unfinished business left to complete?” Reading Hutton’s statement brought me back to the cliff moments in my life and got me reflecting on how I see myself and the world around me when faced with those questions.

How do you know whether there is anywhere you actually need to be? The only way I can imagine answering that question is by looking deep within myself and listening to see if you hear from that little voice – intuition – because asking myself whether I still have appointments to make or whether I’m willing to leave a good friend behind just doesn’t seem to generate the ‘right’ kind of answer.

How do we know whether there’s somewhere we actually need to be? How can we know whether there’s someone out there, either in a nearby city or in the apartment right next to ours who needs help that we are able to give? How do we know? So many of us have become so focused on ourselves and on how to survive the times that we have completely forgotten to ask how we can help. It scares me sometimes. Am I losing my faith in humanity? Or am I coming to an age where these questions are naturally on one’s mind? I don’t know…

But what I feel is that if we ask for guidance, become and remain open to divine intervention for the Highest Good and act when the Universe requests our assistance, then perhaps we will discover a purpose where we didn’t think one existed… Or perhaps not, but that process of deep reflection and openness to whatever answers come from within is important, I think. Perhaps…we might just discover a new reason for being…wherever that may be…

So tell me, how can I help?

I read somewhere recently that it’s official: we, as a globally connected society, have become more of an energetic culture than a physically-based culture. The sentiment stimulated many responses from me. Most of all, it made me feel better about myself! The life I lead is becoming more and more electronic and less rooted in the material world. The vastness, the openness and the limitlessness of the World Wide Web and of the technology that supports it and nurtures it is intoxicatingly tempting in which to immerse myself when I compare the alternative – to engage in a world where it still takes hours to get from point A to Point B, where the air is smelling increasingly ‘funny’, and where people are loosing their patience much more quickly then they seemed to 20 years ago (…kind of sounds like a description of Neo’s world…).

The statement also made me wonder how communication will look in the future. Is it all going to be digital? Is sex ‘caveman style’ becoming an extinct pastime as its newer, real-time, instant and anonymous counterpart takes center-stage? Even peering into the neighborhood cafe freaks me out! People are still drinking coffee but instead of making eye contact with other humans(!!), laughing at jokes and talking about whatever it is that people at coffee shops used to talk about, they’re ALL staring into sleek little laptops!

Becoming an energetic culture is the most amazingly connected yet disjointed reality I can imagine. From one perspective, we can reach out and connect with people from across the globe in an instant and build relationships that would otherwise have been very difficult to cultivate. On the other hand, we still (at least partially) exist on a material plane where things are physical and can be touched and can touch back. Social etiquette aside, how are we supposed to evolve as a physical race if we are investing more and more energy in the virtual?