I recently saw a “20/20” ABC News piece that touched me and validated what I’ve been seeing in the spiritual work I do. That it’s not about being blood-related or having the same DNA that defines one’s feeling of a soul connection with another soul here on this all-too short little trip we have.
As a teen, a Texas lady went through her mother’s emails to find that who she thought was her late father wasn’t her father and she was born from a sperm donor, who they eventually figured was Sperm Donor No. 106. When she met him, they hit it off, and before he met her, from her picture he cried, he felt a connection. When they met, they thought that it made sense. There was a soul connection. Clearly they were meant to be a father-daughter relationship in this life. Whether DNA declares it or not.
Years later, she found out her actual birth father was her mother’s fertility doctor. But the happy ending of this story is that she still calls the man who was sperm donor No. 106 “dad” and they spend holidays together and he even officiated her wedding. The man who has no DNA connection with her.
For me it underscored how the soul connection supercedes DNA and that DNA is just that – biology. And when we pass on, biology is of no significance. The true soul connection can be vastly different than how science says we should act. The fertility doctor isn’t seen as “dad” even though it was his biological sperm, and the man who isn’t blood related is a soul connection. That’s a powerful lesson about the soul connection overriding a human situation.
This life has no rehearsal. It is what we make of it. And even when we lose a parent who is 89, it will still feel like life was too short and we wish we could spend just one more day with that loved one. Knowing that feeling of how we’ll look back when our loved one is gone, we say to one another, “Make the most of it.”
But that’s the thing in this spyPhone era – many of us aren’t making the most of this life they have that is so precious, for the time that is ticking away so quickly each week (have you noticed how fast Saturday seems to come now that we’re grown up?).
Instead, many of us are in a permanent time-suck loop, anesthetizing ourselves, so we don’t have to really live our own true lives of why we chose this life path this time around. Even when the universe drops a true soul connection, a soul match, on our heads like an anvil. We instead want to run away from our true selves and waddle in other people’s faux glossy lives to take us out of our own real life, as we virtually convene with these faces that we don’t plan to call or spend time with in the same room, if at all. Instead, it’s easier to waste a few minutes to have that minimal connection to faux connect with another person behind a screen, to satisfy some human part of us. But never deeper, because then we would have to be real with another soul, and that could feel too raw and naked. So it’s much easier to live in Robot Land than to be a vulnerable human being when one stumbles across a true soul connection.
We often try to make this life go by as quickly as possible by wasting valuable time looking at someone else’s virtual life, rather than reflecting on ourselves or being real with those we want to truly connect with on a soul level.
Anesthetizing ourselves comes in many forms of what we call “addictions.” It can be with drugs or booze. Back in the day, I had friends who proudly proclaimed they didn’t own a TV. In this spyPhone era, they still don’t own a TV, but the irony is they have a bunch of tiny TVs now which are even more addictive, because the “friends” there are so alluring. It’s alluring when we get faux validations by these other “friends” who are also wasting moments in their lives they can never get back, being behind a screen (even on vacation when they’re supposedly off the grid), that we scratch their backs and validate whatever they faux share.
It makes us feel better about ourselves not living much of a life, or if we’re feeling like a failure on the inside, when we see the “Likes” pile up on our images designed to display to the world that “Damn it, I’m having a good life!” Doesn’t it?
And we can never leave home now in this spyPhone era. We can just eat ourselves to death from our disconnectedness, which I’m sure people are doing as they anesthetize themselves from the pain of what is their life. They make it easy for us to never leave home because groceries and anything can come to the door on the same day.
This topic came up today with a friend who is a publicist. Though a relatively new friend, she’s an old-school type of friend that I would have had in the old days, where we’d communicate by phone, similar to my friend Fred.
We were talking about no-replies today. I feel for her as a publicist, since people these days get away with not replying to requests. And she said, “If it’s no-replies a few times, I would assume it’s a ‘no’ but how do you know it didn’t spam?” Which was our feeling about this era now and how hard it is to get work done when people don’t answer the phone anymore. I said people are busy doing nothing on anti-social networks, so they’re really not that busy to reply to her. Since she isn’t anti-social networks like me, she said she’s “friends” with journos, and that she uses the network to keep in touch about family stuff. That these business contacts will engage on the network for her personal family posts, but she can’t follow up with them for her requests. We really are more disconnected, I said, as people choose to not reply in real life.
Thankfully people I hold close and respect are on the same page when it comes to this topic, I said. That even my clients for my spiritual work are like me, they dread the anti-social network and are private.
Last week, this came up with mine who is happily retired from a big muckety muck job in local news, when I explained what working in this new era is like. That people don’t reply to emails or take phone calls. If you leave a message, it doesn’t mean they’ll even call back. I called his former assistant (also retired), but, no replies this year. He said, “TV people are weird.” “No, it’s this era we’re in,” I replied, then added, “For example, on your anti-social network, you probably get replies, but if they’re not replying to me in real life with emails, if I was on your anti-social network, I would probably be ignored in that too.” Although it was later explained to me why people reply there but not in real life. he said, “That’s just a flicker of communication, it’s not enough for me.”
Decorum seems to be slipping away. People feel it’s ok when they don’t reply to emails or voicemails.
I was on the same side of what my publicist friends often bemoan, although a PR buddy said he just knows this is the month people are off. But even then, I said, people are tethered to their spyPhones with an umbilical cord to others who also can’t seem to be alone. God forbid they should have profound thoughts to share with just one close loved one, or reflect privately within themselves. No, our every thought and cup of coffee has to be broadcasted via our spyPhone to more than 500 “friends” we really don’t know, or want to see in real life, who we talk in pound signs with, I mean, hashtags, lest we’re left out of Hipsterville.
We forget that these voyeuristic spyPhone smoke screen glimpses we see are often from people who have no real relevance in our life, except that it takes up pieces of time, that add up to a bit chunk of time we’ll never get back in this precious life. Or perhaps you’re in an unconscious time and energy suck from what’s been a slow daily drip of sharing your own carefully crafted regurgitations to strangers that has become your own Truman Show, because it’s easier to faux connect with that spyPhone than step off set and away from the camera to live a more authentic life with just a few, real soulful connections.
The universe does provide us with moments of hope – old-school human and soul connections – and they often come in the real, non-Robot Land way. I attended a work thing recently and I couldn’t help but notice a nice light back and forth kibitzing with the person next to me at this lunch table. While others affiliated with that company displayed being on anti-social networks even though they don’t have to be on it for work, it seemed like he valued privacy. Who knew privacy could be such a turn on? In this era, unfortunately, it’s a dwindling, rare commodity.
It was kismet how I ended up at the table, because I made a new sister friend there and she brought him and that lunch up on the phone this week. Talking about that light moment, it immediately picked me up, after feeling no-replied to this week. It reminded me that new interesting real connections can happen when we least expect. I had forgotten was there for that bit of verbal back and forth because I said, “You know I want to end up in the U.K., right?” She said, “Cornwall!” It made me smile. Life is so fleeting, that it’s a gift to have someone who was there to witness and share that same moment in time. We’ll always have that lunch reference point as the place we first met.
The light back and forth with a stranger about that spiritual topic was unusual for me, and a nice surprise. We had to go around the table and tell people what we do, which was tough as an introvert, so I went last, and I mentioned what I do spiritually, and added that I want to end up in Cornwall some day. He laughed, “Most people want to leave Cornwall!” Then I talked about having the same gift I have now in past lives but I didn’t use it and I lived in England. He said, “Cornwall?” I laughed, “Yes!” It’s rare to meet someone that seemed to get it. To just riff with a stranger. I was surprised people were still making, giving, and taking business cards (the last time I went to such a work conference, it was pre-spyPhone era), and I was grateful Joy made me make them in early January for her.
With my new friend I made from that lunch, a synchronicity this week, when we found we have a shared dream of being Scotland. She then ended a sentence by calling me, “Sassenach!” She made my day. And no-reply week. Gems from the universe.
The old-fashioned phone calls I do have now feel special. And those on the same old-school page, to quote a famous song from the analog world, “I thank the Lord for the people I have found,” in this spyPhone era.
It’s a Sisyphean waste of time and energy to wait on the people we wish we could connect with in real life more, and hope they’ll come out from behind their computer screen of whatever size to have more of a real soul connection, if they’re too busy chasing their virtual tail. And energetically aligning with others chasing their own virtual tails, following the mob off a digital cliff. These are the people who always use words like “narrative” and talk in “hashtags,” words unknown in the pre-spyPhone era.
It’s the same as waiting for someone with an addiction to decide their going to get sober and live a more present life that needs no anesthesia. A life that isn’t acting like we’re still in high school. So, perhaps it’s time to find the kind of like-minded people we valued in college when our minds felt freed at a vast world of independent thought that was in front of us.
Perhaps as this spyPhone era continues to go into deep Robot Land, the few people we connect with on that rare soul level now, are all that we need to feel human again. And we should cherish life’s little surprises of real human connections when we least expect it. Like in the old analog days when people answered the phone no matter what, when there was the feeling of surprise as to who might be calling, because we knew there was always another human being on the other end of that old-fashioned non-Caller ID phone that we might be glad to hear from.