Last night I congratulated a Facebook friend who announced that they were expecting their first baby in a few months. This particular connection worked with me on a project team for a few months several years back when Facebook was still a new thing and we were early adopters. Earlier this week I sat beside another acquaintance from my web/social media networks who was blossoming with her second baby due in October. Both events for me were special moments of joy – the most recent in a long list.
It is easy to join in the chorus of lament about the superficiality of social media where many of our connections can fit into this category of people who have passed through our lives for very short moments in time. Twenty years ago the connection would have disappeared through lack of contact. Which is why I paused and reflected after posting my congratulations (which she “liked”)
I live in a world which is overwhelmed with busyness and noise – the pace of my life frequently reaches the frenetic. Another friend of mine (a theologian) once told me about some research which suggested we achieve in a week a level of work that our ancestors would achieve in a month. I admit to sometimes feeling wistful for a time when my children were young and my life revolved around a simpler type of productivity – even though I seriously believe that my effectiveness as a project manager is built not on PRINCE2 but on my ability to organise a five year old’s birthday party.
New life and the creative power which a woman’s body is blessed with in sustaining it and delivering it into the world is such an earth shattering magical thing. Even if the connection is tenuous it still sparks in me a moment of pure joy, as if in that moment ,time and space collapse and it is as much about re-living my own moments of expectation as rejoicing in another’s. In the river of information flowing through my life – those sparkles in the water that for a moment sharpen my focus on people and life are precious and help me keep my balance. And for that I am grateful.
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