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As published in the NY Times from The L Word
I am just back from the kitchen. I made a pan of date squares for my dear friend Milla who had to put her cat Felix down yesterday. In truth, while I would have made something to bring her anyway, I made the date squares to avoid screaming &*%#! because I wrote this entire post already this a.m. and lost it somehow when I went to add this image. So, you could say this post has some bad karma around it. Ironicallly, it is about good karma. So: Take 2.
What do dates squares have to do with my friend, her cat and this image? A lot. You see my original post was about “webs of indebteness”or reciprocity. I believe it is what makes the world go ’round. The concept has been on my mind for 2 weeks since Danny Iny got me hooked on Copyblogger and I read about the power of focussed generosity.
The past 2 weeks have been a perfect storm of ideas swirling in my head:
1) I recently read Seth Godin’s Linchpin (along with the rest of the world) and started looking around me to identify the Linchpins I know;
2) This reminded me of Gladwell’s Tipping Point and I started collapsing the notion of Linchpins with connectors. For me, Linchpins are often connectors;
3) I met up with a coaching colleague Britta Heintzen who is passionate about mind mapping; even her website is done in mind maps (I love it when people walk the talk);
4) I flew to PEI to surprize my mom on her 60th birthday and had some time on my hands to draw a map of all my connections. This entertained me for several hours and my really nice seatmate Mark (who hosts Friday night Kareoke in Kensington, PEI) seemed to be intrigued too. I am calling it my human map of connections (HMC). Mine is not scientific like the human genome but it took a good measure of geekiness to perservere.
5) I told my friend Jennifer about my HMC and her fascination prompted me to write this post. She sent me the image above as I was complaining that my laptop and camera have stopped talking to each other so I cannot show my own HMC; apparently a whole season of The L-Word was centred around The Chart. In this case, someone had “the chart” tatooed on her back. It chronicled who had slept with whom (does everyone want to be a The Girl with a Dragon Tatoo now?) My HMC didn’t do this but perhaps I could do this on an overseas flight sometime.
Part of my Human Map of Connections, if you could see it showed my friend Tessa introducing me to Liz before I ever thought of living in Montreal. A while after I made the move to Montreal, Liz took me to a special Laughter Yoga thingy that her friend Anita had organized for International Woman’s Day. At this event, I met Milla, Kathy and Tasha among others. Milla and Kathy started a book club and invited me. Jennifer was also invited and so on and so on …You see, I wouldn’t have had images for this post if it weren’t for Tessa’s generous introduction more than 4 years ago.