Measuring Life’s Connections

We begin learning how to make connections very early in life. From the moment we are born a connection is made. Guest blogger and author of the book “Connections, Everyone Happens For A Reason” – Jerry Davich examines just how we can learn to measure those connections we make in life.

Here’s Jerry Davich:

Measuring Life’s Connections

Walt and Marlene met in the first grade after their families moved next door to each other on a one-block street in Upper New York. As childhood chums, both came from broken homes, celebrated First Communion together and attended the same school. As a dreamy young girl, Marlene told herself, “I’m going to marry him someday.”

As teenagers, they faded away from each other. Walt quit school to make a living out of town and Marlene focused on her classroom studies. One day, while Walt visited their hometown, the two accidentally bumped into each other at the movie theater. “Write me sometime,” she sheepishly suggested. He did just that, as often as possible. They kept in touch and met regularly, again, as often as possible.

At age eighteen, Walt confided to his mother: “Mom, I want to marry Marlene.” His mother asked, “Are you sure? It’s for a very long time.” Walt didn’t blink. “I’m sure.” With a $30 engagement ring, he marched into the home of his seventeen-year-old sweetheart, who was doing her homework on the sofa. Walt proposed on the spot. Marlene didn’t blink. On the spot, she said, “Yes!”. Marlene’s uncle ‘gave her away’ at the wedding. Walt and Marlene eventually moved to the construction yards at the southern tip of Lake Michigan where Walt could put his chiseled body and massive hands to work.

They raised two sons. There they began fixing and fusing her poor engagement ring, which often lived down to its $30 price tag. There, they began investing in their 401(k). Not the kind with direct deposits and compounded interest but the plan that stashes away priceless moments and compounded memories. Let’s call it an emotional 401(k), one with life’s special moments squirreled away into memory vaults for decades. As the years peel away, these ‘direct-deposit’ moments draw interest,  priceless moments either banked in the back of your mind, or stashed away through photos, videos, or scrapbooks. Think of it as a 401(k) for the soul.

Walt and Marlene were expert bankers when it came to such life investments. When their sons were young, they loaded up their camper and trekked the country; actually, all fifty states. Once Walt drove 27 straight hours while his wife and boys slept. He didn’t mind it a bit. As the couple got older, they eventually visited more than 35 countries on six continents. They vacationed around the world, as often as possible, usually on a shoestring budget or as part of a tour group. At every port of stay, they deposited their 401(k) memories like sea-side tourists, digging up souvenir shells along a newfound beachfront. Over time their modest home became filled with such souvenirs – a chunk from the Rock of Gibraltar, Atlantic Ocean sand, a bottle of Japanese Saki, tundra from the Rocky Mountains, ash from Mount St. Helens. You get the picture.

Today the couple has been married more than a half century. Their 401(k) of the soul is brimming. You can find Walt using his workman’s hands gently picking a guitar on the front porch or penning mushy love notes, displayed on the kitchen refrigerator, to Marlene: “Life is a journey. Thanks for taking it with me. Love always, Walter.”

Walt’s journey in life taught him many lessons, but none more valuable than connecting with a profound appreciation for each moment, each day, each excursion into the unknown. To prove his point, Walt sat down on his living room recliner and pulled out an imaginary measuring tape from his pocket. He counted off his age in imaginary inches – 10, 20, 50, 60, finally 71 – and he pinched the tape at that spot, watching as he let several feet of invisible years fall to the floor.

“Do you see that?” Walt asked, staring down at the tape on the carpeting. “That’s gone in my life.” Then he looked at the short remaining inches of time left on the imaginary tape. “This,” he said, pinching the spot, “this is what I have left to live. We have no regrets, but I know some people do.”

I share Walt and Marlene’s story – and his imaginary measuring tape – to remind you that regardless of how young you are, how old you are, or how many life souvenirs have been deposited into your 401(k), those inches of life’s past remain on the floor. You can only learn from them. You‘ll never get them back.

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Today – right now, at this moment – is where your personal tape measure gets pinched and your life gets measured. Go ahead and pull out your imaginary tape measure and pinch it at your age today. Now look to the floor. Are you staring at a wreckage of regrets? Are there missed connections there? Missed opportunities? Looking back, what could you have done to take advantage of those missed connections? What should you have done? Either way, as Walt wisely noted, that time is gone. It’s history. It’s in your rearview mirror. And that’s OK.

Now, look up and stare at the remaining “inches” of your life on that imaginary tape measure. How many inches ― years ― are left? Go ahead, play pretend with us and guess. Five years? Ten years? Fifty years? Who knows, right? Regardless, those remaining inches are filled with potential connections to make your life more contented, more meaningful, and more successful. We want to help you ponder these connections, discover them, and ultimately utilize them. What we don’t want is for you to pull out Walt’s imaginary tape measure in five, ten or twenty years, pinch it again, and look back at even more missed connections. That would  be a travesty. That would be the most important connection to miss in your life: Connecting with yourself.

Now is the time to imagine your life with new connections, with renewed connections, and with a new outlook toward every single connection.

Today is the perfect opportunity to change your “shift-in-time perspective,” a term coined decades ago to define the same critical point in all our lives; the one that typically takes place during our middle-aged years when we stop viewing our life from birth to today and start viewing it from today to our life’s end.

Go ahead and ask yourself: Am I connected?

Of course you are. Everyone has connections in his or her life – to family, friends, business associates, loved ones. To one’s past, future, and one’s spirituality. Yet from what we learned talking to thousands of people across the country, too many of us have lost, forgotten, or fractured all too many connections in our lives. Others have let key connections slip through their grasp without ever knowing of their existence.

Now can be the time to adopt a fresh awareness of those connections in your life – past, present and future – and how these unions can transform your perception, your life, and your world.

Think about it.

Why do people endlessly seek companionship, togetherness, and a sense of belonging in our society. Or any society, for that matter? The answer: Human connections.

This primal need –not only timely, but timeless – is our original wireless connection with face to face value and eye to eye contact. No need for Blackberry batteries, a strong cell phone signal, or a laptop computer. The new buzzword of the fast-paced twenty-first century is high-tech “interconnectivity.” Just look at all the cyber-social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Not to mention the millions of “conversations” taking place via email, instant messaging, and in the blogosphere at any given moment.

But at what cost? From what we can tell, the price is human interconnectivity.

Along the way, many of us have become oblivious to this eons-old primitive need. While mass-messaging is easier than ever, key personal connections have slipped through our grasp for unexplainable reasons. These disconnects often cost us a coveted career, a revered relationship, an elusive enlightenment. Sometimes we look back wondering what went wrong more than what went right.

It’s these pivotal connections that reveal who we are and how we got to where we are in life. But more importantly – with your tape measure getting pinched today – you can begin capitalizing on future connections you may have otherwise missed.

For more infomation on Jerry or his amazing book, please visit www.connectionsbook.com.