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.

StopStressingNow.com - Connecting To Happiness!

Have you ever wondered about what connects us all together?

Maybe you’ve asked yourself why you are here?

“CONNECTIONS: Everyone Happens for a Reason” is a collection of real-life stories and eye-opening facts illustrating our biological need to connect with each other, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from our first breath to our last wish, from the womb to the tomb. Although our society has never been so seemingly connected – through email, text message, instant message, cell phones, Blackberries, cyberspace chat rooms, etc. – we’re not very connected, leading to the trademarked “Laws of Connection,” and featuring dozens of people’s key connections, including Dr. Mehmet Oz, of “Oprah” fame.

I’ve asked one of the co-authors of this amazing book to share with us, in a series of articles just how important life long connections truly are. So it’s with great pleasure that I introduce to you..

Mr. Jerry Davich, our newest guest blogger here at StopStressingNow.Com

Melinda stood at the bottom of the airport escalator, waiting for her husband to return from a business trip. The couple had been going through rocky times. She decided to warmly surprise him by meeting him at the terminal, rather than coldly wait for him in the parking lot with all the other husbands’ spouses.
While waiting, she pondered their on again-off again marriage. She pondered how they may have wed for all the wrong reasons – civic duty, family obligation, even social expectations – but certainly not true love. Still, she pondered the importance of honoring her wedding vows, trying to work things out in their relationship, and reconciling their differences. Again.

Everything would eventually be OK, she confidently told herself, and someday she would be able to handle her guilt, sadness, and sense of loss for following her head and not her heart. Someday, she assured herself, those emotions would finally fade away, like a bad accident in her car’s rearview mirror.
As her husband’s plane landed and passengers began exiting, Melinda reminded herself that she had plenty of other meaningful human connections in her life, including two children, countless friends, and a loving extended family. One such connection is with her brother, which has conquered the test of time, she fondly recalled. Several years ago when her brother and his wife expected their first child, the baby died one week before delivery. Melinda’s brother called her and for the next hour the two siblings said nothing to each other — they just remained on the line for each other in silence.  They didn’t need to say anything. They just needed to share in that pain. Someday, she quietly told herself, she’ll share a similar relationship with her husband. Someday, they’ll share a connection that’s blanketed in love and trust, not hurt and pain. Someday.

Finally, her husband appeared at the top of the escalator. He saw her. She saw him. Their eyes met. Her heart raced. And he immediately gave her a half-hearted smile – the one he keeps for her in his back pocket, the one that conveys politeness not warmth, the one that comes distilled of any passion. Melinda knew that smile all too well. She loathed it. Yet, as so many spouses do, she instinctively returned it back to him. Her shoulders shrugged. Her heart dipped. Her hope faded. She knew right there that there would be no warm embrace like she imagined. There would be no tight hugs like she had dreamed. There would be no passionate kisses, like she had rehearsed in her mind. No, he simply exhaled and slowly descended toward her.

This was the precise moment when Melinda experienced the epiphany of a “missed connection” in her young life. This is when she found out that a missed connection can be just as powerful as a cherished connection, like with her brother. This is when she realized that a missed connection can oh-so-easily crystallize into a life-long regret. And, unlike the arriving and departing airplanes that circled above Melinda that day, these regrets have a way of staying grounded for years, even decades, through the fog of despair, the storm of misgivings, or the blizzard of routine habits.

This is when she exhaled, forced a fake smile, and thought to herself, “I’m at the wrong airport waiting for the wrong person.”

For more info, visit www.connectionsbook.com.

StopStressingNow.com - Connecting To Happiness!