Meeting--what is "networking" anyway?
So, I return from my meeting of local youth professionals. I am uncertain why I attend these, though I recognize that I do find some sense of fulfillment in them. From what, I am uncertain. Maybe it is my vice of nostalgia, the yearning for the past, complete in all its beauty. For the past is only an image and we all know the persuasiveness of the image on the human mind. Being surrounded by people near my age in an aging community lets me imagine that I was born fifty years before in the glory days of the Range, where jobs and youth and hope were plenty.
If I were more of an optimistic, I would fathom that the prospect of building a better community or rebuilding the glory of days past compels my attendance. But I am not. However, nor am I a pessimist. Like most things in life, I am neither extreme. Fifty percent pessimist, fifty percent optimistic, and ah ha, I guess my glass is always half full with optimism.
As much as I would deny being an optimist, I do plafind great comfort in hope. However, I don't fathom is to be a source of sustenance for my daily exisitence, as so many quotes would love you to believe, but rather a source of much entertainment as it allows you to imagine the prospects of your future.
And I know the future is only that, a prospect-- the great denier of the present. But again, it presents itself to you in the form of an image, and like all images, it is compelling.
I don't have anything more to say of the meeting. We eat, we talk, we plan events. I think I go because it has been so innundated into my generation that to be successful in careers, life, etc... you should network. And that terrible word has become an empty substitute for a whole array of positive human behaviors: talking, comforting, encouraging, listening, laughing, planning, working together...
So, now we taken lovely things that we do for ourself and others and tried to make them trendy by calling it networking-- something like so much else, you do solely for yourself and self-advancement.
The point being is that I go to talk, comfort, listen, laugh, plan and work with others. I contemplate my attendance solely because I need to reclaim these verbs from under the umbrella of such a negative word.
If I were more of an optimistic, I would fathom that the prospect of building a better community or rebuilding the glory of days past compels my attendance. But I am not. However, nor am I a pessimist. Like most things in life, I am neither extreme. Fifty percent pessimist, fifty percent optimistic, and ah ha, I guess my glass is always half full with optimism.
As much as I would deny being an optimist, I do plafind great comfort in hope. However, I don't fathom is to be a source of sustenance for my daily exisitence, as so many quotes would love you to believe, but rather a source of much entertainment as it allows you to imagine the prospects of your future.
And I know the future is only that, a prospect-- the great denier of the present. But again, it presents itself to you in the form of an image, and like all images, it is compelling.
I don't have anything more to say of the meeting. We eat, we talk, we plan events. I think I go because it has been so innundated into my generation that to be successful in careers, life, etc... you should network. And that terrible word has become an empty substitute for a whole array of positive human behaviors: talking, comforting, encouraging, listening, laughing, planning, working together...
So, now we taken lovely things that we do for ourself and others and tried to make them trendy by calling it networking-- something like so much else, you do solely for yourself and self-advancement.
The point being is that I go to talk, comfort, listen, laugh, plan and work with others. I contemplate my attendance solely because I need to reclaim these verbs from under the umbrella of such a negative word.
Comments