Business Olympics

I have been to more meetings this week than in the last six months combined. Again and again, when I'm forced back into The Swing of Things, I am dumbfounded at how human beings--many of them--do this stuff every day. More dumbfounded that I used to do this stuff every day. Makes me happy for traumatic amnesia.

I am so out of shape for the world of business, I might as well be an Olympic track and field athlete who's never stepped foot on dirt. It feels quite like the rest of the business world is running some kind of relay, while I look on wondering, how do they run so fast? And what's that thing they're handing back and forth?

What I find is that I'm left feeling old. Not so much from the raising of a child, or the usual mother things, or my own anemia and nicotine deficiency. No. This is the aging of technology. This is the aging of starting out in the 80s, filling my heart with the Mac, swapping disks like a mad scientist, believing the 512-E was sent from God. That was a century ago in technoyears.

Mine is the aging of having to keep up with and spit out enough technoelequence personally between 1998-2000 to fill most community libraries. In technology years, I'm 112. Many of us out here are well into our 100s. Some of you must be 220 in technoyears.

Do you feel it like I do? Don't you get tired? Couldn't you be happy not learning another thing, not watching another wave, not caring about what's emerging from where? When do we all get to go sit on a beach and wonder how starfish walk with all those legs?

I don't want to medal anymore.

I want to sit on the bleachers and watch the kids run by.