I’ve found myself doing this more and more often … and I suspect many others are doing the same thing, in this new interlinked, interconnected environment. I’m thinking in links, and linking my thinking … and it’s creeping into my behaviour on dry land.
It makes me think of the process I’ve experienced that involves learning a new language.
At the age of 35, I embarked upon the process of learning French. Today, I speak French almost as well as I speak English. Learning French involved moving to Montreal, settling into an almost all-French neighbourhood, and going out and speaking my (initially awful) French. I found I needed to be persistent when people politely reverted very quickly to English, in order to communicate effectively with me.
I also found that (for me) the learning unfolded in waves and plateaus. Early in the process, I found that when I spoke French all evening, or all day, I got physically tired. I’ve since learned from language teachers tha this is a normal and well-known phenomenon. But every once in a while, in a subtle and barely noticeable way, it became obvious that i had moved permanently to a new level of fluency.
This accelerated when I began going out with a French woman in Montreal, and then accelerated again when I moved to London (UK) and began living with Veronique la supersonique, a Bretonne whom I had met in Paris a year or so earlier.
I’ve begun to notice the same sort of thing with respect to interconnectedness and interlinking, or interlinkedness and interconnecting … learning the language and dynamics of blogging is taking me along a very similar path.
last night I went to a charming little Uruguayan file titled “el viaje hacia el mar” (The Seaward Journey), presented by the Vancouver International Film Festival with another friend, Isabelle ( a gloriously gorgeous-and-flamboyant Frenchie, too). I found myself continually saying, during our conversation, ” oh, I’ll send you this link, and that link” while trying to explain what Wealth Bondage is all about, or when wanting to shore up an example by pointing to Ray Kurzweil’s site, or explaing why I think the Rude Pundit is essential to read, but requires a strong stomach.
Anyway, it’s clear that I now have a “linky” frame of reference, and increasingly a “linky” mental model, and the process in which I am learning all this is very similar ot the process I experienced while learning another language.
Oh, well. I think I’ll just float and live in this interlinked river of life, and enjoy it just as much as I can … which is usually a lot.
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