It was such a day to remember, I completely forgot what happened.  Have you ever had one of those? Like there’s so much beautiful flow, you lose track of your orientation in space-time.  Wait, did all that just happen today? Your mind implores, wide-eyed and incredulous. I was about to sit down to write about all that good flow-lectures by Deepak Chopra, a panel of some of the most powerful women ever lined up to speak, words on creativity by the inimitable author and speaker Elizabth (‘Liz’) Gilbert, one of the most AWEsome forces you’ve ever met.  But the Universe had other plans.

I escaped the room I was sharing with my mother, planting my precious signed copy of Liz’s latest novel in her hands. A book for my mother is like an iPAD with on it for a toddler.  Demands and needs that require attending to immediately fall away; she went book deaf. And I could relax into some time to myself to create. I grabbed my mac book air and steadied myself for some writing, inspired and compelled by Liz’s words on how we’re designed to create, and therefore must make like Nike (not her cliché; far too prosaic for Liz, that’s my puerile concoction) and “just do it.” 

I arrived at the cozy seating area overlooking the pool and golf course of the Omni La Costa resort, where the Chopra Center is housed, and settled into my lime green-cushioned chair to write.  No sooner had I typed these words before my neighbor, an attractive woman in her late 40’s, connected me with me over a gentleman who was apparently “hitting on her.”  My laptop was open, cursorready to fly, and it blinked tantalizingly at me.  But in this age of digital overload, addiction to technology and social media obligations overriding our human ones, I realized I had a choice.  And (Robert Frost, I hope you’re giving me an approving nod) I took the road less traveled.  I engaged her in conversation, acknowledging her obvious beauty and the inextricable vortex that her bulging green eyes could create for a male, heck female.  And I told her as much. 

We got to talking, and my peripheral vision kept taking stock of a woman just to my right, sitting alone eating a club sandwich and drinking a pint of blue Moon.  My heart called to include her in the convo, as it always does when I observe someone dining alone, and it became a powerful resonance of three; An East-coast brown girl in her 30’s, a brown-haired Canadian with olive skin in her early middle-age, and a blond-haired blue-eyed mid-Westerner blooming in her late-middle-age.  What a trifecta we made, of different decades in age, time, culture and looks, a convergence of experience that kept us marveling and laughing and cementing a bond that had only just been formed.  Like a chemistry experiment the likes of which can only be tried in the laboratory beaker of weekend-spiritual-retreat–ness. And because we were all ready to let go of our solitude, our addiction to technology, our ego-stroking from the attentions of men, we came together in a most potent human way.   

More to come on the veritable gems of the weekend (teasers: how to find a man according to Deepak Chopra; how to hop in the minivan of life for a road trip with fear and creativity a la Liz Gilbert; how to overcome psychosis and get to Harvard re: Jane Borysenko).  Til then, sit with this most human of revelations that I share with you now: pull your eyes away from the screen and into another human being’s eyes. The connection you discover there defies even the strongest wifi connection technology can supply.