Personal/Professional, Practice

Posted in ashtanga yoga on 09/19/2007 08:42 am by karen

The worlds converged a bit a couple of days ago, when I found myself showing the executive team some social networking software. Ah, the fine line between personal and professional. Almost as blurry as “real” and “virtual” life. Not everyone thinks the line is fine, of course.

The Cop said, a few weeks ago, that he doesn’t think people you meet online can count as friends. We were driving to a restaurant and he said this in reponse to my mentioning something said by a “blogging friend.”

I was quite suprised by his opinion. And wanted to hone in a bit. “How long do you have to meet someone face-to-face in order to be friends? Can it just be if you are passing through their town and you meet at the airport for a few minutes? Do you have to sit down and have a drink and a conversation? Do you have to spend the whole day together?”

The Cop had no specific parameters for when a contact becomes a friend, beyond the notion that there has to be an actual physical meeting. I think this is really interesting. People are having to come to terms with these sorts of questions now — questions humans never had to think about before.

Of course, The Cop deals with people online very much like contacts: he frequents discussion boards about overhauling trucks and practicing martial arts. When I’m online, I talk to people who are on a similar (to one degree or another) spiritual path. Even the biggest Ashtanga rebel still posits some relationship to a very specific and esoteric (and in America, just plain crazy exotic) spiritual system (even if it’s a contrarian position). If I were talking to folks who overhaul Jeeps, well, I imagine the audience would be much more heterogenous. Perhaps more difficult to find like-minded individuals.

All that aside, though, there’s something about The Cop’s way of dealing with people, and my way of dealing with people, that puts us in different relationship to our web contacts/friends. I’m always curious about what people believe and feel. The Cop, he’s interested in the information people can share.

Okay, so I was showing some social networking software at work, specifically, my profile on this system, and my profile included this blog. I felt VERY disinclined to click on the link and show my blog to the powers that be. Particularly since the title of the most recent post was “Pricks.”

So I’ve started a buffer blog. A more-professional blog. That way, we can move into the miasma that is personal/professional blogging a little more gently.

Fascinatingly, one of the directors asked me, after the meeting, why anyone would want to include their blog address on a professional site. “What is the relevance?” she asked.

I am astonished by that question, and astonished that there’s never been a reason for me to think very much about why her perspective would astonish me. She is a very professional person, brought up in a family of high-end professionals. She’s probably had a professional persona since she was a child. Basically, coming at it from the opposite of the continuum from where I started (art student daughter of first generation immigrants goes to corporate).

***

Practice

Practice felt great. My sacrum is cracking in all sorts of poses, and I love when that happens. I’ve been knocking off at laghu vajrasana this week, but my real “work pose” has been ustrasana. I did a couple with my thighs up against the wall this morning. Volleyball Guy came over and used his feet to push me up against the wall more solidly, so I could relax more into the back and shoulders. This feels like a kind of intelligent work. Even though it’s one of those deals where I can honestly say I both don’t know the answer and can’t even fathom the question.

 

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  1. Would The Cop also feel distant from someone whose eyes he’d never seen nor voice he’d never heard, but whose sweat and breath he came up against daily?

    Ashtanga ways of knowing are funny. Either the one-dimensionality of online brain-dumping, or the ritualized ships-passing-in-the-night thing of practice. But never the usual stuff of conversation and eye contact. For me, the first two are more intimate than the second. If I wanted to know someone, I’d sooner invite them to read the blog or to come to practice than ask them to dinner. Except they’d probably think I was weird.

    Good thing I’m not single.

  2. Hey! I write a company-work blog too! Blogging must be addictive. Do you intend to use the same “voice” or do you have a different corporate persona in mind?

    What is a friend anyway? I think most people have few true friends and many acquaintances. I would suggest that blog friends (especially super-cool ashtangi bloggers) know more about each other than office friends. We certainly reveal more of our true selves via posts and comments than most people would at work. what’s the old line…a friends is just a stranger you haven’t met yet…

  3. Oh gosh, the intimate-but-not-personal reality of the Ashtanga shala is definitely a trippy thing. I wonder if introverts are particularly drawn to it. The Cop is accustomed to the sweat and breath of martial arts, but wouldn’t bring friendship into the equation, I think. I’ll ask him.

    Cody, I have no idea what voice will develop for the work-related blog! Not knowing is actually the fun part. I always sound like myself to myself — and in a blogging context, I have only one developed voice, but I’m figuring that consciousness of the different audience will affect/moderate the “new” voice.

  4. Hi Karen
    I’ve read somewhere, okay, in one of these blogs, that we need to be thankful for all of our friends, including our internet friends. So on this one I don’t think I agree with your husband. One of the fellow bloggers in my nutrition group has been very supportive to me. Over time, we’ve learned that our pasts are so similar that it’s uncanny. Would I have met this person in my city? No. She’s in Virginia and I’m in California. I hope to meet you sometime, and practice in your shala with you, so we can be a different version of friends. In my observation of the nutrition groups I belong to, after 4 years of exchanging daily thoughts, I can say that I know at least 8 people pretty well in the groups, even though I have not met them personally. Meeting them personally will happen in the future.

    Karen, since I have an interest in Buddhism as well, could you recommend some groups I should belong to? I belong to a few local sanghas’ newsletters, but I don’t interchange ideas as you say you do in your groups. You can email me offblog if you prefer.

    Regarding starting a professional blog, I started one and have never added to it. Then Ron Stettles, who occassionally blogs (“exchanging hats”) and whom I have practiced with in San Francisco, mentioned that he enjoys mosts the blogs that can show all of a person’s facets of life – work, yoga, family, etc. I thought htat made sense and I”m planning to do that. I don’t contribute to my blog regarding architecture sufficiently because I can’t present the projects we’re working on. I can present built projects. That’s an idea. I helped design a spa that is now garnering awards. Maybe I should ask permission to mention it in my blog. It would be good to do so, since the articles haven’t mentioned us, the architects, so far.

    Anyway, I need to get ready for work. Cheers,
    Arturo

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