Get RSS updates
At Edgeware we have a sneaking suspicion that Twitter is going to turn out to be much more than the kind of life streaming’ we see going on right now. It has to do with the conciseness and simplicity of the medium (text only, 140 characters), its ease of use on mobile platforms, and its capacity to multicast very quickly. A recent case in point: yesterday Yollana Shore, one of my Twitter ‘followers’ (who I hasten to add, I also ‘follow’, as the result of a Twitter intro from a member of each of our Twitter networks), tweeted that she was looking for ideas about dealing with a negative mood. I recalled a teaching from the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who says that negative attitudes like anger and anxiety should be treated like an ‘errant little sister’, a pesky kid who gets on your wick but who you nevertheless love (she’s part of you, right?), so you should consider taking her by the hand, talking calmly to her, soothing her, walking with her, treating her gently until her anger subsides. I replied to Yollana, who liked it and RT’d (re-tweeted) immediately to her network of ‘followers’. One such, Isabel Grant, who I’ve never met, RT’d in turn to her followers, and one of them, Nancy Gray, RT’d it to hers. (I know this because they included my Twitter tag in the messages - goodness knows how much further it went if someone stripped out the tag!) Then, as icing on the cake, Yollana blogged on the experience, and now here we are in this blog, right now. The wisdom of that little monk just focused, multiplied, circled, spiralled and homed in to where it was needed.
A little compassion, it seems, can go a long way.
by Eddie Harran on July 28, 2009 at 7:58 pm
I am looking at this with a bit of Zen’s beginners mind.
God, Twitter is messy, confusing.