A Technophobe's Onetime Enemy Becomes a Long-Distance Lifeline

When your son moves halfway around the world, it's not 'who ya gonna call,' but how?

By Suzanne Gerber for Next Avenue

Credit: Monkey Business | Thinkstock

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with technology. When I got my first answering machine back in the '80s, it was with a mix of excitement (never missing another call!) and dread (but what if no one called?). I make no pretense of being an early adopter, but I pride myself in believing that I eventually do catch up. (Although my son will cringingly tell you that I still sometimes call my iPod a Walkman.)

Our kids are great at forcing us to keep up with the times. Years ago my son taught me the difference between ripping, burning, downloading and importing (and for a while there, I even remembered). He kept me current with cool websites (he was the first to turn me on to, for instance, Stumbleupon, Fark and Catsinsinks) and always had me upgrade software and do smart things like defark my computer.

Years ago he made me switch from my comfortable Internet Explorer browser to Firefox (which I kept calling Foxfire, partly to piss him off and partly because I’m partly dyslexic). He was about to trash my old Explorer desktop icon when I insisted he keep it there “just in case.” He did — and labeled it “I/E: USE FIREFOX.”

When he went away to college, I knew I was in for trouble, and had him leave me the same detailed instructions for watching videos that we’d leave for foreign guests, who were clueless about our systems, and his grandparents. I’m embarrassed to admit that more than once I still had to call him for further explanation.

A typical helpful exchange would go something like this. Me: “Rory, which machine should I play the DVD in and what do I set the TV to?” Him: “MOM! It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night and I’m at COLLEGE. What’s wrong with this picture?” Me: “There’s nothing wrong with the picture, honey, I just can’t switch the TV to Video.” CLICK.

Oh, eventually I’d figure it out. He’s always been a great teacher that way, giving me the confidence to muddle my way through. Last summer he put those teaching skills to good use — and in the process unintentionally forced my biggest tech upgrade ever. He moved to Korea to teach English.

Korea is 6,885 miles (or 11,080 kilometers) away, the farthest apart we’ve ever been for more than a few weeks. It’s also 13 or 14 hours ahead (they don’t do daylight savings), and therein lies my greatest challenge of all.

At first he wrote long, delicious emails, describing everything he’d seen, done and, especially, eaten. (That part was less delicious: I’m a squeamish vegetarian, and he’s an omnivore without a hint of a dilemma.) He’d pen these riotously funny letters about cultural exchanges and miscommunications, the bulk of which seemed to have been found emblazoned on cute girls’ T-shirts (e.g., "Mono.B Nice To Me!"; "General Educate!").

And then the emails stopped.

When I used to travel regularly, I made a point of avoiding that dreaded yet ubiquitous outcropping of modern life, the Internet café, populated, as they always were, by colorful young people in headsets, yammering away in a Babel of cacophony. You might not be able to drink the water in a town or get electricity on demand in your “hotel,” but by gum, you could always get online in some Internet café. No matter how much I missed people back home, I was determined to never become one of those … Skypers. It felt a noisy and impersonal way to connect with a loved one.

But now that my son is 6,885 miles and 13 hours away, I’ve learned all the nuances of Skype (and gchat). For starters, I always know what time it is in Korea (5:04 am, thank you, though right now, all bets are off: He’s a Rangers fan — and if you don't know what that implies, it's not worth trying to explain). I always keep half an eye on my gchat list, waiting for his name to pop up. Skype stays open — with its constant annoying dings — in hopes of a cameo appearance.

The thing I loved to hate has become my parental lifeline. I’m also not ashamed to admit I own a Skype-compatible headset and actually have used it in … Internet cafés. Anything to talk to my boy.

I can’t begin to guess what new gizmos or apps are in the works that will make reaching out and connecting easier or quicker (or offer better quality). But if anyone in some high-tech R+D department is reading this and taking requests, could I make one? Can you invent a device that would let us hug?

© Twin Cities Public Television - 2016. All rights reserved.



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Why Letting Go Is the Path to Happiness

By Suzanne Gerber for Next Avenue

 

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Bestselling author and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Dr. Judith Orloff is a model for balancing fierce left-brain intellect and right-brain compassion. She calls herself an “empathic psychiatrist,” and it’s her ability to connect with her patients on an emotional level while supporting them and offering wise life strategies that puts her in a rarefied league.

As a follow-up to her 2009 book, the wildly popular Emotional Freedom, Orloff has penned The Ecstasy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life. She gave readers a taste of it in a TED talk, which garnered more than half a million views on YouTube.

In the new book, Orloff shows why surrender is a more effective approach to life than trying to control or force things. She offers examples and exercises to help us make that simple, yet super-challenging, leap when it comes to power, money, communication, relationships and mortality.

I had the pleasure of chatting with her about these subjects and others and was especially eager to hear whether she felt surrender was more important to boomers than other age groups. Highlights from our conversation:

Next Avenue: You’ve said you write about what you want to learn about. How did you pick the subject of surrender?

Orloff: Well, because I’m a control freak and I tend to fight with life sometimes, and worry, and get attached to patterns and relationships that aren’t good for me and I can’t rid of them … my deepest desire was to learn surrender on a deep, deep level so I could shed what wasn’t working for me and learn how to trust and flow instead of fight, and really go forward in my life.

So since undertaking the writing of this book, have you been able to shed much?

In the Forward, I talk about all the things I’ve had to give up. For starters, because of unrelenting noise and construction, I had to move out of the condo where I lived for many years while I was writing this book. I ended up moving 10 times in one year and giving away all my possessions. I shed things, I shed a relationship, I shed a therapist, and I shed old ideas about relationships, sexuality and caring about what other people think of me. It’s become a lifelong meditation for me; it’s how I want to live.

You call surrender “a sublime state, that can help us improve the overall quality of our lives and reduce stress, help us conquer our fears and get unstuck.” That’s quite a claim! Can you explain what you mean when you say “surrender” and how one learns to do it?

In Sanskrit, “surrender” means giving one’s self wholly to something without holding back. What surrender doesn’t mean is weakness, failure or defeat. What it entails is taking a conscious look at what’s working in your life and what’s not, and then deciding which parts you want to let go of because they’re holding you back, and what you want to surrender into. It’s about making choices.

The way I use the term implies there’s a grace surrounding all of us that goes beyond our to-do list. It’s something we have the power to tap into and “co-partner” with.

In the book you write, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in the universe by mistake. Aligning yourself with the flow of nature ensures you’ll be headed in the right direction.” That’s a tough thing for some proud, self-reliant people to swallow. What do you say when you get pushback on that belief?

I don’t say anything. If people want to live a life where they’re trying to control everything and tighten up and force and push and that’s working for them, that’s fine by me! I just want people to be happy.

But how people typically get to surrender is that they realize that something isn’t working in their lives and that they need to find a new approach. Sometimes it takes big things, like illness, drug addiction or alcoholism to get the light to go on.

When I frame surrender not as giving up power but gaining it, people can usually relate to that. It’s a balance between doing everything you can to make something happen and then letting it go.

I loved the chapter about relationships. Do you think learning to surrender to the flow of love and sensuality becomes even more important at midlife?

It’s important for everyone to be aware of their body and emotions at any age, whether they’re in a relationship or not. While I don’t believe you “search” for love because it’s always there, you can surrender the barriers to love.

So surrender isn’t magical thinking. Sometimes it involves cognitive-behavioral therapeutic techniques.

Yes. And just staying conscious. Sometimes surrender is letting go of things that aren’t working, but sometimes it means opening to something new that might work.

If your old patterns prevented you from finding an appropriate romantic partner, the work is looking at your fears of control and becoming open and less guarded and surrendering to love.

Is surrendering something you’re ever “done” with? What kinds of things trip people up?

I don’t think one is ever “done” with this work. It’s a lifelong process. On my book tour and with my patients, I’ve found one of the most common things that people struggle with is letting go of the need to be right. That can really sabotage relationships and work and people just hold on to it and hold on to it. Most of the time they are right, but that’s not the point. Being right isn’t the goal; the goal is the relationship.

The ego never wants to surrender; it wants to be right. But the heart wants to love, and if you want to love, surrender is necessary. You need to find some kernel of truth in what the other person is saying and acknowledge it. That will soften them and allow a dialogue to begin. That’s the beauty of surrender work. Once people get the explanation and actually try a different way, even if they have doubts, they’ll see that the results are stupendous.

Talk a little about the “anti-aging” aspect of surrendering.

Having to be right or fighting everything pumps stress hormones like cortisol throughout the body, which decreases immunity and speeds up aging. But people who are relaxed and open don’t have the slow burn of the stress hormones. They have the endorphins that come from letting go, meditation and the exercises of surrender. Endorphins, our natural painkillers, soften them and make them radiant, decrease stress and aging and produce bliss.

I’m convinced as people age, if they have tons of resentments — which weigh something like a quarter of a pound each — those resentments weigh you down so your shoulders get stooped, your brow gets furrowed, and you look older. Yet people who are more surrendered don’t have as much baggage on their soul or their body.

I think that at midlife and beyond, people can go through a constant rebirth, and that’s what the surrender is. It’s not buying into the negative, ridiculous, fear-based ideas that society has about aging. I’ve decided to reinvent it on my own and bring in intuition, subtle energy and the mind-body connection.

I encourage people to look at what is emotional aging, what is spiritual aging, what is physical aging, what is energetic aging and optimize all those components. If you have a spiritual practice, for example, the older you get, the better it gets.

The irony is that pain is a lot easier to surrender to for most people than pleasure. But it’s important in midlife to let pleasure in to savor it.

Don’t just say, 'Oh, isn’t that a nice sunset?' Let it in, really feel it in your body and enjoy it with every cell. Get used to receiving as a form of surrender. The more we can get out of our heads and thoughts and into our bodies, the more pleasure and joy we’ll experience, and the more radiant we’ll become — at any age.

Copyright© 2014 Next Avenue, a division of Twin Cities Public Television, Inc.

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