As I was watching the Na’vi commune with Pandora, I thought “The Na’vi have it easy. The interconnected nature of all life on their planet is obvious to them; not so on planet earth. But life here is no less interconnected. I wish we had some kind of uplink to mother earth. If the people of this planet had real time feedback on what was happening to the planet and to its people, the world would be a better place.

Later I thought about this some more. Maybe we are building that uplink, that network that we can all plug in to. Maybe it began with Arpanet, and the World Wide Web, and is now being expressed in the phenomenal success of social networking and things like Twitter. Perhaps the Internet connected to 100 of millions (billions ? ) of smart phones is evolving into our global real time uplink to the planet. We just call it the Web.

As if to prove the point, mother nature furnished me with a personal example of how well this is already working. Just this morning, my wife and I experienced a 25 second long slow rolling earthquake. There was no damage, but it felt like a big one from somewhere not too far away. The first thing I did was send out a geo-tagged tweet with a description of what we had felt. Then I searched the twitter stream for “earthquake”. In less than 2 minutes, I had learned that quake was a magnitude 5.8 with an epecenter about 100 miles from my location. It would be 15 minutes before there was anything on any of the news channels about it.

Here is another example. Every time an asteroid passes close to the earth, I can sense it. Not only can I tell that an asteroid just passed the earth, I can also tell how far away it was and how big it was if I really want to. How do I do this? Easy. I Follow @lowgflyingrocks on Twitter. When an asteroid passes by the earth, I get a tweet telling me all about it. So in a sense, I can sense asteroids.

Granted this is pretty crude compared to what is described in Avatar, but I think we are heading in that direction. Here is my “just for fun” comparison of Earth to Pandora.

On Pandora the trees share information through an interconnected web of roots. The trees form the backbone of the web. On earth, we have in the Internet. Instead of tree roots, we have fiber optic cables.

On Pandora each living thing is exchanging information with the rest of planet in real time. We are just beginning to scratch the surface with such things as location-aware iPhone apps and Twitter. We should spread web connected sensors of all kinds all over the planet if we want to catch up to Pandora.

On Pandora everything evolved to live with this incredible amount of information flow. On Earth we have long way to go in this area. How are we going to handle the information flow? Augmented Reality may help. We certainly need better, more natural ways to both send info to the web and to receive it. We will need to be connected to it much more directly than through the screen of an iPhone. But even then, we would be quickly overwhelmed with the flow of information.

Clearly we have a long way to go to catch up to Pandora, but I am beginning to think that this is were we are heading. It feels like a natural evolution. If that is true, it is bound to have a significant impact on the planet and on us. What will we have to evolve into if we are to absorb and process information on a planatary scale in real time?

Dealing with a massive amount of information flowing in from all directions is a very difficult thing. But… It has been done before. Over the course of millions of years, animals on this planet learned to successfully integrate information coming from all their senses. This was no small feat! Just imagine the massive amount of analysis required to turn a stream of photons hitting the optic receptors in our eyes into what we call sight.

I believe that our “sense of self” is the result of having to integrate all this information into something that would allow us to absorb, analyze and act on all this information. In other words, the “I” or the “me” that we all feel at the center of our being is a construct, created by the brain to allow to it deal with the information flow coming at it from our bodies and our immediate environment in real time.

If this is true, then throughout most of evolution, our sense of who we are has been formed by what we could take in though our immediate senses. If we didn’t see it, feel it, taste it, hear it, smell it, or think about it, then it didn’t enter our consciousness. It did not affect us.

What if we are able to learn to integrate information in real time from a much larger area? What if we could see what was happening in the next town over in real time? What if we could hear a baby in some war torn country crying as it happens? What if we could feel the ice melting in Greenland, and the trees falling in the Amazon, and the oceans filling up with trash?

What if we could integrate all of that in real time? What would that do to our “sense of self”? Would we still be able to pretend that we are isolated separate beings disconnected from the rest of the planet?

Would there even still be a word for mine?

I was certain that if I just discovered this missing piece of information that all the craziness in my life would just fade away and everything would just fall into place. A light bulb would flash on, and chase away the darkness.

Now as I approach my 42nd birthday, I realize I have been missing the point all along. There are no answers, there are no missing pieces of information. There is no destination, that once arrived at, will set me free.

What there is… is “Nothing Special”. There is just life, lived wide awake. Right Now!

First let me back up…

At about the age of 12 or 13, I discovered that smoking marijuana and drinking removed that sense of lack. I doubt I would have expressed it that way at the time. I just knew that I felt “great” when I was high or drunk, and I felt like a loser when I wasn’t. As a result from the ages of 13 to 23 I drank a lot. Far too much. And as is the nature of such “cures”, they stopped working, and left me with my original problem as well as a new onem an addiction to drug and alcohol.

I got sober at 23. And that began my real focused search for answers. I tried everything, self help books, support groups, religion. All of them were helpful, some profoundly so, but I was still missing the point.

I was looking feverishly for some Special Understanding that I was certain the truly successful people already had. I was pretty certain that its revelation would be accompanied by some pretty serious pomp and circumstance. Possibly even a choir of angels. Ok, well maybe not a choir of angels, but at least it would seem very, very deep and profound. It would very obvious how special it was.

I was looking for something to cure me. First it was drugs and alcohol, later it became intellectual understanding. I believed that Once I understood whatever it was i was missing, I would suddenly be free and then and only then would my real life start.

The problem was that I was always waiting for the end of the journey. In my own mind, tomorrow’s imagined understanding became more important then what was happening right now. Today!

I had badly missed the point. And all the stuff I had been reading, all the great teacher’s of ancient times, and even our own cultures common sense teachings and wisdoms had been giving me the answer all along.

It is not the destination it is the journey.

It is the very ordinary things that happen every day, all the time, that deserve and in fact require, our attention. These things that seem like they are Nothing Special are worthy of our respect. These present moments are our greatest teachers if only we can be aware of them.

There is no great understanding to gain. There is no Eureka moment. But if we can learn to focus our attention on what is happening right now, we will learn all we ever need to know. We will see what needs to be done and we will do it.

If your like me and your try to live this way, you might find that it is pretty difficult at first. I have an extremely overactive discriminating brain. It loves to just chatter at me all the time. And what it is telling me, isn’t always very useful. So I tend to drift off into daydreams or worries or fears, and forget about what I am doing. I loose the present moment.

Thats ok. It happens. And here is the thing. It doesn’t matter! What does matter is to try. Only try, try, try! That is the journey and it is far more important then actually getting anywhere.

ps. This Nothing Special idea is not my own. In fact, none of this is my own original thinking. It only has my style applied to it, probably to it’s detriment. Nothing Special comes to me from a Korean Zen Master named Seung Sahn. I use Nothing Special as a reminder to help me pay attention! I need all the reminders I can get!

When I started to think about it, I realized that part of the problem might be a subtle misunderstanding of how practice works.

According to the Free Online Dictionary, one of the definitions of the word practice is:

“To do or perform (something) repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill”.

There are other definitions but this one shows the common understanding that practice is something that we set out to do to. We decide when we are practicing and when we are not. It is up to us. It seems obvious that when we can only practice the piano when we are actually playing it. The same could be said about most physical and mental activities, or in fact, for any skill we would like to acquire. Practice something and you will get better at it.

This seems simple enough. So why is it that some skills seem very difficult to acquire? Why is so hard for many of us to lead healthy lives. If living healthy is skill just like practicing the piano, then if we practice at it we should get better, right?

Over the years, I have have tried many workout routines and diets. I have studied and practiced Aikido for more than a decade. I have practiced meditation. I have tried many things. To be sure I have gotten better at many of them. They have been a great help. But I am still not where I would like to be in many areas of my life. For example, I have too much stress, I am 15lbs over my target weight, and my cholesterol is a little on the high side.

All of the years of dedicated practice should have added up to more then that, so why haven’t they?

There are lots of obvious answers. Many of them come to something like I stopped practicing, so the skill was lost. This is true enough but again it points to this idea that I have control over when I am practicing and when I am not. And therein lies part of the problem:

We are always practicing. The only question is whether we are practicing something beneficial or something detrimental.

We have no control over when the brain is laying down the grooves and shortcuts that make it easier for us to do that same behavior the next time. There is no “off” switch. The brain is constantly re-programming itself. I am practicing even when I don’t think I am practicing.

So when I decide to eat a chocolate chip cookie even though I don’t need the calories, I am doing more then just blowing the calorie count for the day. I am practicing eating chocolate chip cookies. I making it that much more likely that I will eat a chocolate chip cookie the next time I encounter one. I can not tell the brain to stop recording, while I chow down on this cookie, and the start again when I am ready to start eating better. The brain doesn’t work this way.

Again, it did not matter that I didn’t want to be practicing when I ate the cookie! I have no choice the brain just does its thing which in this case is laying down the groove, or the pattern, or neuronal connections that make it more likely that I will eat that damn cookie the next time.

So all the time I was practicing, Aikido, or practicing eating a healthy meal, I was also practicing eating chocolate chip cookies, and practicing sitting on my but in front of the computer, and practicing getting angry and stressed. No wonder I am not were I think I should be. I have been canceling out the good practice with the bad practice.

When I recognized that this how it works, I started rephrasing the questions that I would ask myself when faced with things like chocolate chip cookies.

Instead of “Should I eat this chocolate chip cookie?, It looks so good” I ask “Should I practice eating things that aren’t good for me?”

Instead of “Should I cut this workout short?, I am tired”, I ask, “Do I really want to practice quitting?”

Instead of “Should I buy this new shiny thing?, I ask, “Do I really want to practice buying stuff I don’t need?”

It also works with things like anger and stress. When I feel myself getting angry, I remind myself that I am practicing being angry. If I continue, it will be that much more difficult to avoid anger next time.

Rephrasing the questions in this way, gives them a weight, a gravitas, that makes it easier for me to come up with the better answer more often. That one chocolate chip cookie is not just about today. It is about my future!