Our Blood is Red, Our Flow is Orange

Buzz Submitted by : Gert Scholtz

Buzz: Honey Five-O

In celebration of Gert Scholtz flow

This is not another attempt to define flow, which was never an attempt in the first place, but a recognition of a bee who is clearly in flow, because it runs through the diversity of his buzzes.  Honey Five-O is of course a humourous twist on the image we conjure up with Hawaii-Five-O and the picture Gert has chosen for his buzz is the colour of honey.  These are all touches of an individual in flow with his discovery and exploration, without a contaminant of imposition that takes away from the nutrients he provided. 

It fueled a comment that I was in equal flow with and now looking back at it, it was X marks the spot, encapsulating fully what I most like about being on beBee.  From that comment is drawn the title of this Paradox Wisdom.  I have attached the comment to the end of this buzz.

This is not a continuation of my prior Paradox Wisdom which was entitled "Death needs Time, Flow needs Life".  Writing that particular one did not leave me in a state of flow but actually put me in an out-of-flow state, for it was not meant to define flow either, though if a definition is required, Mihaly did the empirical research and his genius was charting optimal experience between challenge and skill (or capability).

Gert was celebrating 50 buzzes and provided a sampler of his postings.  My milestone moment is entering Learning Journey 56, and these are the kind of milestone moments I prefer, one's which are unique to our individual DNA.   For sure DNA has the same four letters, but they express themselves in profound ways that 26 letters will never achieve - it is not in our words that wisdom is found, it is already flowing from our own DNA.

It is Richard Dawkins who coined the idea of "memes".  The underlying reason for this are more in line with Dawkin's opinions about religion, so I am not concerned here about what motivated him to create the word "memes", but that now it is a word we are becoming familiar with in our collective lexicon, it speaks to beliefs that we carry.  One of those memes is the one of "sharing".  When we carry the "sharing" meme like a religion, we engage that which Dawkins does not like, the mythical "good".   Sharing is good but it can also be an imposition and eventually transform into group-think.  Group-think is not a negative, like alcohol it is only bad when we end up drinking too much of it.  We can share anti-group think sentiment but it is still a drink.

When it comes to beBee, this is not a place where I live.  Where I live is where I am thinking this right now, which in my bed along with what is keeping me at home right now, a brief contagious condition that I have already yarned about on the LI place.  I have no issue with LinkedIn and the only unfortunate frame here is that when LinkedIn is abbreviated, it looks like the word "Lie".  This simply reminds me of a book someone wrote called "The Lie That Tells the Truth" which is a guide about writing fiction by John Dufresne and also a book with a really clever title by Seth Godin "All Marketers Are Liars".  We have built our society on the social glue of BS and the foundation stone of mythologies - so as far as truth goes, like the film says we can't handle it.

What I do know is that as I keep different coloured hives for another aspect of my learning journey here, I also keep a listing of the links I accumulate in that journey, and as I look at the the listings of links from 2015 that I meant to use Twitter for (but did not), it is actually rather frightening just how much content we "share" and here I am linking stuff that evolved as I thought about things and never started out as something I consciously expected to share.  If I was more conscious about it, I would still have an active presence on Twitter (and I actually should but for beBee). 

There is a widescale acceptance of the premise of following and sharing, which as it scales becomes an increasing absurdity.  Only an absurdity if sharing becomes more important than affinity.  What I mean by affinity is not quite what the founders of beBee mean by it, because I am not locked into the meme of marketing, and when Gert finishes his "Honey Five-O" buzz he is not providing contact credentials, he is not counting his followers or treating this as a part of his branding strategy - he ends it with the words "your engagement is my enjoyment".  A statement of flow not a statement of personal branding.

In 1998 when I first entered the online space, there was a much smaller footprint of people interacting.  As social media volcanoes began to develop, the lava of following the virtual space moved away from the idealism of Tim Berners-Lee and into a land grab of personal power.  We are today at a point where sharing is finishing each others sentences,  but I am not looking at what we share - I am looking at the flow of people coming online and have to yet to come online.  The existing model of following and sharing does not scale to 7 billion people.  The Earth is my home, but my home is not the Earth - for sure the online space opens up the world but the world cannot possibly fit into my living room !

Nor can the thoughts of 7 billion people fit into 7 billion neurons in my head, even if I could command my brain to reserve one neuron for every human being on this planet.  We are all limited in our attention capacity and mental bandwidth, in our limits of capability and the way we can see the same thing with a different frame or lens.  That is the absurdity I call following and that is why the word affinity is way more than me building a brand online so I can go forth and multiply.  That marketing meme is going to kill a guy like me and put me totally out of flow, even trigger psychological depression - because I treat this meme as a trigger for becoming out-of-flow.  Affinity for me is my own learning journey and with people like Gert, they don't impose on that journey - they simply multiply my capacity for appreciation.

The most interesting synchronicity personally for me with beBee is that when I set out on my learning journey, I created my spectra - of which sales, branding, social media and persuasion where given an orange spectrum.  Bebee is not that orange, it is its own kind of orange, which has made my own flow Orange - and where beBee limits itself to the original orange type conversations I post things to my Naranja Hive, but when it is its own Orange, I post to the Orange Bee - that is where I posted Gert's buzz - because it too is a different kind of Orange.