Hello again! I am so happy to be back in the land of the blogging. We had a technical problem with WordPress, coupled with an insane couple of weeks since I returned to the US, with the net result that I have felt utterly bereft of blogability since my last posting.

But thanks to Nick Jaffe, my ever-intrepid webmaster, it seems that we have overcome the gremlins and are now back online. Isn’t it ironic that despite the patchy satphone coverage in the Indian Ocean, my blogging was more consistent then than it has been since landfall?! Thanks for hanging on in there, and from now on we should be back in business.

So much to catch up on, but for now here is the blog that I have been trying to post for the last couple of weeks. Much more soon to come…

 

I am often asked how it feels to be back on dry land after spending so much time alone on the ocean. There are definitely some interesting aspects during re-entry to so-called “civilization”. So what are my first impressions, now that I have been back on terra firma for 11 days?

First, everybody is so BUSY! And things move so fast. People are rushing to post photos, reply to emails, send an update, return a call. On the ocean I usually only logged onto my email once a day. I would write my emails and store them in the outbox, then try to get a data connection (which could take anything up to half an hour). The software would then upload my outgoing emails, and download my incoming emails. Replies had to wait until I logged on again the next day, so the turnaround time was often 48 hours or more. And you know what? The world didn’t stop turning because I hadn’t replied within 5 minutes. When did everything get so hectic?

Second, everybody is occupying everything. Wall Street, London, Toronto. Even Obama. I haven’t had time yet to figure out how I feel about this. For sure, our financial system is teetering. But what are the protesters offering as an alternative? It’s easy to point out the obvious, but less easy to come up with a solution. But awareness is a very important first step, and as soon as they are FOR something rather than against it. I will be there.

Third, after five months away, social media seems to be bigger than ever. The Trasher’s Ball in LA was extensively Facebooked, including the second time in a week that I have been caught on camera in the act of dancing badly. The first time I had the excuse that I had just stepped off a boat. The second time that excuse was getting a bit out of date. Even our little party at Greens in San Francisco last night was posted all over Facebook. And now we have Google+ as well. Wow. After being so very much off the grid, this immediacy is a major upshift in tempo, and I’m still trying to adjust. Are we all really happy with this, or is it occasionally just a tiny bit stressful?!

I had wondered if there would be exciting new technological developments to tempt me to spend my money. Fortunately, temptation seems to be thin on the ground. The new iPhone is nothing to get too excited about. No disrespect to the late and much-missed Steve Jobs. I’ll hang onto my 3GS until the 5 comes out.

Other than that, the world seems much the same. There are still advertisers trying to sell us stuff we don’t need. There are still politicians saying things that strain the bounds of credulity. There is still too much plastic, too much food going to waste, and too much traffic on the roads. But still occasional outbreaks of common sense and random acts of kindness. ‘Tis a strange and wonderful world.

And, all things told, I am very happy to be back in it.

 

42 Comments

  • http://photomomentum.com/clients/rozsavage/

    Thanks Aleksey for taking these pictures. Many more are on facebook fan page and several were posted as comments from the blog previous to this, as well as on my facebook (public) album. 
    Thanks Roz, for sharing your story. Complete with failures, challenges and record breaking historical achievements. I would like to thank all that came out to greet Roz and also the ones that had wanted to, you were definitely missed in physical presence, but in solidarity we gathered!

    Cheers all! Let’s continue to support her….. Who’s with me?

    Row Roz Row!

    ~Jay 

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      • Ha! Bruce! It was a splash to meet you! … 

        What is there to not understand?

        First, you must see the world through child-like eyes (a beginner’s mind). Then you must live out of your heart. This is the reason why I follow her…

        ~Jay

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      • Bruce, in other words … Jay in haiku

        Roz is like clockwork
        slow living thinking sharing
        steady goes her blog

        Thrive on terra firmly, Roz!

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  • Roz, you ask an excellent question, whether all this hyper-connection is really making us happier. There’s an excellent advert running right now by Toyota. It shows a somewhat hollow-eyed young woman explaining how her parents only have 18 friends on Facebook and they really need to start living. Meanwhile, the middle-aged parents are driving their Toyota SUV to the countryside to mountain bike with actual friends. Of course, it’s only an ad, but I’m sure it resonates with a lot of people. We ‘connect’ over Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and blogs like this one, but it’s all only worthwhile, in my opinion, to the extent it enriches our real life relationships. So, it was with great pleasure that, after following your exploits online for a few years, commenting on this blog, and mentioning you on Facebook, that I finally got to meet you recently. I look forward to continuing to support you in your efforts to make this a better world!

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    • that commercial resonates strongly with me.  As for FaceBook . . . I generally resist the urge to friend someone on FB unless/until I have met them in “real life.”  FB is for me a way of maintaining connections with people already in my life.  On a few, rare, occasions I have friended folks I don’t/didn’t know but generally because they’ve been “introduced” by one or another of my FB friends.

      It is all about quality not quantity.

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      • that’s true Cynthia….however I have become “friends” on Facebook with  some folks I have never met! (bizzare really )…and am the richer for it 🙂
        regards David Church

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  • Roz, it is terrific to have you back with feet planted firmly on the ground … in fact your feet are so stable that I have a movie of you with feet planted firmly on a chair … http://bit.ly/HurrayRoz!!!

    Hip hip — HURRAY
    Hip hip — HURRAY
    Hip hip — HURRAY

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  •  Well said Roz  I agree that this world of immediacy is not heallthy . 
     Do we need “breaking news” and instant everything…I don’t!!!.
     Take some time to draw breath ..reflect, consider and most of all …Live you life at YOUR speed.
     Don’t let the media/ technology etc etc speed up your life…you only have one!
    Well said also Roz regading “positive” protests.
    Hope you get to the UK before long!
    David Church

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    • You have choice. Parts of the world can now move at the speed of thought, but you CAN opt in and out any time you like. It’s like TV – don’t forget where the ‘off’ switch is.

      We have always had “breaking news”. Remember the history of Marathon. Its just much closer to real-time now.

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  • Pweeee. For a moment there I misread the Blog title as;”Thoughts On Returning to The Ocean” 
    instead of the actual Thoughts On Returning From The Ocean ! 🙂
    Seems I am just not ready to have you wander off again!   So, now that I am breathing better, CARRY ON!  lol

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  • Hi Roz and Everybody!So glad you’re continuing with your blog. Jay got me going on Facebook (thanks JAY!!) but I absolutely cannot stand it (sorry JAY!!). I simply don’t get it. It’s just a big mess. Friends, and unfriends, walls, and whatnots. I still don’t have a cell phone either and I’ll hold out as long as I can. The blog is for me. Philosophy Phridays? 

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    • I never liked Facebook’s interface much, nor a lot of its indiscriminate broadcast model, although both have improved, especially in response to google+, which seems much better thought out. Facebook has such a huge base now, that it will not be so easy for google+ to get ppl to switch.

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  • Interesting blog Roz, especially from someone who just came out of slow life. That’s the word slow with a different meaning, as those weeks on the ocean filled your life with deeper meaning.

    Too much connectivity exposes you to the risks of shallow seas.

    No Facebook for me, no Twitter, no iPhone. It has to stop somewhere and for each of us, that border where shallowness becomes the overriding tune, must be identified.

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    • Short posts to Facebook or Google+ need not be shallow, and Twitter has its place for getting a simple message across, eg “x tanks just rolled up my street firing indiscriminately – govt radio denies their presence” etc.

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  • Glad to have you back. Regarding all the hectic hype and an ever increasing rush remember, as you have said many times, we have free will and can choose how far down that hyperconnected, technology laden road we choose to go. There is a good middle ground; we should all seek our own comfort level and stay there.

    Oop’s it’s not philosophy Friday. Off the soap box for now.

    Keep up the good work, Roz.  

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  • Hey, Roz, your thoughts resonate with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the (too) short discussion we had in Mauritius at Nicolas’. Life is all about ENCOUNTERS and RELATIONSHIPS, not digital connections that are often too shallow and die as fast as any piece of technology. Meeting you was enlightning! Continue bringing “slow” in our “fast” world! BTW, Ì wrote that blog post I talked you about: http://lacrisequellecrise.com/2011/10/13/une-rencontre-marine-et-lumineuse/. In French, but you can check Bing Translator, it may help a bit. Hope to cross your path again someday.

    Marc

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  • I’m amazed and impressed by the response to my comments on social media. I seem to have struck a common chord. Vic and I also discussed this in our latest podcast at Roz Roams. 

    My feeling is that it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Many of my good friends are online friends, and I enjoy checking in to see what they are up to last thing at night before I go to sleep. It reminds me how lucky I am to have friends all around the world.But it is an entirely different thing to be checking in with Facebook while in the company of in-person friends. I am a firm believer in uni-tasking, and present company takes priority over virtual company. There is a time and a place.

    We also should be wary of mistaking quantity of communication for quality. Old-fashioned handwritten letters generally possessed much more depth and thoughtfulness than the micro-updates of Twitter and Facebook. 

    I hope that my blog is the equivalent of those letters of yesteryear, a place where we can enjoy a deeper and more meaningful correspondence. Now that we have overcome our gremlins, I will endeavour to be more regular in my writings. I am looking forward to continuing our conversations here…

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    • During the past several years, I have met people near and far by making phone calls from a list, discovering friends of friends on Facebook, and through face-to-face encounters … BUT the underlying common thread is our common concerns, activism and passions. Of course, some friends are “closer” than others, but the universal characteristic is mutual support.

      I attribute my expanding network of friends to being at the right place at the right time … the Law of Attraction which you wrote about between Hawaii and Kiribati.  I believe all forms of communication are vital these days, and we can’t rely on just one. “All things in moderation” has guided me for decades.

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    • I could not agree more Roz!

      In person friends have got annoyed with me when I ask them to put away their phones and iPads when we’re hanging out.  It is almost like an addiction . . . probably is.

      My own lifestyle is deliberately slow and unstructured as a way of preserving a space away from the hectic ways of the world around me.

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    • Current “social media” is so new that there has not been time to adjust to its full potentials (and dangers). It took a full generation for the original telephone to become readily available to most of the Industrialized West and it still hasn’t reached most of the world population. There is now an adult generation that has never known what it is to be without some sort of cell phone with its capacity for instant communication with anyone anywhere in the world. The desktop computer is only one (human) generation old and yet most of its capabilities are now available on higher-end cell phones.

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  • Regarding Occupy Movement –

    I’ve been following it closely. I think the common thread in the Occupy movement is government no longer represents the people, only the monied interests–transnational corporations–who are strictly focused on their fiduciary responsibility of creating value for their shareholders. They have no loyalty to the nations where their corporate charters were issued. Their focus is on the 3.5 billion people climbing the economic ladder in Asia, new customers they can peddle their junk to (and very much like the industry revolutions in the UK, and later in the States, with regard to cheap labor, poor working conditions and so on). 

    And then there’s the financial industry, which is all that’s left in the western world, and who creates zero wealth in terms of tangeable goods and services, but rather acts like leeches on society sucking capital out of our communities and leaving them to wither and die. 

    In particular, the youth are finally seeing just how broken the system is. Strapped with growing student loans they are looking out from their college campuses and seeing few job opportunities.

    Hopefully, they’ll figure out that the whole problems begins with money influence in government. Once that problem is identified and corrected, only then can we begin figuring out what to do about the bucket list of social- and environmental-justice issues.

    So these things take time to change. It took a couple of decades for the American Colonists to wake up enough before they took action because their interests were not represented in Parliament and their economic opportunities had been usurped by transnational corporations, such as the East India Company, for whom Parliament was a mere puppet.

    Unlike we hear in the news, much of this can be traced back to the youth protests in Spain over unemployment last Spring (at least according to Sylvia Poggioli of NPR).

     

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    • I think your first three paragraphs summarise the situation very well.

      Also, I find it interesting that the “traditional media” (eg ABC today in Australia) reported how the protest message is too diverse, unclear and therefore not understood. To me, this points to people in traditional media and of conservative minds not wanting to try to understand, as much as anything. The general message is quite simple and clear to me. Bob got it OK.

      I see an escalating war globally between haves and have nots, between authorities and the poor but connected and thus empowered masses. I think the internet has opened Pandora’s Box. It just took a few years, and particularly social media, for people to realise the power they have.

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  • I tend to think of social media as a “facilitator,” a means to an end.  Not unlike the Internet, social media has opened up seemingly limitless. It is up to us to use these paths as needed and not wander on them all day; and it is up to us to know when to move on.  To put it in “Rozspeak,” we can use the currents to drift to our benefit, but we must not lose sight of our target destination and must always row, row, row!!”

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  • http://youtu.be/iVjue0R5tHQ This is a great explaination. Done by mutual friends of Roz at The Story of Stuff. 

    Right now I am reminded of two quotes both quotes also directly related to Roz and her message. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” ~Desmond Tutu (via Doug’s facebook)

    “They go in paradox, decided to be only undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerfull to be impotent.”~Winston Churchill; of leaders that chose to ignore Adolf Hitler’s threat. (Used by Al Gore on his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize.

    Row Roz Row!~Jay

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  • ARRRGH! Please accept my sincere apologies for the multiple posts (Disqus is not cooperating today)

    http://youtu.be/iVjue0R5tHQ

    The Story of Stuff is one degree of separation from Roz as well as the two quotes below. The interconnections are as simple as Roz and Julie and I passing the protests at Justin Hermann Plaza in order to take the BlueMarbles pictures that are up on her facebook sites.

    “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” ~Desmond Tutu (via Doug’s facebook)

    “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity,all powerful to be impotent.” (From Al Gore’s acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize)

    Roz, we will work with the white house 🙂 you work on getting past the gaurds! 🙂

    Row Roz Row!

    ~Jay

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  • Welcome back to shore, Roz! Your experience transitioning to land-life resonated very strongly with me – as a commercial fisherman, this is an annual transition for me, about 6 months on a 43′ boat, and 6 months in an 1800 sq ft house. (One of the hardest things for me at first is how FAST cars go, compared to boats! I’m clinging to the ‘oh shit’ bar at 55 mph.) During those months on the water, the forced removal from social media, news, TV, phone, all of the ways we’re constantly “connected”, gives me a far greater sense of connectivity to myself and my surroundings… It’s an increasingly powerful experience to get that break from the constant stimuli.

    Thanks so much for this post, and best wishes ashore!

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    • Disqus used to work on Roz’s site even with IE but stopped doing so a few weeks ago. Firefox has its advantages but it seems odd to ignore the needs of IE users, who outnumber Firefox regular uses. It’s not hard to tweak the site to work equally well on both of them.

       It’s notable that today’s blog lists 0 comments on the list page although there are actually 37 (depending on how they’re counted).

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  • There will come a day when we will all be connected and at all times only save the times when we specifically want to be disconnected and with the ability to choose the variability, the degree of it.
     
    Humans are social creatures and pine for connectivity. But we are also independent and intellectual creatures and need physical, emotional and logical space from connectivity too. We balance the inter-dependence now.
     
    Social media is a great equalizer. I have friends on my facebook that I have taken rafting for two hours as well as dear people that have known for going on three decades.
     
    On the same plane of thought is the evasive corporations that have taken roots into our correspondence. Coke and Pepsi spend millions of dollars advertising and marketing to us. However, with the use of free social media, we are able to counteract and counter ballast, for free.
     
    Free social media has the potential to become the “Power to the People” and it should not be ignored.
     
    With kind regards, Row Roz Row!
     
    ~Jay

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