I realized that lately I’ve been encouraging people I know to get out there and meet people face-to-face. This is kind of funny since I was speaking to them in person. But I was talking about the synergy that happens when you put yourself in a place where there are other people you wouldn’t normally meet.
(Synergy is two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable. Yes, I had to go look it up to be sure I was using the right word … turns out I was using it better than I knew.)
It was reinforced by a friend who told me that he was going to a convention now that he was prominent in his business, but he wished he had scraped together the money to go in the early years. “They don’t know,” he said, “what advice they’ll hear, what insights they’ll have, until they experience it themselves.”
Another friend spoke of meeting someone in the bathroom at a conference. Laughing over a faulty faucet, they began to bond and spent the rest of the conference hanging out. Later, she discovered her new acquaintance was a decision maker famous for eschewing obvious ingratiation. However, the naturalness of their meeting began a fruitful business association for years to come.
I experienced this last year at the DFW dioceses’ combined Catholic Conference when I just went to wander around. Oh, the people I met. Oh, the conversations we had. Oh, the talks I heard.
This isn’t a “results oriented” process most of the time. I can’t show you one big “aha” moment or book contract or concrete result. However, I would suggest that the intangible results may matter even more. However, my husband and I repeatedly bring up situations, examples, or acquaintances in conversation so we know it influenced us.
So now I turn to you, who I do not know face-to-face, with the same advice.
If you are on the fence about attending the Catholic Writers’ Conference or the Catholic New Media Conference (which is where I’ll be hanging out most of the time), I encourage you to take the leap of faith and see what happens.
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C.S. Lewis has an essay collection, On Stories, where he had an eye-opening observation about free will, destiny, and story. I pass it along to my fellow story lovers:
Another very large class of stories turns on fulfilled prophecies–the story of Oedipus, orThe Man Who Would Be King, or The Hobbit. In most of them the very steps taken to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy actually bring it about. It is foretold that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. In order to prevent this from happening he is exposed on mountain: and that exposure, by leading to his rescue and thus to his life among strangers in ignorance of his real parentage, renders possible both the disasters. Such stories produce (at least in me) a feeling of awe, coupled with a certain sort of bewilderment such as one often feels in looking at a complex pattern of lines that pass over and under one another. One sees, yet does not quite see, the regularity. And is there not good occasion for both awe and bewilderment? We have just had set before our imagination something that has always baffled the intellect: we have seen how destiny and free will can be combined, even how free will is the modus operandi of destiny. The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be “like real life” in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
