A Dream And Some Questions

A Dream
In my dream last night my brazilian sister held a microphone in her hand, her back to me, a statue against Rio de Janeiro's screaming night.
In my dream last night I struggled with her to find the switch. The little black one, she said. The one that would turn on the mic. The one that would amplify her words.
My brazilian sister looks nothing like me, but I have slept beside her more than a hundred nights and once she cradled me like baby when I couldn't stop shivering through an abnormally cold tropical dawn.
\"I'm sure I can make this work, Jessica. I'm sure I can figure this out.\" I fumble with the mic in my hand, but there is no switch and I begin to panic. I should know how to do this. I have to do this before I go back home. Before I get on a plane. Before six thousand eight hundred and forty four miles are between us.
My brazilian sister sees my mounting anxiety and she laughs as I stare incomprehensibly at the broken equipment.
\"Maybe we don't need it\", she says. \"Maybe we just need each other.\"

I often wake from dreams like this with a mixture of excitement that I have seen my friends and family so vividly in my night time vision and an intense anxiety that I don't know the answers to all the solutions I crave. An anxiety I am not moving fast enough, quick enough, alertly enough. A dear friend of mine calls this panic button the productivity chip. She relegates it often to the western world or the western mind. An obsessive need to be accomplishing a task or a million tasks in one day.
In my dream Jessica told me I didn't need to worry about fixing the button on her mic. Sometimes I wonder if in my productivity chip craze, which often leaves me completing tasks in more of a hurry than I'd like to, I forget to look at the simpler solutions. In my dream it was the power of two joint voices. It was Jessica's faith in our own human ability to amplify her message.
I want to learn to balance my productivity chip with my humanness. I experience World Pulse as very humanizing, as a vehicle that humanizes the internet by bringing an authentic connection to an otherwise virtual reality. Utilizing the power of technology to globalize our communication without taking away the inherent connection the communication engenders. As I prepare to be on a different continent again from my brazilian family I mourn the loss of our in person contact, but I also try to imagine new ways I can bridge this distance that I haven't been able to see before.
I'd love to hear other people's ideas on how they deal with their own productivity chip. On how they deal with the panic of not doing enough. On the various creative ways they stay connected despite long distance.

with much love,
Jocelyn