A Tangible Moment, they only happen now and then!
Recently I was in New York, my favourite city to convene this year's Tangible Leadership Workshop entitled 'New Avenues!'. For weeks I was promoting this event a long with the subsequent events in Crossmaglen and Melbourne. You know the score in this era of multiple channels, do I send him/her a Text/SMS or use Mailchimp, WhatsApp, Messenger, Linkedin, tag them on Facebook , retweet their Tweet etc.?
All the work, all the tedium, the incessent transmission of posts into the cloud, is there anyone out there, anyone listening, does anyone care? As an engineer I'm fascinated by cause and effect. Does this amount of work result in this amount of outcome? Well I'll tell you something interesting, I can now declare that I got more exposure and profile from a random event that happened on Wednesday June 5th than resulted from the previous year's work.
Someone on the ball in the Irish Consulate, Tourism Ireland or Global Limerick figured out I was in New York and I was invited to a special launch event at the Consulate for some upcoming festivals including: Richard Harris International Film Festival, Donegal Home Coming and the New York-Ireland Festival on the night before our own event.
Fueled with caffeine having traveled across the Pacific and across North America I put on a clean shirt, shook out some of the wrinkles of my grey sports jacket and headed off to fly the flag for global Limerick. I put on my game face, ready to answer yet again why a Limerick man who is living in Melbourne is visiting New York, blah, blah.
At the event I chatted with various people and jokingly said to a few that I was wondering why I was there, a 'Where's Wally' feeling. Then I migrated across the room and said hello to a living legend, Malachy McCourt and his daughter Siobhan. Malachy is a Hollywood Actor, Writer and Raconteur whose notoriety was greatly enhanced by his role in his brother's book "Angela's Ashes' about growing up in Limerick and migrating to New York.
Once we got through the niceties I started talking about Limerick and my parents who grew up in Limerick in Malachy's era and we went through the classic Irish credentials testing process, mentioning :Soda Cakes, Slops Delaney and the fact the the Georgian Sewers of Limerick are named after the Kings and Queens of England etc.
For a brief moment we were back in old Limerick and then Malachy turned to me and said 'Do you know the song 'There Is an Isle!'?
I said yes and the rest is history!
It was a Tangible Moment, afterwards I was ready to ascend to Limerick man's heaven, or even 'Poor Man's Kilkee'!
Raymond Sexton
#tangible19 #globallimerick #livinglegend #globalIrish #angelasashes
3rd July 2019