conference truth

I have been attending conferences since I was 14 years old. My first conference was in New York City; we were housed at the 92nd St. Y and we spent our days in meetings with Very Important People (UN-type-people. International Leader Type People.) ...and with each other. Our nights were spent staying up way too late perched on beds and curled in corners of those impossibly tiny rooms, talking and laughing and working a million knots out of shoulder blades and backs and feet and hands. In the intervening years (over half of my life, now) I have learned a lot about conferences, but none more profound than what I learned in New York, years ago:
the true conference content is not the material, not the handouts, not the workshops, not the experts. The true conference is what happens between workshops, at lunch, after dinner, at 2AM. The true conference is the connections between people. Everything else is commentary.

I am at a conference. It is morning. I am very tired, and the conference programming (which I will not skip) begins in half an hour.

...and the sun is shining; all is right with the world.