Close to the source

Leave a reply

Please visit Kelly Tenkely’s Substack and read, ‘Staying Close to the Source’. She starts with a wonderful metaphor,

“I was the kind of kid who loved to collect rocks. I was especially taken with any rock found in a stream or lake. Those rocks felt different. They seemed uniquely magical, luminous, and glittering just below the surface. Smooth, as if they’d been polished over time, their colors saturated and alive.”

… “Each time we visit a learner-centered school, I’m struck by that same kind of magic.”

I’ve had visitors to Inquiry Hub tell be they could feel this magic. They’ve described that this is a special place. They’ve been struck by the way our students share their learning experiences, and how open they are to articulate both their learning processes and their personal inquiries.

We still have percentage grades in grades 10-12, we are still a BC, Canada school providing our students with a regular diploma that they would get at any other school. But we offer opportunities that most students don’t get. We can’t compete with elective course offerings a big high school can provide, but we can have students design their own elective… but only after 1-2 years of doing shorter, less comprehensive, inquiries with continual reflection and sharing built into the process.

I’m not sure how this compares to the schools Kelly visited, but her post concludes with:

“May we stay closer to the source where learning happens. 

May we teach educators how to notice, how to listen, how to see the glitter. 

May we trust that teachers can sit beside learners and bear witness to their growth, without needing to pull it out of context to prove it exists.

Learning, when you’re close enough to see it, is unmistakable.”

This spoke to me, and reminded me of the special teachers and students I get to work with. I encourage everyone to read Kelly’s full post.

The right music

Leave a reply

Sometimes you can hear a song and you know it came to you at the right time.

Just the right song for just the right occasion.

And it can by any occasion, a high, a low, a wedding, a funeral, a moment of melancholy, a moment of joy. A song comes along and says, ‘Here you go, this is exactly what you need.

And it is.

Daily aches

Leave a reply

I was joking with a buddy yesterday and said, “What I wouldn’t do to have one week with no part of my body aching.”

I dealt with sciatic pain from December to March. I’ve been dealing with golfer’s elbow almost as long and it pops back unexpectedly, even when I’m not using it much. And now, I’ve got a deltoid pain that is making it hard to sleep comfortably.

The sciatic pain has caused me to reduce my cardio goals. I’ve also been less focused on lifting heavy and my buddy is coaching me on both better form, and also pacing myself in the gym… things I can struggle with on my own. And still the aches and pains persist.

Granted, I’m not in agonizing pain every day with my back haunting my every move, like I was 20 years ago, and I’m in great shape… but the aches! I’m tired of alway feeling like I’m on the mend.

I’m reminded of the quote, ‘Choose your hard.’

When I’m sedentary my back aches. When I’m working out, different muscles choose to ache. Well, I guess I just have to choose my ache. Yet I’m actually not joking when I say, when I beg, can I please get one week ache free, just to know what that’s like.

A bigger gig economy

Leave a reply

The gig economy is a system where people work as freelancers or take on side jobs for companies instead of having a regular full‑time position. Uber drivers are a great example of this. There are a few reasons why I think the gig economy is going to grow:

  1. High prices are making a side hustle of some sort essential if you want to enjoy things beyond what salaries allow.
  2. Companies like the structure because pay is based on performance rather than a set salary.
  3. Entertainment is shifting to live performances, gigs, as a primary form of earnings. Getting your music to stream is not enough to keep most musicians going without a concert tour.
  4. A trend now in social media, is to see a lot of affiliate marketing. Only the biggest of social media stars can make this a full-time living. For the vast majority affiliate marketing is nothing more than a gig economy.
  5. We are going to see a wave of AI trainers needed to train robots to do everyday skills. Work as a maid in a hotel? We’ll pay you to wear a GoPro for two weeks while you work. That video will train an AI that’s going to take your job less than a decade later.

Companies are afraid to hire full time staff. Money is better spent on technology than on training a human on a fixed salary. As a result, the gig economy is just going to get bigger and bigger.

Simplify rather than shrink

Leave a reply

I don’t remember where I heard this, but the concept has been on my mind recently:

Simplify rather than shrink.

The idea is that retirement doesn’t necessarily mean becoming less, but rather doing less. No I won’t be going into work anymore, and the titles and responsibilities will be less, but that doesn’t mean who I am will shrink. It’s way better to perceive the changes as simplifying my life. I’ll be able to wake up later than 5am, I won’t have to rush my morning workout, or race to get my writing done. On the contrary, I can work out for longer and write more.

I don’t have to rush the making of dinner, or choose a meal based on speed of preparation rather than preference. I won’t have to give up the quality and healthiness of a meal for convenience. I can also commit to some projects mid-week rather than waiting for the weekend.

This isn’t a shrinking of what I do, it’s expanding the things I want to do, while also simplifying my life. It’s removing the commitment to a job that can sometimes take 10 hours of my week day and creep into weekends, (if not in workload then at least in mental energy).

This frame of simplifying rather than shrinking is one than I think works for me. It’s a metaphor that allows me to get excited about my upcoming retirement. It allows me to see retirement as a wonderful opportunity to expand the use my time on things that allow me to be more of who I want to be. There will be no shrinking, there will definitely be some simplifying.

A hint of summer

Leave a reply

Today I was reminded that summer is coming. I’ve had some nice weekend mornings of sitting in the sun already this year, but before today I can’t say that I’ve really felt like summer is on the way.

This afternoon my wife and in-laws went for a walk in a neighbourhood park that’s not too far from us. There were a couple baseball games happening and a group of people practicing cricket. There were a group of kids in the playground celebrating a 9th birthday party, and many others out enjoying the day.

The sun was shining, and I had to take my thin long sleeve shirt off, and was just in a T-shirt. Of course, I do live on the wet/west coast, and there will be some rain in the coming months. But today was a wonderful reminder that summer is just around the corner. I cherish days like this. I don’t even need to be outside all day, I just appreciate knowing that warm days are on the way.

Crunching again

Leave a reply

The jury is still out on whether my buddy and I are going to ‘Everest the Crunch’ in August, (climb the Coquitlam Crunch trail 37 times in 48 hours, to go up the equivalent height of Mount Everest)… but at least I’ve been back on the trail for the last 4 weekends. Before that I had to take 6 weeks off due to sciatic pain.

A commitment to my physio visits and exercises, regular massage, and of course some extra rest, has all lead to my recovery. Today we did the most we’ve done in a while with 2 trips up, 2 extra loops of the 457 stairs section, and one trip down, (we start by dropping a car off at the top), and seven hours later I feel no pain.

My buddy Dave has taken my injury in stride and isn’t rushing us back to where we were before I had to slow down, and so I don’t feel any pressure to push more than I should. That said, we are just 4 months away from the challenge and if we don’t ramp up soon, our bodies won’t be ready for 37 treks up the hill. I feel ready to push a bit harder, but not ready yet to say this will be a ‘go’ in four months.

Still, the 6 week break was way longer than our previous gap of maybe 2 weeks since we started doing the Crunch in January 2021, and it feels wonderful to be back… and more importantly, pain free. We are crunching again! Whether this leads to the challenge in August or not, this cherished time with my buddy is back on track.

6am Gym Goers

Leave a reply

I’ve been going to a gym, rather than doing home workouts, for about 5 months now. My usual time is to get there by 6am. One thing about the 6am crowd is that they are dedicated. You see all the same faces almost every day. And, you start to acknowledge the regulars when you see them. 

I always see one guy who paddles with a weight like he’s paddling a canoe. He does a lot of exercises I don’t really get… but he’s there every day doing his routine. There’s little miss cardio who attacks the elliptical for long periods and at a pace that I could never maintain. There’s the calisthenics dude that pushes his body to the max on every set he does, with an effort that I’d struggle to maintain day-after-day. There is the somewhat self-conscious overweight guy who keeps to himself, who works hard and ends his weight session on a stationary bike. There’s the old guy (I might call him that, but he’s probably just a few years older than me) who chats up everyone, and is always smiling. There is the girl who does RDL’s with such a perfectly straight back that I think you could use her back as an ironing board – impressive! There are two couples, the younger ones work out together, the older ones are obviously together but don’t spend a lot of time on the same machines and do completely different workouts. I could go on and on… because I don’t just see these people once in a while, there are there every weekday. 

I often wonder what their back stories are? What got them to be diehard gym goers who are so dedicated? What makes them push, what makes them commit to consistency? Showing up consistently and dedicating regular time to being healthy is a life changing habit. It doesn’t matter if a person is trying to build muscle, increase their max VO2, or just in maintenance mode. It doesn’t matter if they do exercises that make sense to me, or if they struggle with good technique, or if they lift way heavier or way lighter than me. These gym goers have one thing in common… they start their day in the gym. I tip my hat to the 6am gym goer crowd. 

UCI rather than UBI

Leave a reply

As AI and robotics continue to scale at unimaginable speeds, with AI getting exponentially smarter and robots increasingly more agile, we’ve got to realize how many jobs will disappear in a very short time period. This isn’t a gradual transition, it’s not a move from one field to another like farmers transitioning into factory workers during the industrial revolution. It’s a massive shift from human labour to machine labour that the world’s economies simply aren’t designed to absorb.

I’ve seen a growth in the number of people talking about the need for Universal Basic Income (UBI), but I fear this isn’t enough. I fear that the idea of giving millions if not billions of people a basic income, but no real means for most of them to supplement those incomes as an insufficient solution. We don’t need UBI, we need UCI – Universal Comfortable Income. It’s not going to be enough to give people a basic survival income. We are going to need to see governments, and maybe even companies, share their resources and wealth with people, or else who is going to have the resources to buy the products and services AI and robots will offer?

The potential for dissatisfaction and ultimately unrest seems scary to me. A world with a couple dozen trillion-dollar companies, and a handful of trillionaires running them, is also a world with vast populations of people eking out a subsistence lifestyle, unable to do more than meet their survival needs. A basic income, requiring additional sources of income to appreciate the offerings of a fully automated economy, will not survive without a revolt for too long.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are other solutions to this problem. Maybe I’m too bullish about to how far things will advance in a short time. That said, the potential for the scenario above to occur in the next decade is not zero. It might be a pessimistic bad-case or even worse-case scenario, but it’s possible… and scary. If things advance as fast as I think they will, we can’t continue to have UBI conversations, we need to move the goal posts and start really thinking of UCI.

Observing time

Leave a reply

Yesterday’s post, ‘Let’s Do the Time Warp Again’ is still messing with my head a bit. The idea of the Andromeda paradox suggests that if we are in motion compared to another bystander, our view of very distant events can be days apart.

I understood relativity with respect to travel, a twin in a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light goes to a distant galaxy. When he comes back to earth a few years later he would be younger than the twin left behind… demonstrating the relativity of time. But the idea that distant events can ‘happen’ at different times for people witnessing it from almost the same spot, simply because of their relative motion to each other is perplexing.

So then I suggested that we could re-witness an event by changing our motion such that we are moving quickly away from a very, very distant event, so that from that relative perspective the event hadn’t happened yet. I’m no physicist, the distances would have to be huge, and I don’t know what speeds would need to be achieved, but it seems pretty conceivable to me.

What’s messing with my head is that if this is possible, what does ‘now’ mean?

We have to wait 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach us. When it reaches us, the sun is already 8 minutes older. We don’t see the sun now, we see its history. Our concept of now has a perpetual lag.

This then got me thinking about animals and their reaction times. Have you ever seen a video of a cat toying with a snake? A cat can avoid the bite of a snake, always reacting faster than we would be able to. How does a cat perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

How do birds fly in a murmuration? The flock changes direction in waves, so quickly that they can stay in formation despite hundreds of them having to coordinate with each other. How does a bird in a murmur perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

To a ten year old, 5 years is half a lifetime, to me it’s less than 1/11th of my life. Is it any wonder that as we get older, time seems to go by faster?

Like I said, these ideas are messing a bit with my head. They make me wonder what ‘now’ means and if in reality we share a ‘now’ with anyone? Is the mere act of observing ‘now’ just a relative glance of varying histories? And yet the only thing any of us ever experience beyond our memories and imagination… is now.