Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
“Can we get to the place where there is no place to get to” ~ Michael Stone
I’ve been mediating daily since January 5th. It isn’t something that I feel I’m particularly good at, even months later. I wrote earlier about Embracing the suck, and although I know that on many levels, embracing this idea isn’t helpful, I have still stuck with it.
But in today’s meditation Tamara Levitt, on the Calm App, spoke about this idea of embracing that if we are trying to make something happen, then we are not accepting what is in this moment. Wanting to not be distracted is different than noticing I am distracted and focusing on my breath as a place to choose to put my attention. Rather than pulling away from the distractions, choosing to recognize them and letting go and accepting a new moment in time.
Even now I want to write that during meditation, ‘My distractions get the best of me’, when I know that’s counter to what I just said… this is a learning journey. But I thing it’s good to shift my thinking and realize that the journey isn’t to anywhere specific. I don’t have a destination, a place to go…. Rather I have thousands of moments along the journey to remind myself of this, and to embrace where I am, not where I’m trying to get to.
The four burner theory, as seen in this video shared below, suggests that we never actually live a balanced life, and if we do, we can never really be successful in any key areas of our lives: Family, Friends, Health, and Work.
The theory suggests that we have a limited amount of energy to distribute to these different burners, and so we need to decide where best to distribute that energy. The video also suggests that we might want to distribute that energy differently at different times in our lives.
I agree with this video in that I have seldom found balance in my life and I’ve often put one of the areas ahead of others, reducing those other areas in time commitment and overall satisfaction. However, this year I’ve also realized something else… we don’t need to accept that the limited amount of energy we have is completely fixed.
Since the start of this year, I have instituted a self-care program that has really changed my ability to give more to all 4 burners, so by giving time to a 5th burner of self-care, I have more to offer. This vlog shared my healthy living goals for 2019.
Does this mean that I’ve suddenly found balance in my life. Absolutely not! I agree with the idea that balance is not fully achievable if we want to excel in different areas of our lives. But I don’t agree that our fuel, our energy levels are fixed. I think we all know this too. Every one of us have had times when we’ve felt down, and low in energy, when trying to be successful in one area means we have nothing left for the other areas of our lives. We’ve also had times when we’ve had high energy levels and things are going great in more than one area of our lives. The question is, are these differences ones that happen to us, or do these differences happen because we create them? This year, I’ve been able to give more of myself in more areas of my life.
By taking the time to listen to audio books, and to write; by exercising more consistently than I have in over 15 years; by reducing my unhealthy snacking; and, by meditating daily for almost 10 months now, I have felt more energized, more level-headed, and more productive in other areas of my life. That said, I’m the first to admit I don’t have everything under control, I’m not perfect, and in fact I’m still my own biggest critic. The start of this calendar year was so crazy at work, I had days I just wanted to run away and move to a remote island. There were weeks where my only communication with my wife were logistical. There were days where 20 minutes on the treadmill started with 40 minutes of procrastination. But as I approach the end of September, the craziest time in the school year, I feel more on top of things than I did a year ago. I’m enjoying my family time more. I’m seeing leaps of improvement in my strength and conditioning. And I’m doing things like this daily post on a Saturday morning, while my family is still sleeping. Sunday morning, when this post goes live, I’ll be having breakfast with a friend.
The reality is that we may never have balance, but if make taking care of ourselves a priority, we have more fuel to add to the other burners in our lives.
When I moved to Vancouver in 1993, I brought with me an old TV, and it had a ‘converter box’ to change the channels. It was connected to the television by a long cord. It had 12 buttons on it and a 3-way toggle switch to triple the amount of channels it could go to. Even for that time it was a novelty to those who came to my apartment, why didn’t I just have a remote?
Now, in my basement we have a projector for a television, and we have 5 remotes:
The projector, the speaker/amplifier, the TV channel changer, the DVD player, and the Apple TV remote.
If I project my phone onto the screen using the Apple TV, my phone becomes a 6th remote.
None of these remotes looks the same or puts the controls in a similar place. Even a control as simple as the volume is something I need to search for when I switch remotes. There is no universal design for these tools. My upstairs TV starts and says, ‘Press ‘OK’ to watch TV’ but the centre ‘OK’ button is one of the only buttons on that remote that isn’t labeled!
I find this quite frustrating.
I think this frustrates me even more than it should because I actually don’t watch a lot of TV, so every time I use them I feel that I need to relearn the locations of everything. I will routinely change the channel instead of raise the volume, or jump back a full scene when I’m trying to rewatch/re-listen to the last 10 seconds.
I’m not advocating for universal design, that likely won’t happen. But what if remotes were to come up with some universal colour patterns? The yellow buttons change channels, the green is the power button, the blue button is are for volume, etc.
By doing something like this, remotes can continue to look different, but still provide a better user experience.
Where else does a lack of universal design hinder user experience?
Some choices we make are hugely influential and others are not, yet we seldom make distinctions when we should. Or at least, we get lost in the importance of decisions that are not important, giving them too much value.
We can spend a couple minutes choosing the right cereal to buy in the store… but both of our choices result in bringing home a breakfast that is loaded in refined sugar.
We can spend hours watching a TV series that is less interesting than it was when we started watching, but we feel committed to finishing the season. We don’t allow ourselves the choice to stop watching. On that note, when was the last time you chose to walk out of a theatre because the movie was bad? You probable chose to stay until the end… but it likely didn’t feel like you had a choice. You think or justify, ‘It might get better’, but it never does.
We can spend hours making a big purchase like a car, then let a salesman talk us into features and add-one we don’t need. Our choice for the car is done, and suddenly we are more easily persuaded and less likely to exercise choice.
How many unimportant choices do we spend too much time on? How many times do we passively do something without giving ourselves a choice to do something different? And how many times do we delay important choices to the point that our choices diminish? For example, you can’t decide what to do, and 2 hours later one of your choices is eliminated because there isn’t enough time to do it.
‘To do’ lists can become not do lists. I will choose to do a few easy things on the list, but those big things will sit on tomorrow’s list. I will write down the things I’m choosing to do later instead of now. I will add more things to the list so that I don’t have to do those things already on the list.
We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are big, but most are small. We also make thousands of non-decisions a day, doing something without realizing we can do something else or choose to do the same thing differently.
What’s something that you can do differently today? What’s something that you can make a choice not to do, that you do out of habit? Where in your daily routine can you empower yourself with better choices?
When I read this article about pharmaceutical companies that acquires drugs and increases their price for shareholder profit, it made me think of how many different ‘services’ actually focus on profit, and not the person who uses the service. Banks make huge profits off of the money you borrow, but shareholders benefit while you get almost nothing for putting your saving into that bank for them to lend to others.
Insurance companies help you prepare for the worst, until they have to pay you, then some of them are more interested in giving you less than you deserve. Profit and greed can work against you, when it should be working for you. The best example I can think of is real estate agents. They have your best interest up until a certain point, but the sale is more important to them than getting you the absolute maximum… when they are making $12,000 on a sale, it’s more valuable to them to get that money than to get you $5,000 more, which earns them just $100 more. Your agent’s advice of “I think you should take it,” might actually come from an agent thinking ‘I don’t want want to lose this sale now, and have to work more, in hopes of getting you more money in a week from another buyer. ‘This is the best I can do for my client’ might succumb to, ‘I have worked hard enough and I’ll take the profit now.’
Profit wins over common sense, over decency, over advocacy. It’s why cigarette companies exist even when they know their product causes cancer. Why vaping companies target children. Why pop companies add more addictive sugar into their already sweet drinks. Sell more, at all costs to the consumer. This is neither a healthy nor a desirable model to live in.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”~Mahatma Gandhi
Greta Thunberg asks, “How dare you?”
When I watch this i am reminded of Severn Suzuki’s speech at the Rio Summit in 1992.
There is something special about hearing impassioned youth showing genuine concern for the environment and for their, for our, future.
The difference of 27 years is interesting. Severn did her speech 13 years before YouTube. There wasn’t social media to spread the word. There also wasn’t a culture of mockery and resentment. I went looking for the full video of Greta on Twitter and I saw videos that made fun of her speech and one that was a full attack on her generation. It claimed that her pampered generation was the first to need air conditioning in schools, and technology in their hands. This video started with a frame of ‘this global warming hoax’, so I won’t share it here, I feel bad enough having watched it… giving it my attention, it doesn’t deserve yours.
I hope that Greta’s speech will stand the test of time and not get swallowed up by a subculture of hate, mockery, and ‘meme-ification’. I hope that the global conversation isn’t the equivalent of patting her on the head and saying, ‘good speech young girl’. I hope that this amazing young person can do what Severn Suzuki hoped to do, but didn’t have the stage and audience to do. I hope that Greta Thunberg can be the spark that ignites a real movement, one that makes us seriously look at our human impact on climate in a way that forces us to change.
Elton John has been performing on stage for 50 years. He has had the opportunity to follow his passion his entire life. Having recently watched his autobiographical movie, it is evident that fame brought him many lows to go with the highs, but not many people get to follow their dreams for 50 years!
And although he is in his 70’s, he put on an amazing show! He was on stage for almost 3 hours, his only breaks being a few minutes between a quick change of outfit, and before his encore. He belted out old favourite songs like he was on tour for the first time. He was gracious to the audience and to his band. And he spoke about his charity to support Aids victims, a charity he started and that has raised almost a half billion dollars.
Not everyone can achieve what Elton John has, but he stands as a model of what’s possible when you follow your passion.
I’m listening to the audiobook ‘Sapiens’, by Yuval Noah Harari, and this quote struck a cord with me:
“… Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas, and values compel us to think, reevaluate, and criticize. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
This fits well with some of what I was thinking when I wrote Ideas on a Spectrum. We need discord to compel us forward. We need differences of opinions and rich discourse. Consistently thinking the same thing does not promote learning or progress.
On a related note, sometimes I forget to celebrate the good things that are happening around me because I focus on what still needs to change and get better. Maybe this is a flaw. Maybe I need to focus more on this, if not for myself then for those I work with. On the one hand, celebrating can lead to complacency. It can limit or cloud the perspective that more needs to be done. On the other hand, not everyone is willing to work towards a common goal if they don’t feel valued. It is challenging to put these two ‘musical notes’ together as we move forward.
In moving forward, I often think that, ‘Good is the enemy of great’. Consistency can breed mediocrity. And, striving to make things better is never dull.
One of our middle schools in the district sits on the edge of a steep hillside. There is a large set of stairs, and to the side of that, a long wheelchair ramp. Between the stairs and the ramp is a steep grassy wedge. There is a huge forested area with trails nearby, but three boys, two with GoPro cameras on their helmets, are riding up the ramp, and riding down the grassy embankment as well as the stairs. You can see a trail down the embankment from continued use… use that was never intended.
I remember reading about a new college or university that didn’t install walking paths until after students had created foot trails through the grassy openings between buildings, allowing form to fit function.
There are so many ways that poor design misses the point that the use of an item is more important than the look. Here in Vancouver, the overhangs in front of malls, stores, and buildings will have massive gaps between them. But these are decorative, not functional. They might ‘work’ in California, but it rains a lot more here in Vancouver, and people would rather be dry, instead of having decorative overhangs that let the rain come through.
Design vs Use in Schools
Schools lack inviting spaces to hang out that result in the use of hallway or stairwell alcoves where kids like to congregate, making the hallways and stairways more of a hangout and much less functional to walk through. Rectangular desks only let chairs fit in 2 of the 4 sides. Library stacks don’t move, making the design of the library fixed in form and function.
Multiple choice tests are easy to mark, but force the focus of tests towards content. “All of the above” answers allow student to be partially correct but not get credit for knowing what they know. The questions are ‘closed’ as opposed to open ended.
The bell schedule with blocks of time push schools into teaching subjects in silos. Blocks limit collaboration between teachers. Grouping students by age in those blocks limits the ability to combine students by passion and capability.
We should always be thinking about designing for use. We should have empathy for the user. And we should celebrate when users make the design work for them.
