Monthly Archives: September 2019

Go Fish

Isn’t it funny how we can lack perseverance and grit with some challenges while with others our attitude is completely different?

We can learn a lot about this from fishing hobbyists. Anglers will go to a lake or river and cast for hours with no luck. They will try different lures and techniques, and they will move to different areas, but they won’t give up. And then, if hours later they are packing up, and they still haven’t caught anything, well then it was still a good day.

I’ve heard it said that ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result’. But sometimes we just need to go fishing a little. Maybe some time, patience, and perspective is all we need… Along with the attitude that a little fishing expedition can be fun, even if the immediate results aren’t what we are looking for.

Daily blogging made easy

On July 6th I decided ‘It’s time…‘, and I (re)started this daily blog. Although I might have missed a day or two early on, it has become a daily routine for me. But that was during my summer holidays and I had time!

Like my healthy living goals, I knew that to make this stick, I need to make it work when I am busy. It’s never busier than September startup in schools. So, how am I adding this to my daily routine? I thought I’d share:

1. I have the WordPress App on the front page of my phone.

(I love the colour option:)

2. I use the app to add draft ideas any time of the day. It can be as simple as a title and a single sentence. I do this very quickly, unless I plan to write the whole post.

3. Set aside a bit of time to write. I usually write after dinner, before bed, or I wake up early if I don’t have a post scheduled the next day. I might write longer posts on weekends but I try to keep writing to 30-45 minutes mid week. I don’t watch TV, so I think of it as a writing ‘episode’, (without commercials😜). If I wake up early, I limit myself to 30 minutes. This isn’t a chore, it’s not work, it is a hobby I want to do. If I am tired, I rely on my drafts.

4. Find an image. I usually start with a search for a meme related to my post, and no matter what, I commit to finding something in less than 5 minutes.

5. Go to the app’s Post Settings and: Add 2-3 related blog tags, add the image, and change the message that gets auto-posted on Twitter, LinkedIn, and my Facebook page. (I usually make this message the post title, my #dailyink hashtag and one sentence about the post).

6. Schedule posts for the next morning. I’m playing with times between 6:45am and 8am. I have no idea what works best? I have a morning routine of meditation, exercise, and listening to an audio book, but sometimes I have time and I re-read and edit my post, or I dream up new draft ideas.

That’s it. Some days I’m spending 30 minutes ‘all-in’, this post has been a bit longer. If I needed more time this would have been popped into my drafts and I’d probably post something else tomorrow.

I’m writing, I’m putting it ‘out there’, and I’m enjoying the mental break from the day. I tried watching TV with my wife a couple days ago…

…I prefer to be creative and add some #dailyink on my blog.

Smart A$$ Responses

Ask yourself, if you aren’t getting the answers you want, are you asking the right questions?

Here are 2 worksheets where students got very creative with their answers.

Did the students give the teacher a response that they wanted? No.

Did the students deserve the response that they got? No.

Regarding the first worksheet, I created this image to make fun of it:

“You’ve got to ‘love’ worksheets typed on a typewriter and copied so many times that parts of the letters are missing.”

Did the student spell any of the 10 words wrong?

What if the teacher said, “Haha, that was sneaky, now look around the room and find 10 more words that you can spell”?

Looking at the second worksheet, what if the student gave the examples shared as their answers? What would the teacher have done then? (And who ‘jumps’ with their family???) The question coupled with the examples makes this a painfully boring task. The musical response by the student actually makes the assignment interesting.

Why the big red X?

“Not the answer I was looking for.”

No it wasn’t, but it is a very clever answer! One that should be recognized as creative.

What if the teacher said, “Haha! That’s great! What other action verbs do you know?”

Is the purpose of a worksheet to get the answers right? Is the purpose of assessment to count marks or to check for understanding? When someone doesn’t give you ‘what you are looking for’ does that mean their response is wrong and deserves a big red X?

Or is a smart a$$ response a wake up call that maybe you can ask better, more interesting questions?

On being present

How much time do we spend ruminating on the past? …Anticipating or anxious about the future? …Thinking about possible scenarios and reenacting different outcomes to decisions or conversations? …Wondering how our lives could be different, if only…

How much time do we spend hiding from the present moment without knowing that is what we are doing? Are we really procrastinating, or are we outright avoiding? Are we creating new possibilities, or are we avoiding inevitable realities? Are we rehearsing alternate options, or creating unachievable fantasies?

What do we do to unintentionally avoid the present?

What can we do to intentionally be present?

Stop. Breathe. Breathe again deeply. Feel the oxygen reach your extremities. Smile. Now decide what you will do right now.

To seize the day, you must first seize the present moment.

Sugar Monsters

“Listen to your gut.”

We use phrases like this all the time. But it looks like we might actually be listening a lot more than we realize. Research suggests the bacteria within our gut biome actually influence our thinking. This takes the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ to a whole new level!

What we eat determines the makeup of our gut biome, and our gut biome sends messages to our brain. Our brains literally get craving messages from our gut, and just like a drug addiction, these signals can control our behaviour. One food that acts a lot like addictive drugs do is sugar.

I’m going to issue a challenge. I want you to go into your pantry and choose any 10 items that you enjoy eating. Include condiments, cereal, sauces, treats, and even a few things you consider healthy. Now look for the Sugar in the ingredients. How many of these items have sugar as one of the first four ingredients?

In case you didn’t know, ingredients on labels are ordered from largest to smallest amounts, so if sugar is one of the top 4 ingredients, that likely means there is a considerable amount of sugar in the product. Some labels will also have Nutritional Facts that show how many grams of sugar are in a single serving. And that single serving is likely smaller than what you serve yourself.

It’s almost impossible to avoid large doses of sugar in your diet. It takes effort. With high levels of sugar in so many things, if you aren’t intentionally thinking about it, you are literally creating sugar-hungry, mind-controlling monsters in your gut.

The next time you get a food craving, is it really your mind doing the craving or is it the bacteria in your gut taking control of you?

Luxuries Become Essential

What starts out as a luxury often becomes essential… something we struggle to live without. Think of indoor plumbing. Water when you want it, for drinking, cleaning, and flushing waste. At one point these were things you couldn’t do, later they were luxuries reserved for the rich. Now in a ‘developed’ country indoor plumbing is essential.

Phones used to be a luxury item. Then, like running water, they became essential. Our (personal) phones used to be tied to a single location, our homes. At first the chord was 3 feet long, and we were tied to the room it was in. Then the chords got longer and/or the line to the phone was extended, and suddenly my sisters could make private calls from their bedroom or the bathroom. Then came cordless phones and we could even make calls from the back yard or the garage. Then came the cellphone.

The first mobile phone call happened in 1973. The first commercial mobile phone arrived in 1983 and cost close to $4,000. IBM came out with the first smart phone in 1993. In 2005 the first Blackberry came out. In 2007 there were about 295 million people using 3G around the world. And in 2008 the first iPhone came out.

Now, carrying a phone with you is no longer a luxury, it is almost as essential as indoor plumbing. But is it truly a luxury?

I love having Google at my fingertips. I don’t love the access to work email when I’m home with my family. I love being connected to family on a group Snapchat we share. I don’t love telemarketing phone calls interrupting me. I love having an audio book with me at all times. I don’t love talking to people who interrupt our conversation for a phone call, or an alert. I especially don’t love when it’s my phone doing the interrupting… because I can be just as guilty at times.

In the move from a luxury item to an essential item, our phones have changed our behaviour, our communication, and our relationships to one another in significant ways. We are always connected, always available, and always reactive to a device we take everywhere we go. A cellphone is no longer a luxury. It is convenient but can be inconvenient too. It is definitely a distraction.

Here is a parting question: If cellphones were a species, would this be a symbiotic relationship or would we would be the hosts in a parasitic relationship where the phones benefited more from us than we benefit from them?

Sharing the flame

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~ Buddha

There is one more element to this quote that I think is worth reflecting on. Not only does the lighting of other candles not diminish your own candle, but the joy of sharing your light increases the brightness around you!

How and where do you share your flame?

Some kids…

Some kids are easy to like. They make an effort to connect with you. They want to do well. They seek your approval.

Some kids are hard to like. They don’t want to make an effort to connect. They are defiant. They don’t want your approval, or maybe they do, but they sabotage their own efforts because that don’t believe they’ll get your approval even if they try.

Some kids don’t fit either of those categories, and others switch between the two on a given day, or even within an hour. Some kids come to school to learn, some to socialize, some to get out of their house. Some kids don’t want to come to school at all.

Some kids deserve a second chance, while some kids deserve a sixth or ninth chance. Some kids are willing to say sorry, and some of those kids mean it. Some kids make others feel unsafe, some kids do things to make themselves unsafe. Some kids are resilient, while some kids lack the strategies and the confidence to believe that they can be successful.

Some kids make working with them feel like hard work, while some kids help you bring joy to your work day. Some kids are happy, positive, and peaceful and others are sad, negative, and angry.

Some kids deserve more effort, thoughtfulness, patience, love, tough love, and care… more care than you want to or feel that you can give… more forgiveness and acceptance than you want to share.

All kids deserve to be cared for by adults who believes in them; who want them to be better than they are; and, who see the good in them, even when it is hard to see. All kids need to see the goodness in you. They need to know that you believe in them. They need to know you care.

And as for the toughest kids to work with, the ones that drive you crazy, the ones that don’t appreciate what you do for them… they are the ones that can read you the best. They know if you are working from a place of love, or acceptance, or tolerance, or impatience, or anger. They are the kids that most deserve the best you that you can give them. Because only the best, most resilient, and most caring you can get the best out of them. It isn’t easy, but it’s extremely rewarding.

Vaping epidemic

It’s sad to me to know that nicotine use in teens has been going down for years, but with the growth of use of e-cigarettes and vaping, that statistic is now going up. And if it isn’t bad enough that vaping is increasing nicotine use, these little machines are heating up oils and vaporizing them into droplets that are inhaled into the lungs.

“Federal authorities consider the ingredients safe to consume as food. But our lungs are only equipped to inhale clean air.” Vaping heats up oils but “Our lungs are never meant to have fat in it.” This is “a chemical insult to the lungs,” according to What are vaping-associated illnesses and why are doctors concerned? – CBC News

Here is some interesting information, in infographic form, from The National Institute on Drug Abuse: Teens and E-cigarettes

The last time I went to the movie theatre there were two ads for vaping, one for a vaping product, the other to promote vaping marijuana. The legalization of marijuana has probably created a spike in teen use here as well. A few days ago, I read an interesting article on the teenage brain, and this was the section on smoking and pot smoking:

“Other studies have linked smoking in teens to alcohol abuse, which itself has a devastating effect on both memory and intelligence. And it turns out smoking pot may be far worse for the teen brain than previously thought. Recent studies have linked regular marijuana use in adolescence to smaller brain volume and more damage to white matter. Smoking daily before the age of 17 has been shown to reduce verbal IQ and increase the risk of depression.“

I think that things will get worse before they get better. More than ever, advertising deploys strategies of influence that we didn’t even understand a decade ago. And while advertising for cigarettes is banned, that’s not the case for vapes and now marijuana. Vaping flavours like cotton candy and cherry entice young kids to get used to vaping. Peer pressure doesn’t help. Add to that the fact that vapes are designed to be easily concealed, made to look more like USB drives rather than cigarettes, and you have the makings of a major problem.

Teen vaping is on the rise… so are the negative effects of inhaling oil droplets, nicotine, and marijuana into the young, developing lungs, brains, and bodies of our youth.

Vitamin D

About 3 years ago I dealt with 6 months of chronic fatigue. It was awful. It was caused by an extreme deficiency in Vitamin D. But in Canada, only a specialist can ask for a Vitamin D test as part of a blood test without it costing the patient money, and so it took 6 months before a specialist tested me.

Vitamin D is known as the sunshine pill. Sunlight provides your body with Vitamin D. But we don’t expose ourselves to enough sunlight in the northern hemisphere, and winter is approaching with shorter, darker days ahead. I take 5,000IU (International Units) of vitamin D3 daily. I call it my ‘sunshine in a pill’. That’s a higher dose than most people take, but it works for me.

40-50% of North Americans have a deficiency in Vitamin D. There are possible links to this deficiency and MS – (Multiple Sclerosis). Chronic fatigue does not actually have a significant correlation. My deficiency was at less than 5% of what it should have been and the specialist said that another person at that level might show it in completely different ways than me.

But here is my public service announcement: Winter is coming, you will be exposed to less sunlight. Get a little sunshine in pill form and start taking Vitamin D.