Monthly Archives: November 2021

The Wakeful Lucid Dream

When I was in my early 20’s I went through a period where I had trained myself to lucid dream. It was challenging because often, when I discovered I was dreaming, I’d get excited and wake up, ruining the experience. When it worked, it was amazing! The thing that I enjoyed doing the most was flying.

Last night I had a unique experience. I went to the spare room late at night to meditate, because I wrote for too long in the morning and didn’t have time to both meditate and exercise as part of my morning routine. I lay down rather than sat up and ended up falling asleep with my phone on my chest, moments after hearing the guided meditation end.

Shortly after dozing off I opened my eyes and my body was frozen. I couldn’t willfully move a muscle. I could see my chest rising with my phone on it. I could even see that the reflection in my turned off phone changed with my breathing. However, I couldn’t move a single muscle no matter how hard I tried, because I was still asleep. The first time this happened to me decades earlier, it was a frightening ordeal. But this time as I struggled to raise my hands, I felt them dislodge from my locked body and lift up in my dream state, despite not seeing them move. This control of an invisible body let me know that I was still dreaming. I was dreaming with my eyes open, aware of my body on the bed, phone on my chest, fingers clasped just above my belt buckle.

It didn’t last long, I sat up in my dream and visually I switched to the dream world, seeing a mirror directly in front of me, and looking at my reflection. I wasn’t sure what I should do so I tried to fly. I floated towards the door of the room, got excited to be flying and found myself looking at my waking body, suddenly no longer locked in the sleeping position.

I wiggled my fingers. I saw my phone on my chest, and could see that as my chest raised and fell with my breath, there was a reflection of a picture on the wall that moved in the dark screen. Remembering seeing this movement made me realize that while I was sleeping I wasn’t just dreaming that I could see my body, I actually had my eyes open and was aware of my body.

This was a short but very freaky experience. I was dreaming with my eyes open, simultaneously aware of seeing my physical body and also aware that I had no control over it my my dream state. I’m not sure I’ll be able to replicate this, especially since I had nodded off with the light on, but on most nights if I opened my eyes and saw the world while I dreamt, it would be dark with little detail to see.

I’m going to spend the next few nights trying to see if I can start to lucid dream again. The strategy that worked for me years ago was to tell myself before bed that if I noticed I was dreaming to simply lift my palm in from front of my face. If I could do this in a dream, that meant I had control of my dream… and that meant I could fly!

Sometimes I had to flap my arms other times I could just soar at will. Last night for a brief moment I got to float, and I want to feel the sensation of flying again. I’m not sure I can replicate the wakeful, eyes open, aware of my body sensation while dreaming again? But hopefully I can once again start controlling my dreams and taking to adventures in the air.

The surprise discovery

We were 16 or 17 years old and avid fisherman. Living in North York, a suburb north of Toronto, we didn’t get out fishing too often, but we tried to go as often as we could. I remember skipping school one day and taking the bus to a river to fish. I caught a beautiful brown trout, and wanted to take it home, but had to release it because I couldn’t come home from school with a fish.

We loved to catch bass and we were good at it. My friend Dino had a cottage on a lake called Bass Lake in Orillia, and when we would go there we’d catch 20-30 bass in a weekend, and we knew that was more than any of the other fishermen on the lake.

Either Dino or my other fishing friend, Gus, discovered Mussleman Lake just a 30-35 drive from our houses, and we had a new favourite spot to go to, close to home. We would bass fish in the shallows of this small, but deep lake every weekend that we could get there. Sometimes we’d just wade through the water for hours, waist deep with our shoes on. Other time’s we’d rent an aluminum row boat to paddle around the lake. And we caught a lot of bass!

I remember once, Gus had a big one on his line and just before he could get it, it snapped his line. A while later I caught a nice 4-pounder and we kept that one for dinner. Back home, I was cleaning the fish in my back yard and we found 2 crawfish and Gus’s lure in the belly of my fish.

We went back to Mussleman Lake a lot. And we caught a lot of bass. There was one day when we were in a rented aluminum boat and we had paddled to the upwind-side of the lake, to look for calmer water, since the wind was making the shallows choppy and the conditions were not favourable for bass. After unsuccessfully fishing the calmer, but still choppy, side for a while we thought maybe the fish had gone deeper to avoid the rougher water. We decided to use the wind to our advantage and troll across the middle of the lake. We each cast our lures behind the boat and Dino rowed slowly, with the wind helping to speed us up, keeping our lines taught, as they followed behind the boat.

Then Dino’s line snagged something. He stopped rowing and started pulling his line in. But it was really stuck. As he reeled in, our boat slowly went backwards, pulling us towards the snag. “I think it’s a log.” Dino said, before saying, “Actually, I think it’s a fish.” Then, “No, it’s a log.”

Then the log dislodged and started coming to the surface. “It’s coming up, careful not to snap you line,” I said. At this point Gus and I had reeled our lines in and were standing near the middle of this little boat. Dino was in the back, rod curved from the tension of dragging this big log from the depths of the lake. It was almost at the surface when it moved sideways. Then a fat, approximately 4-foot long pike surfaced with a huge splash of its tail.

This scared Gus, and he stepped back flailing his arms. He knocked me over and a box of cookies saved me from getting stitches. I fell backwards and my head landed on the cookies, crushing them against the hard aluminum bench. The fish splashed and flailed a couple more times and broke Dino’s line. We were shocked. We had no idea there were pike in this small lake, and certainly no idea that there were any fish that big to be caught.

The game had changed. No longer did we head to this lake to fish for bass in the shallows. We went to Canadian Tire and bought ourselves higher poundage fishing line, longer metal leaders to prevent the pike’s sharp teeth from cutting our line, and lures that sank deeper that the ones we used for bass in the shallows.

And then, after many trips of only ever catching bass at this lake, we started catching pike. A lot of pike. There were some unsuccessful days, but they usually ended with us in the shallows catching a bass or two. I find it so interesting that it took this little trip across the windy lake for us to learn what to look for. But once we knew what to look for, well that’s all we needed to find them… seek and ye shall find.

More on writing every day

“When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can start working on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30pm because it’s ready, It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we are creative, we are creative because we ship. Take what you get, and commit to a process to make it better.” Seth Godin, ‘The Practice’.

Seth has written over 7,000 blog posts on his daily blog, dating back to 2002. One interesting point that he makes is that no matter how many posts he writes, 50% of them are his worst 50%, and not as good as the other half. It’s impossible to do better than that. It’s not about doing great work every day, it’s about ‘shipping’ work every day. It’s about being creative every day, it’s about the process… the practice.

I’ve written pieces that I’ve thought were quite good, and no one will probably ever look back at them. I’ve knocked off a quick post with little thought, and it garnishes comments and positive feedback… and occasionally these two things coincide. But it’s not accolades or attention that matters to me nearly as much as the commitment to write every day. To do the creative work. To wordsmith, to ponder, to question, and to practice the art of writing.

So forgive the typos, the comma splices, the run on sentences. Indulge me when I intentionally break convention. Like this. This is my muse, and I do my best to ship every day. And exactly half of the time, you’ll get better than average work from me.

The nod

When I lived in China, if I passed a foreigner, an ex-pat, I got ‘the nod’. It didn’t matter if the person was British, East Indian, Australian, Japanese, or American, they were from another country and I got an acknowledging nod. We were in Dalian, North East China, and of all the foreigners, the Russians were most abundant. The Russians would not give you the nod, even if you gave them one. It was weird.

I got to know a few Russians while in Dalian and they were all very nice, but seeing a Russian stranger on the street, or in a shopping mall, they would give you a quick glance, decide you are not ‘one of them’, and look away. Never the nod.

It’s funny, one of my daughters once asked, “Do you think that they think we are American?” Because we were often asked (in Chinese) by locals if we were American? (Nǐ shì měiguó rén ma?) To which we would answer ‘Canadian’ (Jiānádà rén). Then the person would smile and be even more friendly. My kids picked this up pretty quickly and figured the Russians were assuming we were American.

Here in Canada I get the nod from people of Middle Eastern descent. It happened last night, when I was in a Lebanese Donair shop. I ordered my large, spicy, extra lamb donair, paid and walked along the counter to where I pick it up. Directly in front of me I made eye contact with a young man sitting and enjoying his meal, and he gave me the nod. I returned it with a smile. That was the whole exchange, nothing more. The knowing, ‘you are one of us’ nod.

Oddly enough, I have a Russian grandfather, and my Middle Eastern ancestry is that I’m 50% Ashkenazi Jew. So, the Russian in Dalian that shrugged off without the nod had no idea I actually had heritage, and the Middle Eastern in Canada would probably be surprised to know that my heritage is Jewish. And the Chinese in China had no idea my Grandmother was Chinese.

I’m used to not fitting in a cultural box. As I mentioned before, “I have a look that Italians mistake for Greek, and Greeks mistake for Italian. I am neither.” I am ‘white’ but with a combined heritage of being 75% Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese, I don’t readily identify as white… other than the privilege I know that I ‘wear’.

But the nod is not about that. The nod is not really about nationality or heritage, it’s about sharing a common experience. It doesn’t matter if the nod is a case of mistaken identity, it doesn’t matter if you are from different parts of the world. The nod is a way that two human beings connect and say “I see you.” And it’s a beautiful thing.

Satisfactory Work Habits

When report cards go out, they include Work Habits. The usual standard is either that you got a ‘G’ for good, or you haven’t done a good enough job. Admittedly, as a parent, I wanted to see ‘G’s more than ‘A’s, because I wanted to know that my kids were trying their best.

At Inquiry Hub we look at it differently. We think the scale is skewed to the negative with ‘Satisfactory’ being something bad, when in fact in means you are doing a ‘good enough’ job. This was part of my message home to parents that went out on report card day:

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Work Habits – The work habits provided are ‘G’ – Good, ‘S’ – Satisfactory, and ‘N’ Needs Improvement. 

Many middle and high schools break this up as ‘G’ = anything above average. ‘S’ = There are some issues. ‘N’ = Not good. Some schools even give awards for students that get “All G’s”. That is NOT what we do here. The word ‘Satisfactory’ is not a bad word. Satisfactory means doing what needs to be done. That’s not a bad thing… could it be better? Yes, it is possible that a student can step up and do more than they need to… that’s ‘Good’. And for us an ‘N’ means that work habits need improvement, like most other schools. 

We like to have a positive distinction between ‘Satisfactory’ and ‘Good’ rather than ‘Good’ being the only measure of doing good work. It’s more important to us to separate 2 kinds of ‘Good’, than 2 kinds of ‘Needs Improvement’. In fact, we have many over-achievers in our school, and one thing we stress is that sometimes it’s perfectly OK to do ‘enough’ work in one area so that you can focus more attention in another area. Can you still talk to your child about moving from ‘S’ to ‘G’? Sure, but please don’t put a lot of emphasis on this! ‘Satisfactory’ can often mean, “I did what I needed to do to get the job done.” If everything you do is always good, that’s a heck of a lot of stress to deal with when you have a lot on your plate. 

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This approach seems even more apt now that we are having students do SCRUM projects, because part of working on a scrum team is defining what ‘Done’ looks like. For some parts of a project ‘done’ doesn’t mean ‘excellent’, it means good enough to move on. This is an important skill to learn. The interesting thing is, when you are working on a team, the collective definition of done is usually more than just ‘satisfactory’, and is already better than ‘good enough’. This isn’t about putting the least amount of effort it, it’s more about not extending the team so much that they can’t finish a project on time.

Sometimes satisfactory work really is the goal, so that you have the time, energy, and enthusiasm to do other work at an excellent level. A satisfactory work habit means that you’ve done what you needed to do.

The sales pitch

We bought a TV last night from a wonderful man with the softest sales pitch I’ve ever experienced. This included going to competitor’s web pages to show us their prices, and sharing the actual cost of the TV we were buying. It was a smooth, sincere sounding pitch, from a delightful person.

He gave us a bit of his sales background as we were paying. During that time he said he started his career in car sales but he couldn’t stand it because, “It’s impossible to sell a car without lying.”

He didn’t tell us which car company he worked for. He did mention a couple different ‘big box outlets’ he worked at for over two decades, without saying anything bad about them. And the he shared the name of one he worked for, for just 6 months, that we should never buy from. And of course, now that he knows us, he can share the same kind of deals with our family and friends.

Except for the fact that he was the busiest salesperson on the floor and we had to wait a couple times while he dealt with other customers, the whole experience felt positive… from the first time we talked to him on the phone to when we left the store.

One funny point is that when he was on the phone with us, we thought he was a young, enthusiastic sales person, on his first sales job. We arrived and was told he was in the back with a customer and walked right by him without knowing him. When he found us he said, “Didn’t I tell you to look for the short bald man when we were on the phone?”

He didn’t, and my wife and I had a good chuckle about how mistaken we were about what this man would look liked. But the mistake fed into the appeal, who was this older-than-us man who sounded so genuinely enthusiastic to serve us over the phone? Turned out he was a nice man, working for a good company, with the smoothest, most enjoyable sales pitch I’ve ever heard.

A commissioned sales job is not a job I could ever do, and so I have respect for someone that can do it so well.

Crossing the Thin Line

Have you ever noticed that sometimes it feels like the days slip by. You follow a routine filled only with preparing for work, work, preparing and eating meals, your commute, and preparing for the next day? Sometimes there is a thin line between existing and living. This line separates what feels like a Groundhog Day from some simple things that make life great.

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Crossing the Thin Line

A genuine laugh.

A shared smile.

A deep conversation.

A thoughtful contemplation.

A short walk.

A long reflective pause.

A delicious lunch.

A worthy cause.

A kind gesture.

A little surprise.

A random purchase.

A twinkle in someone’s eye.

It can be internally driven, it can be externally motivated.

It can be deliberately sought after, it can be accidentally activated.

It’s not a chasm to cross, just a simple fine line… Between a day lost simply existing, and a life sublime.

I can be prickly

It’s hard to admit to yourself that you are stubborn, but in some cases I really am. There are certain colours that I just don’t like. There are pieces of art I just can’t appreciate. There are things that annoy me that don’t bother other people. The thing is, I’m not usually apologetic about this kind of prickliness.

I think the only people that really notice this are my family and close friends. I’m not terribly vocal about it, well except for sharing it here, and it’s not like I launch into public rants about my dislikes. But if I own up to it, I can be a bit over the top and annoying about some pretty small things. I think my wife has to put up with this more than anyone else.

It can be hard to admit that I have these annoying idiosyncrasies, but I think for the most part it’s me being annoyed and I leave the rest of the world out of it. Still, I probably need to reflect on that a bit, and when I get prickly about something really insignificant, I need to take a breath and not take my unimportant concerns so seriously.

I don’t want to be that old guy that took the ‘ly’ off of prickly. 😜

The most powerful paradoxes of life

I just read this thread of tweets by Sahil Bloom and it needs to be shared! Click on the tweet and read them all. More than one will speak to you. These are indeed paradoxes that you will have experienced and understood intuitively at some point in your life.

Beyond that, I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Another trip around the sun

Today I turn 54. I’m starting my 55th rotation around sun on this tiny blue rock. While I have been taking good care of myself and feel great, I also realize that there are things that time does to your body that are irreversible… like my hairline. 🤣

On a more serious note, it amazes me that I am now older than my parents were when I left home and headed to BC. They were in their late 40’s when I left. That means the vast majority of my memories of being in my family home are memories of parents who were spring chickens compared to me now.

How did I get here? Time passes so quickly. Five years ago retirement seemed a lifetime away, now it’s actually something my wife and I are planning for. 10 years ago ago I had 2 kids that weren’t even teenagers yet, and in a few months my youngest will be 20 and once again I won’t have any teenagers.

I feel blessed for having the life I’ve had, and I look forward to a lot more (hopefully healthy and happy) years ahead. I just marvel in the fact that so many years have gone by so quickly, and time seems to be speeding up.

I don’t usually think much about birthdays. The one birthday that made me sad we my 36th. A couple days after that birthday I had to fill out a form and the checkbox for my age went from ages 36-54. That put me in the dumps. I felt all depressed that I was now lumped in with the 50-year olds. Now that I’m at the tail end of that category, I simply look forward to what comes next.

Hairline be damned, it is going to recede and turn more grey no matter what. But I’m hopping on my exercise bike this morning, I’m going to shoot some arrows, and I’m going to have a wonderful family dinner. It’s a good day to appreciate the gift of life, and to use the time I have well, as I rocket towards this spot on the earth’s orbit again in another year.