Author Archives: David Truss

The hill

I have my car in the shop so I rode my bike to work yesterday. It’s a really easy ride to work, with about 5% uphill, 15% flat, and 80% down hill. It takes about 10-12 minutes and I couldn’t break a sweat if I tried. Coming home is a different story.

When I leave work to go home, I cross the street corner the school is on and BOOM… there’s the nastiest of hills I have to ride on my whole trip. It starts easy, then turns and gets harder, then a steep bend that stays steep afterwards, then a slight bend and steeper yet. But then you can see a 4-way stop and what looks like the end of the hill, but no. On the other side of the intersection is still an uphill climb. It’s not as bad as before, but having just got on my bike and started to sweat within 3 minutes, it’s still feels tough.

From there, a turn onto a flat, main thoroughfare street for half a block, and a turn at the lights onto my street almost 2 km from home… and with the exception of one small dip and a flat last 100 meters, it’s all a gradual uphill ride.

I remember now why, despite living so close, I have chosen not to ride to work often. That said, none of this ride is that bad. It’s more mental than physical. It’s the issue of starting right on the toughest hill, and that hill progressively getting tougher. And since I’m a lot fitter now than in past years, it didn’t wipe me out. So maybe I’ll ride more often now.

One nice thing that is no longer an issue that used to deter me was having to lug my laptop back and forth, but now with everything I need stored in OneDrive and OneNote, I really don’t need to carry anything home. I have to ride this morning, car is still in the shop. Maybe tomorrow too. After 3 days, I’m pretty sure I’ll decide if this hill keeps me from riding regularly, or if it gets smaller in my mind and riding to/from work becomes a regular thing.

Teaching and Trust

I surveyed our Grad 9’s a couple days ago. Coming from middle school, and getting stuck in a single cohort, they really didn’t get the experience at our school we wanted for them. At Inquiry Hub our students usually connect across grades, and interact as a larger community, which is important in a really small school. But although we were able to give them full days, unlike large schools with a lot more cohorts to manage, the environment our 9’s came into is far more like an extension of a single class in middle school than a high school. That said, they really don’t know what they are missing compared to a regular year here… they’ve never seen it.

I asked them to write on a piece of paper, a positive, a challenge, and/or a suggestion or wish, and I collected them. They could write about any or all of these.

Here are a few of them:

The challenges and suggestions were all related to covid restrictions, with less clubs, and a lack of connection with other cohorts. Beyond that the comments were very positive.

“I like the open and just overall welcoming environment.”

“I like how you can structure your own day…”

“I like how our courses let us set our own goals and learning paths.”

“Even though our community is so small, I like how close we’ve all gotten.”

One comment in particular was quite interesting to me:

“I love how much the teachers trust us here.”

I agree that our teachers give students a lot of freedom, and choice. And students at iHub get a fair bit of unstructured time to work on what the want/need to work on. But I never thought of this through the lens of trust, like this student.

When students feel trusted, they feel empowered, they feel they have a responsibility to keep that trust. It’s an interesting lens to see the dynamic of the classroom through. How does the relationship between the students and the teachers change when trust is given and valued? Where does the responsibility for learning fall in a trusting relationship? What else is fostered in a trusting environment?

Kudos to our teachers for creating such a wonderful learning environment in these challenging times.

Cat alarm clock

It’s not fun having your cat wake you up at 3am with an angry high pitched scream. What could possibly be wrong? And then I find him at the back glass French doors, hair raised on his back, looking at a cute, fluffy, grey and white cat just outside the doors. The other cat is sitting calmly watching him, taunting him with complete lack of concern. The only recourse is to lock our cat in the bedroom, or try to chase a cat away, that will surely return as soon as I fall back asleep.

Our cat isn’t usually like this. Our neighbour has a male cat too, and our two ‘boys’ are best friends. They hang out together all the time. They roam the neighbourhood together. They visit each other to start their days. They have quite the ‘bromance’ and don’t even put up a fight if the other cat is eating their food.

But this grey cat is not a friend. He or she is one of the only reasons our cat will wail like a heavy weight just landed in his tail. And last night we got the 3am wake up call.

I don’t mind when our cat, Oliver, walks on me at 5am, even though he won’t settle on me. Instead he wakes me up to pet him 2-3 times, then goes to my wife. He literally comes to tell me, ‘I’m going to cuddle with your wife’. But this is ok. I’m usually getting up about then and so this wake up call is fine.

On the other hand, Oliver screaming bloody murder at 3am is really not an ok way to be woken up. Hopefully the cute, fluffy, grey and white cat is regularly kept inside, and we don’t have too many unplanned cat alarms in the coming days and weeks ahead.

People are Blackberries

This is a silly metaphor, but it works for me.

Blackberries are a unique fruit. I can eat a handful of raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries, and it doesn’t matter how many I put in my mouth, I enjoy them all the same. That’s not the case for blackberries. Blackberries taste better when you have one at a time. Two blackberries in your mouth are not as enjoyable as just one.

I think this is the case because individual blackberries have distinct taste profiles and these unique qualities get cancelled out when you taste too many of them at once. The collection of taste profiles isn’t as good as tasting them individually.

I like people the same way. One at a time. I enjoy conversations with a single person far more than with a group. I want to hear their profile, I want to focus on the individual. At parties I seldom seek out a group of people. I’d rather have a one-on-one chat.

To me, people are blackberries, not any other berry… and I enjoy them most, one at a time.

Yard work

I’ve probably written about this several times before, but I’m really not a fan of yard work. I don’t understand growing grass and making it nice and healthy, just so that it needs to be cut more often. I think weeds are prettier than a blanket of green grass. I understand watering a vegetable or herb garden, but flowers are made to be outside… if they don’t grow with the weather you have in your environment, then they are the wrong flowers to grow.

I love being outside, and I enjoy my back yard immensely. I want to spend time out in the sunshine. In fact, I’m about to assemble our above ground pool and I’m looking forward to putting a couple hours into this. So, it’s not that I don’t like doing chores outside, I just don’t like gardening, and cutting the grass, and weeding. Maybe one day, 30 years from now, if my knees and back are capable, I might fall in love with nurturing a garden. But right now, I’d rather sit in my back yard and enjoy the dandelions… if only my wife (and neighbours) agreed with me. 🙂

All the extras

We’ve been looking to replace my old minivan, and shopping for a hybrid SUV. Today I decided that I’ll just stick with my van for a couple more years, and probably go all electric when I do upgrade.

Nowadays shopping for a vehicle is all about the extras you get lumped together. It’s not about personalization, it’s about packaging. My wife wants a sunroof, ‘Oh well then you have to go two models up and you get the video rear view mirror’ (makes me dizzy), ‘the built in GPS’ (my phone and CarPlay is fine), ‘and the trunk opens by waving your foot under it’ (wow, I couldn’t live without it, I think to myself sarcastically).

I can’t see myself buying another gas-only car ever again, but while we still want a larger SUV, the choices seem to be overpriced features in hybrids, and I think I’d rather wait for a larger full electric, that I’m not spending thousands more on features I don’t want.

My commute is 6.6 kilometres (4.1 miles) round trip, to and from work. For now, I’ll keep my minivan and shop again in a couple years… maybe then I’ll be a little less fussy about paying for features I don’t want.

New conspiracy theory

I wish I saved the video clip where I heard this… it’s brilliant and I don’t know who to give credit to.

Here’s how you out conspire a conspiracy theorist anti-vaxer who talks about how the government is using vaccines to control you… you tell them this:

“You are right! And their plan is very clever. Vaccinate all the sheep who listen and comply. Then spread a deadly variant of the virus, and kill off all the unvaccinated who don’t listen. And further get the sheep to follow them by saying, ‘See, we told you the vaccine would save your life.’ Thus wiping out anyone that doesn’t obey and reinforcing the importance of complying.”

🤣🤣🤣

Now there is a ridiculous conspiracy theory that I’d like to see spread widely in the conspiracy theory circles.

Phishing for your money

On Tuesday I received this almost real looking letter in the mail:

It’s a rather simple scam. First, tell me in a letter that someone has changed my personal information, and get me scared that someone has already gotten into my bank account. Second, have me phone them and ask for my reference number, so that they can call me by name before I even tell them who I am, making me believe that I’m talking to the fraud department of the bank. Next, ask for me to confirm who I am ‘for security reasons’ by asking information that they want to learn about me, so that they can pretend to be me and access my bank account.

I don’t know how these people live with themselves? They make an occupation out of tricking and stealing from innocent people. These scammers disrupt people’s lives, and some of them even break people‘s hearts. And it seems to be something that is getting more rather than less common.

It was after hours and so I contacted the bank via a Twitter direct message. Then through a rather painful process that took way too long, I finally sent a link to a digital copy of the letter to them (the person seeing my Twitter message was seeing it in a chat format with no images, despite my sharing the image in the original message). I got a thank you and a generic warning about how not to be scammed from them. The thing is, although it didn’t fool me, I’m sure this will fool someone who is panicked enough to share too much information with the scammers, thinking they are talking to their bank.

Why wouldn’t the bank immediately be in touch with the phone company to cancel the phone numbers? Why wouldn’t the police be involved too, tracking the phone number? I bet a disproportionate number of elderly are fooled by these scams. I bet the number of these scams that work are greater than we would guess.

Be aware of scams like these. Sign in to your account and check the information rather than calling. Call phone numbers that you can find on bank websites rather than in letters. We unfortunately need to start out cynical rather than trusting when we receive phone calls, emails, and letters like this… and not like this, because the next scam is probably going to be more elaborate, authentic looking or sounding, and tricky.

Monkey brain meditation

Six times I had to back up my guided meditation today. I was instructed to breath naturally and count my breaths for one minute. A seemingly simple task, but not for my monkey brain.

In… out, one, in… out, two, in… and drift into thinking about something else and don’t notice. My 6th time I got to fourteen, but might have missed one around 12. Before that try, I didn’t make it past five breaths before my meandering mind wandered off thinking of something irrelevant and unimportant.

You would think my 3rd, 4th, and 5th attempts would have been more successful, after all, I only had one task to do, and only for a minute. But like the dog in the movie ‘Up’, my mind was pulled away, attracted by squirrels, no mater what I was trying to focus on. I can’t even remember what pulled my thoughts away, none of it important, just monkey-mind distractions, or squirrels, or whatever metaphor you prefer to describe an unfocused mind.

I just tried again and counted to 9. I’m sure that was wrong, because I don’t take 6+ second breaths. I’ve been meditating for 2 and a half years and I can’t relax my thoughts enough to count my breath for 1 minute. Perhaps 10 minutes guided meditation is not enough of a daily practice to truly quiet my mind. I’m not quitting, I’m sure there are other benefits to starting my day with this activity. But perhaps it’s time to add some silent meditation to my day as well.

I’ll start with 3 minutes, and I’ll try this now.

And for pure comedy, my cat came meowing up to me 30 seconds in, wanting me to let him out, and clawing the couch to ensure he had my attention.

Let’s go again!

Well, that wasn’t so bad. I will need to add silent meditation to my daily practice. I’ll keep it short enough at the start to ensure that I actually commit to the habit. My goal: simply to be able to sit and count my breaths for a minute, without my brain doing mental gymnastics. My date I hope to achieve this? I don’t know, I think I will just look for gradual improvements and progress, that’s probably better than an arbitrary date and the pressure that distraction would be. One less monkey thought, one less squirrel to pull my attention away… and maybe put the cat out first.

The shade of our minds

My morning meditation included this quote:

“We are sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine.” ~ Ram Dass

It’s interesting to think about some of the negative loops we play in our mind:

Self doubt – I’m not good enough. I can’t do it, it’s too hard for me.

Regret – Both for the things we’ve done, and the things we wish we did.

Sadness – for things we’ve lost, for uncomfortable moments that happened in our lives, and also just in our minds.

We put up our own shade while wondering why the sun doesn’t shine on us… and we do this without ever leaving our own thoughts. But we aren’t always in control. The dark spaces can grow, the shade can seem to be daunting. Grey, stormy clouds do not allow the sun through, even if we get out from under the tree.

“Smile.”

“Snap out of it.”

“Just think happy thoughts.”

It’s so easy for someone who sees sunshine to toss out simple advice to those who are stuck in the gloomy shade. But it’s so hard to have the advice of others penetrate the shade we cast on ourselves. When we are stuck in the shade, we do not feel in control of navigating to brighter spaces in our minds. If we did… we would, if only it were so simple.

—

However it is important to remember that we are not our thoughts, our thoughts are not us. If we can recognize this, we can create some cognitive dissonance. We can separate the elements of shade we create in our heads from the shade we are experiencing. We can have doubts and still move forward, we can fake confidence and pretend we are more capable than we feel. We can act our way into a new way of thinking. We can choose to do something that reduces regrets from the things done and not done. We might not feel happy, but we can choose to see our sadness rather than live it, to observe it from a place where it does not grip us so tightly.

So easy to say, when one is not feeling down, when not depressed, when we see potential in ourselves and others… So far away from achievable when we are in the midst of shadow, gloom, and despair. We do not think our way out of bad thinking so easily, we do not break the loop from within the loop. When everything is spinning around us, it can feel like nothing stops moving even if we can stand still. We can’t un-think our own thoughts so easily.

Yet we can act differently, we can choose what to do when we can’t choose what to think. We can take a walk in nature, we can connect with a friend who makes us feel better. We can read a book that takes us to places our minds didn’t know we could go. We can dress in a way that makes us feel empowered. We can do a kind act for others and feel the endorphins that is the reward for selflessness… for not just thinking for and about ourselves.

We can exercise, not to transform our bodies but to transform our minds… not a gruelling workout to make ourselves more fit, but short spurts of activity to change our heart rate and clear some clouds. Activity vignettes that alter our physiology, and get us out of a rut.

We can pattern what we do to pattern what we think, rather than the other way around… Routines can be ruts, and routines can be grooves. We can find physical grooves that helps us out of mental ruts. We can act our way into new thinking when we can not think our way into new action… because the shade won’t think itself away, and sunshine does not fill the shadows when we choose to create our own clouds.

It’s not what we think, but what we do that makes a difference, and action is what moves us from underneath the shady trees of our minds.