Author Archives: David Truss

Everyday Hero

When I think of a real life hero, the first person that always comes to mind is Terry Fox. This young man ran a marathon a day on one leg to raise money for cancer research. He wanted to raise a dollar for every Canadian, and although his Marathon of Hope was never completed it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He attempted something extraordinary (‘EXTRA’ ordinary) for a selfless reason. He is one of my heroes.

Recently, a family member had to perform lifesaving actions on a man that was unconscious and not breathing. It was a rather traumatic experience, and when fire crews and paramedics arrived, they all said the team that worked on this man did a great job. Amazing. Kudos to them all. Then yesterday they learned that the person later died in the hospital. That doesn’t change the fact that they all did a great job, but it was devastating news to get.

This got me thinking about heroism. We tie so much of heroic acts to the outcome of events, not to the act itself. Isn’t that interesting. This isn’t always the case, and I think the pandemic highlighted this. We started to give praise to nurses and other frontline workers. We showed greater respect and admiration for people who work in service of others.

And so now I think more of the silent heroes. The teachers who are the only significant adults in a child’s life. The single parent that sacrifices personal wishes to chauffeur multiple kids to all their expensive activities. The volunteer that brings meals to a seniors. The older child who steps in and stops a kid from being bullied. And the nurses, 911 operators, firefighters, lifeguards, and doctors who do everything they can to save a life… heroes all, whether or not they save the person. It’s not the result, but their service that’s makes them an everyday hero.

A little too sore

A couple days ago I did an 8-minute leg workout that I haven’t done in a while. I pushed hard like I’ve been doing this regularly. By mid day I knew that I’d overdone it. My hips and upper butt were sore. I also did a hard tricep workout that day. Then yesterday I worked my chest and biceps, but chest re-worked my triceps again too.

Today I’m just sore. My hips and legs are sore, my arms are sore, my chest is sore. I’m full body sore. It has been a long time since I did this to myself. This morning I’m going to do a walk on the treadmill, not a run, not a fast walk, a nice slow walk to get my body moving, then stretch. Long slow stretches, and full motion exercises with a 5lb weight, not 15, not 25, just 5 pounds, to go through the motions and activate my sore muscles.

I used to get sore like this a lot when I worked out, then I’d do more to ‘get the lactic acid out’ but end up pushing myself a bit too hard and staying sore longer. Then I’d hurt myself, and need to stop working out. Often my back would seize up and I’d be in pain for days or even weeks. I can feel the fatigue in my back, muscles stiff and inflexible. My hips are already letting me know that I’ll be standing at my desk all day… no sitting for me today. So I need to listen to my body.

No weights today. Tomorrow I’ll do my walk with my buddy and nothing else. I know the two hot tub visits over the last couple days helped, so I’ll squeeze in a couple more soaks this weekend. The point is that I’m too bloody old to walk around with a full body sore from working out.

I’ve made some great progress in the last 9 months, actually in the last 3 and a half years since I started my healthy living journey. But I can’t get stuck in a pattern of pushing myself too hard. I’ll hurt myself to the point of having to slow down significantly. I’m not training for anything other than feeling healthy and good… and a full body ache doesn’t feel good. I’m going to take it really easy the next few days. If I don’t, my back just might force me to take a break. I’d rather slow down on my own terms, and this soreness is a good hint that I’ve got to slow down a bit.

Younger me would have muscled through. Dumber me would have kept going and hurt myself. I guess I’m a little wiser now, but not too wise or I wouldn’t be sore all over right now. 🙃

Stillness

There is a quiet that comes from being still.
A silence felt with settled body and mind.
A calm that seeps in and starts to spill,
Over busy thoughts and plans left behind.

Stillness envelops, quiet reigns.
Heart rate slows, gradually slows.
Nothing bothersome remains.
The quite settles, like gentle prose.

Breaths deepen, eyes close.
Awareness of how the breath flows.

Stillness envelops, quiet reigns.
Only tranquility remains.

Brighter days

It’s so much easier walking up at 5:15am when it’s light out. It’s easier to wake up before my alarm, and there is no need to stumble around in the dark. I love the longer days of summer! We still have 21 days of getting a bit more time with the sun above the horizon.

I didn’t grow up with this in Barbados, where there are no real seasons and the sun would stay out 12-13 hours no matter what time of year it is.

Now I live in Vancouver where daylight will exceed 16 hours in the summer and be under 8.5 hours in the winter. Coming out of winter and moving to these wonderfully long days is so uplifting! It makes me want to just seize the day.

In debt we trust

If there is one thing you can bank on, it’s that people will spend more than they have. Most people live beyond their means. Maybe they have a savings account, and maybe that savings account is growing… But then a purchase is made: a bigger house, a new car, a renovation, a medical expense, a car repair, a new furnace, a high definition TV, a fabulous new outfit, a vacation… and then the savings account diminishes, and it’s time to go (further) into debt.

I received this add from my bank yesterday:

What’s the message? Today is a great day to meet your shopping goals! Translation: Purchase on borrowed money, and take your time paying it back. Buy, buy, buy, by borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, sending you deeper and deeper into debt. It’s easy, so go ahead and spend money you don’t have.

The thing about this advertisement is that it’s not selling you any one product, it’s selling you a lifestyle where you can live in greater debt. It’s selling you ‘affordable’ interest. It’s selling you a pattern of lifetime debt. Buy now, pay later, and keep paying.

That savings account you once used to build, now grows only immediately after a salary cheque… then each month instalment payments on debt, added to monthly expenditures, eats away any hope of savings. But don’t worry, you’ll find away to almost pay for the next big purchase. Almost. And your bank will lend you just a little more to pay it off. And then you can set your own pace to pay it off. The slower you go, the more you pay, the less you have to accumulate savings… The more you go into debt after that next big purchase.

Welcome to the endless cycle of debt.

Half empty

I remember this really funny card my aunt once gave her son, my cousin. He had a spell of bad luck that included being robbed at gun point at work, his parked car being hit and run, and then after being repaired the car was vandalized a day later. The card was a picture of a giraffe’s head looking up. It said something like, ‘When life gets you down, remember to look up…’ and inside the card it said, ‘It will probably rain down your nostrils’.

Things got better for my cousin. He really just had a string of bad luck all at once, and it didn’t take long for him to turn things around. He isn’t someone who acts like a victim, he doesn’t expect bad things to happen to him. But we all know people who do expect things to go wrong, who believe the world conspires against them. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imagine how hard it is to live a life where your glass is always half empty. The system is out to get you. You feel picked on, and you ‘know’ that you are always being treated unfairly. How hard would life be? How bitter would you get?

It reminds me of Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, except that he is passively expecting the worse. When people live glass half empty lives, the glass gets emptier, and the responses to anything bad get more and more bitter. It becomes easy to see and believe conspiracy theories because everything conspires against you.

“The system is corrupt, it is designed to keep me down. We are all victims of the system.”

What a hard life to live. I wonder what it would take to change a person like this so that they don’t see the world as undermining and targeting them? What kind of event or experience would change this person? What would it take to help fill their glass a little? Or would they just empty it to where they expect it to be?

Alien life over eons of time

I’m listening to a book where the earth is invaded then the aliens that defended earth start recruiting our troops to fight in low level intergalactic wars. This book got me thinking about the chances of meeting aliens and I thought about how time is the major factor preventing this.

I’m not just thinking about how any intelligent life form would likely be hundreds or thousands of light years away. I’m thinking about time since the universe began. The universe is about 13.5 billion years old. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The earth has missed 2/3rds of all existence. Even then Homo Sapiens have only been around for 200,000 years or 0.0044% of the earth’s existence. And we’ve had just over 100 years of radio transmissions, that’s about 0.0000022% of the earth’s existence. (That’s 0.00000074% of the existence of the universe,)

Now when you look at 100 years over the span of the life of the universe, it becomes evident that entire civilizations could have survived for 5 thousands years and could have died off 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, or 50 million, or 500 million, or 5 billion years ago, great distances from us, and we’d never know.

Let’s say intelligent life is abundant in the universe, giving us a great opportunity to meet aliens. And let’s say that life didn’t start for the first 3.5 billion years of universe development. That still leaves 10 billion years of inelegant life. There could be 1,000 civilizations that existed and died and each one could have missed the birth of another civilization by a million years.

Let’s face it, we are developing technologies that make it unlikely that we will survive another 2,000 years. In less than 100 years high school students will have the technological know how, and the tools, to build a deadly virus or a deadly bomb that could set our civilization back hundreds of years. I give humanity a 50/50 chance of getting through the next 200 years.

I’m willing to bet that even if there were thousands of intelligent civilizations across the universe most space travel ready civilizations wouldn’t make it to 2,000 years. So forgetting the vast expanse of the Milky Way and the universe beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that any close enough for contact aliens are even around now… They are probably either long destroyed, or they are in their version of the dinosaur age, still millions of years from developing to where we are, much less to the point of light speed travel.

So following this train of thought, it’s likely that intelligent life is/has been abundant in the universe, and yet we are very much alone.

You build habits on your bad days

I touched on this in my post, Just show up:

We live in a society now where there is so much pressure to do well; to be your best; to shine. It’s not easy. But sometimes the message doesn’t have to be ‘you are awesome’, ‘you have so much potential’, or ‘push yourself’. Sometimes the message of ‘just show up’ is all we need to hear.

  • Don’t plan an hour workout, just show up at the gym.

  • Don’t worry about how much you have to do, just start.

I’d like to expand on this idea a bit. When you ‘really really don’t want to go’ to the gym or start your workout, you still need to go. You don’t need to do anything amazing, you just need to get started and know that you are doing something good.

Not going is a slippery slope to a bad habit. If you decide not to go or get started when you ‘really really don’t want to’, that makes it easier to not go when you ‘really don’t want to’. And that makes it easier not to go when you ‘kinda don’t want to’… and so it becomes easier to break the habit.

It’s easy to maintain a habit when you are having good days, it’s the bad days that are the problem. It’s the bad days that break the pattern, or that solidify your commitment. Doing the hard work on the tough days are what keep good habits going.

Some days you’ve got to play your ‘B’ game rather than your ‘A’ game. An excuse that you are not up to your ‘A’ game is not a good enough reason to not show up. On the contrary, your ‘A’ game gets better when you do the work even on your bad days

You can’t pick 7

The next time you ask someone to rate something out of 10, tell them they can’t pick 7. Seven doesn’t give you enough information. If it’s an eight, it’s desirable; If it’s a six, it’s not. Seven may or may not be worth it.

So instead of letting the person come back to you with an un-definitive 7/10, force them to bump it up to worthy or bump it down to un-worthwhile.

Not sure if this is helpful? Then let me ask you: On a scale of 1 to 10, what’s this advice worth to you? … and of course, you can’t pick 7!

Enough is enough

I invite everyone to write a letter to the news editors and producers of their favourite newspaper and newscasts, and feel free to borrow freely from what I share below:

An Open Letter to News Editors:

You wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t quote a Nazi manifesto and share their message. You wouldn’t promote hateful messages of racism. You wouldn’t incite a riot. Yet day after day, year after year you promote gun violence and mass shootings. You contribute to them. You incite them. You shoulder part of the responsibility. Shame on you for perpetuating the problem.

There are decades of research that suggest publicizing mass shootings and suicides lead to more of each. This is a known fact. We know that publicizing high profile shooters will often lead to more shootings. Yet last week media outlets across North America shared detailed information about a killer in Buffalo who committed a senseless act of violence. Five years from now no one outside of Buffalo will remember the victims names, but there will be an unwell person in North Carolina, Florida, Washington, Nevada, or Philadelphia that will know the killer’s name… will have read his manifesto… will have saved photos of this evil person… all of which you shared, all of which you made possible.

What you are doing is unconscionable!

Remove the details of the murderer in the Buffalo story from your headlines, and it is unlikely that the school shooting in Uvalde Texas would have happened yesterday. That’s right, it happened because of you and your media colleagues. Because of you. You didn’t pull the trigger, but you are partially to blame.

And when I go to news articles about the Uvalde massacre, I see the killer’s name. I know where he worked, I can learn all about his life. What you are actually doing is inciting a similar incident. You are inviting it. You are partially responsible for it. You, the editors of newspapers, the producers of television news, you hold some of the blame for Uvalde. Shame on you.

Stop printing the killers name. Stop sharing their words. Stop sharing images of them. Stop profiling them. Stop the cycle of contributing to the problem. To continue is to be complicit. You are complicit, you are an accomplice to murder.

You can help break the cycle.

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