Author Archives: David Truss

The Playmaker

I watched a high school basketball game tonight. It was a blowout, ending with a score around 51-98. One kid on the winning team was a real highlight reel, with dunks, blocks, steals, 3-pointers, and despite being the biggest guy on the court, he’d bring the ball up the court sometimes, and even play the point guard position.

But of all the things he did, the highlight for me was when he’d penetrate the defence then find the open man and dish it to him for the easy basket. It wasn’t the dunks and blocks, it was being the playmaker and making sweet passes.

Teams need the clutch player that you can count on to score points, but when that clutch player is also a playmaker who makes his team play well, and who isn’t selfish, that’s a really great player. Then he’d be on the bench and he’d cheer like he’s the number one fan of the team.

In life, that’s the player to be.

This is just Canadian high school basketball, and while this kid will probably play university basketball, he’s probably not NBA material… but I’ll tell you one thing, whatever he does in life, I’d want him on my team.

Surprise gathering

I’m on a ferry heading to Nanaimo to surprise my father-in-law for his 91st birthday. My wife is already there but he has no idea that his two other children and 7 more family members are also joining him today.

Moments like this are golden. We can get lost in the bustle of day to day things and opportunities to come together can be rare. Today my father-in-law is going to be delighted, and so will the rest of us.

Call someone you love and don’t see often today, and maybe plan the next get-together… or better yet, pay them a surprise visit! 💜

A quiet mind

While we don’t sit in silence very often (yesterday’s post and one from 2022), we also don’t sit with a quiet mind. Our ‘To Do’ list, obligations, and plans fill our mind with things in the future rather than the present.

The idea of stillness eludes us even when it’s quiet. The notion that we are fully present escapes us. A happy experience? Let’s take a photo to remember it. A pretty sky? Let’s take a video. A beautiful walk? Let’s plan our next meal. We seldom stay in the moment.

Maybe it’s just me and my monkey brain. My brain that tries to meditate and spends its time wandering. I want to wonder but I wander. I want to be quiet and still but I fidget internally as well as externally.

I want the gift, the present, of being present. I seek the now and not the future… Not the thoughts of what’s next, what I must still do, and what I should or should not say to someone not currently with me. Imagining future conversations, or worse, past conversations and how they could have been better.

A quiet mind is not an empty mind, it’s a mind focused and aware of the now. It is not in the past or the future, it is in the presence of the present. I will meditate after writing this. Meditation must come after writing or I’m even less present as I think of what I’m going to write. Even then, my mind will drift, I will accept it and understand that refocusing is part of the process, it actually is the process. But I long for the quiet, the stillness, the moments where I’m fully present.

Perhaps it’s that very longing that prevents me from getting there. The desire to be more present is a desire and want of something not in the the present and thus something I can not seek without being less present. It’s the paradox of letting go: the more you try to let go, the more you are holding on to something… the less still your mind is.

Sitting in silence

We almost never sit in silence anymore. Music, podcasts, tv, social media, and even humming or singing to ourselves, we fill the silent void.

There is no room for boredom, no space for quiet contemplation, no moments of solitude. Only noise, distractions, and attention to external inputs. What can we fill this quiet space with? What can we pay attention to? And what else now?

Sit in silence for a while. Sit with your own thoughts. Let them linger, let them settle. Let them get past the sensation that you should be doing something, anything but this. And breathe.

Sit in silence for a while.

Sensing our world

I’m going to need glasses and hearing aids in the next few years. I already use small magnification readers when text is small or my eyes are fatigued, and I know that my hearing has diminished. One example of my hearing issue is that when we shut down our gas fireplace it beeps, but I don’t hear the beep. That sound is no longer in the range that I can hear. I only know it’s there because my wife and daughter mentioned it.

It’s only in relatively recent history that we’ve had access to technologies that allow us to enhance our senses when they fall below ‘normal’ capabilities. Before that we just lived less vivid lives as our senses worsened.

Having my family ask me ‘Can’t you hear that?’ and listening to nothing but their voices, knowing full well that I’m missing something is a little disconcerting. How are they getting to experience a sound that is outside the range of my capability? But the reality is that there are sounds they too can’t hear, which dogs and other animals can.

This makes me wonder what our world really looks and sounds like? What are we incapable of sensing and hearing, and how does that alter our reality? And for that matter, how do we perceive the world differently not just from other species but from each other? We can agree that certain colours on a spectrum are red, green, and blue, but is my experience of blue the same as yours? If it was, wouldn’t we all have the same favourite colour?

A few years back I had an eye condition that affected my vision at the focal point of my left eye. Later, I accidentally discovered that this eye doesn’t distinguish the difference between some blues and greens, but only at the focal point. I learned this playing a silly bubble bursting game on my phone. Without playing this game I might not have realized the limitations of my vision, and would have been ignorantly blind to my limited vision.

That’s the thought of of the day for me, how are we ignorantly blind to the limitations of our senses? What are we missing that our world tries to share with us? How will technology aid us in seeing what can’t be seen? Hearing what we can’t usually hear? That is to say, that we haven’t already accomplished in detecting? Our houses have carbon monoxide detectors, and we have sensors for radiation that are used in different occupations. We have sensors that detect infrared light, and accurately measure temperature and humidity. This kind of sense enhancing technology isn’t new.

Still, while we have sensors and tools to detect these things for us, we can’t fully experience aspects of our world that are present but undetectable by our senses. It makes me wonder just how much of our world we don’t experience? We are blessed with amazing senses and we have some incredible tools to help us observe the world in greater detail, but what are we missing? What are we ignorantly (or should I say blissfully) unaware of?

Mixed emotions

It’s the last day of the winter break. Tomorrow everyone heads back to school. I always find the last couple days before heading back a bit of a reset. The rush of the holidays is over, and my willingness to start something new is extremely low. In the last couple days I’ve watched more television with my wife than I have the rest of the 2 weeks of the break.

That said, I’m not begrudging the return to work. I’m excited about starting up again. I’m looking forward to seeing students in the building and hearing about their holidays. I’m already thinking about things I want to accomplish this term.

Part of me would love to have another week off, and part of me can’t wait to get back to a regular schedule. It’s a mixed feeling and one that sits heaviest on me on the day before I head back. I don’t always know how to balance the different emotions I feel on this day. I kind of just drift through the day, wondering if I should spend time catching up on things like email, or doing something… anything… that says ‘you are still on holidays – enjoy!’

Inevitably, I end up doing ‘not enough’ of either. In actuality, that’s not true, but that’s the emotional rollercoaster I go through every last day of an extended break.

The digital wall

What is it about the internet that gives people permission to be awful and mean to others? I follow an astrophysicist on social media. She’s brilliant, and makes great content. She also posted a rant about all the misogynistic comments she gets from men commenting on her rather than her content. I’m not sharing any more details because it looks like she took the video down.

This is just one of many examples of people behaving badly from the safety of behind their keyboards. Many don’t even hide behind an anonymous profile, no they are just openly rude, mean, and/or sexist. I don’t understand the desire to do this? I don’t understand how a digital profile somehow creates the permissions to do this?

Would these people say the same things if they were physically in a crowded room with the person they are actively being inappropriate with? In most cases I would guess not. But somehow their keyboard acts as a digital wall separating them from their bad deeds.

I wonder what these people would think if someone was saying the same rude things they are saying online to one of their family members? Would that be enough to stop them? Would they think it was ok if a person spoke like them to their daughter? What would it take to make them realize what jerks they are being?

I’m pretty sure Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t face the sexism the female astrophysicist I mentioned above does. I bet the internet is a very different place for these two people with similar jobs. The inequity is magnified on the digital, social media front. The blatantly sexist and rude comments of yesterday-year are still alive and well on the internet.

I’m not the one getting the worst of it, so I don’t see it that much. Yet it still bothers me. I’d hope to see a change for the better soon, but I’m not terribly optimistic. In fact, I think it will likely get worse before it gets better. I hope not, but I think so.

Rethinking sleep

I probably shared this before, but as a 30 year old, new to teaching, I got used to very little sleep. I’d routinely get 5 or less hours sleep for several nights in a row. A friend and colleague who struggled when he had less than 8 hours sleep told me that I was burning my candle at both ends and that I was going to die 10 years younger because of my lack of sleep.

That night, some time after 1am, I sent him an email basically explaining that I’d done the math and if I lived to 70 and he lived to 80, then I would have been awake longer than him.

Now in my mid 50’s I definitely need more sleep. I also notice that I really don’t function as well when I’m tired. However I still struggle to get 6.5-7hrs sleep most nights in a week. My weekly average is probably closer to 6 than 7 hours nightly. And my sleep is a little more interrupted too.

And this is despite the fact that every medical professional I follow and learn from speaks about the value of sleep. I know I don’t get enough of it. I know this isn’t a healthy choice. Yet I’m still up late writing this and I’m going to be up before everyone else in my family tomorrow morning.

I need to rethink this. I need to schedule longer sleep times… and I need to go to sleep now.

Sweet dreams.

Paying with our attention

I got this message from Amazon yesterday:

This notification and specifically, ‘We ‘aim’ to have meaningfully fewer ads…’ says three things to me:

1. We are making our service worse (or more expensive) than what you have now.

2. ‘You are our product’. Meaningful ads means they are using our streaming data to target us with ads that are more likely to influence us, which also gets more value for them from their advertisers.

3. ‘Fewer ads’ is their way of saying, ‘Not many at first, but we’ll gradually increase them at a pace that doesn’t suddenly piss you off’.

Movie theatres used to have 5 minutes of previews, then 10, then 15. Then there were ads for the concession stand thrown in. Then ads for items sold in the concession stand, then partner brands… And now when you pay for a movie, the ads start when the movie is supposed to start… that way they ensure a captive audience. You can bet that advertisers pay more for a quiet, attentive, popcorn-eating, phone-silenced-and-tucked-away viewer than they do a commercial-skipping viewer sitting at home with many other options and distractions.

Advertisers pay for our attention. And they pay well. We are the product. Google sells our information and attention, so does Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The more of our attention they can sell, the more data they collect about us, the more they make.

‘We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads…’ is a lie. It’s decorated like it’s doing you a favour, but it’s about maximizing profits. It’s about you being the product and advertisers being the customer.

‘We’ll be right back after these messages’… (Insert profit-making content here)… This is the process we pay and continue to pay. Our attention is the product; The advertisers are the real customers.

Conversation hog

I had a conversation yesterday and upon reflecting on it I was a bit of a conversation hog. What made me realize this was that I asked a question and upon hearing the initial response, I immediately shared my similar experience. However in doing so, the conversation never got to the person fully answering my question.

I basically jumped in with a related story and took over the conversation. This undermined my initial question and the whole conversation. It’s not like I was rude, but I also wasn’t very polite. Why ask a question if I’m more interested in my own response rather than the person’s I’m asking?

Unfortunately I didn’t recognize this until after the conversation was over, and we had parted ways. Still, this was an excellent reminder that after I ask a question, the need to shut up and listen. I need to engage with the person I’m with in a way that is fully focused on hearing, and less on relating and sharing my own connections, especially when I’m asking for their story. That isn’t to say I can’t make a connection later, but the key word there is ‘later’.

Listen first. Seek to understand. Engage in their story, and when their story has been shared, only then should I consider interjecting my own story, and only if it adds value to the conversation.

Listen first.