In March of 2017 I was in Costa Rica and we visited a beautiful waterfall. This was my description on Facebook.
Take 43 seconds out of your day and watch this waterfall in slow motion.
Nature is amazing. There is a reason why we are drawn to the outdoors, and why natural formations like peaks, vistas, and waterfalls become beacons that draw us to them.
But what made this a truly incredible experience was that it was felt as well as seen. It was a full body experience.
In still, silent air, my daughter and I went for a sunset walk. We did the walk a couple days before and saw the single line animal track, shared below, and we thought it was a fox’s. Today we saw what we thought were deer, a dog or coyote, and rabbit tracks around our previous tracks. These tracks make me wonder how often animals cross our trodden paths and without the snow telling the story we are oblivious.
It’s amazing how good a walk can make you feel, especially when you can surround yourself with trees, and observe the natural world. Walks work to lift your spirits. They brighten your day, even as the sun sets.
Here are a few photos from my evening walk last night.
That’s a quote my dad often shares,
“What’s between our ears is the last frontier.” ~ Abraham Truss
Isn’t it amazing how much we know about the complexities of life, the universe and everything, but we don’t know where consciousness comes from? We still debate whether or not we have free will.
There is so much we still don’t know about the last frontier.
I could sit and watch a fire all day. It’s mesmerizing and hypnotizing. I wonder if the appeal is somehow ingrained in our DNA from caveman times, in the same way that animals know things, like turtles hatching and heading straight for the ocean.
Fire is warmth. Fire is safety. Fire makes food. Fire is life.
For thousands of years fire was also community. It represented an opportunity to share stories, to connect with family, friends, and neighbours. We don’t gather around fires anymore. People share stories in different, digital ways.
Thanks for sitting around this digital fire with me. I’m honoured that you choose to join me. The visits are short, but I’m here every day, I’ll keep the flame going between your visits.
I have been back with my parents for just over 24 hours and I’ve already over-eaten. I blame it mostly on my sister who barely weighs 100lbs and eats 6-7 meals a day, each one bigger than a normal sized meal for me. She’s always thinking about food and she’s an incredible cook. I just finished a pickled cabbage salad she made that I could eat every day for a month without getting bored of the taste.
For me, getting together with my family has two wonderful benefits. First, I spend time with them and laugh, and enjoy their company. And second, and equally as important, I get to enjoy the fusion flavours of home. With Chinese and Jewish heritage, both with roots from South America (Guyana) and the Caribbean (Barbados & Trinidad), my family meals are three things: eclectic, spicy, and delicious!
I’m glad that I’m maintaining some level of fitness while here, because in the coming days I’m going to over-eat. I can’t help myself… and I don’t want to!
There’s nothing like home cooking.
It’s 7:14am in Toronto and our red eye flight from Vancouver just landed. I’m visiting my parents and I’ve still got a long day ahead. First one of my sisters is going to pick us up, she arrived last night and is renting a van to get us to my parents. Then we drive onto downtown Toronto to pick up another sister before driving 2.5 hours north to my parents.
After about 45 minutes sleep the whole night, I’m not really looking forward to more travel right now, but I’m with family and that’s the whole point of the trip. In about an hour and a half I’ll be in a van with one of my daughters, one of my nieces, and two of my sisters. The trip up north will go by quickly… and there might be a nap for part of it.
It’s wonderful to connect with my family. In no time at all I’ll feel rejuvenated, even if I didn’t sleep much on the overnight flight.
It’s the last school day before the March break. My ‘to do’ list at work will require a bit of focus to accomplish, but it is achievable… at least if the general day-to-day interruptions are manageable, that’s an unknown that is just part of the job. The good news is that beyond an email home to students and parents before the break, I don’t have anything pressing, that can’t wait until after the break.
All that said, something that often happens when I reach this point in the year, or at the winter break, is that the first couple days of the break I just crash and burn. I fall into a mode where I sleep more than I usually do, and I feel extremely lazy. And sometimes I literally get sick. It’s like my body holds out for the break, then says ‘You made it! OK, you can let go now’, and I get sick.
However, in previous years, I would usually not be sticking to my healthy living routine right now. I’d have the mentality of, ‘ I’ll get back into shape over the break.’ But this year I’ve done some form of exercise 19 out of the last 20 days. Usually I am metaphorically burning my candle at both ends, but I’ve been intentionally getting to bed for an average of about 7 hours of sleep (I usually get 6 to six-and-a-half). And I’m of the mindset that I’m looking forward to the break, not ‘I need a break’.
While saying this all out loud doesn’t mean that my body still won’t crash to some level, it didn’t this past winter vacation, and I feel like I’ve been able to break the crash and burn routine to start my holidays. The next couple days will tell the tale. Now it’s time for my morning meditation and then on to my exercise bike… I’ve got to maintain the positive patterns that are helping break this cycle.
When I was a kid I used to watch Get Smart, a ridiculous comedy about a bumbling secret agent who seemed to always accidentally solved his case. Whenever his boss was going to tell him something top secret, Max, agent 99, would insist on using the cone of silence… a device that succeeded in preventing them from hearing each other, and could always be heard from the audience’s perspective, outside of the cone.
I sometimes try to put myself in a cone of silence, not watching the news, not paying attention to social media posts related to news events, not discussing anything related to the news. I try to block things out for a couple days and just live in blissful ignorance of the world beyond my daily life.
Does it work? Not always. But every now and then it’s fun to try.
I wrote about the idea of offering people ‘Opportunities not Obligations‘ back in November 2019. I have used this a lot since then. It’s one of my favourite social hacks to allow a person to feel guilt free about turning down an opportunity. (Read the post to really understand what this is all about.)
I want to add something to this now, some advice to the person saying it… if you use this phrase and the person declines the opportunity, well then you need to let it go. You need to be authentically okay with the person not accepting the opportunity. Otherwise, your follow-up will undermine the good intentions of the phrase.
If you say, ‘Are you sure’ Or ‘that’s too bad’, or if you ask again, then you are making the thing you offered feel more like an obligation. You are making the person feel like you are disappointed or let down.
“This is an opportunity, not an obligation.”
When you use the phrase authentically, then it is freeing to both you, the asker, and your friend, the receiver. No apologies needed, no guilt. But if you aren’t authentic and you will be disappointed, then this isn’t a helpful phrase to use.
I just went back to my very first blog post, originally written on March 29th, 2006, and added with a reflection to DavidTruss.com 2 years later. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
First of all, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 16 years! At the time of my reposting this first post onto my own website, I wrote about my 2 year journey to that point, “As I approach the two year mark since first blogging this, I can honestly say that becoming a blogger has been absolutely transformative! I feel like I’ve learned more in the past 2 years than I have in 22 years of one kind of institutional learning or another.“
Now going back to the point of that post, I wonder what the purpose of our current systems are?
Social media seems to be about gaining and keeping attention at any cost.
Governments seem to be about managing risk in wasteful ways.
Law seems to be about expensive litigation with justice sometimes prevailing.
Education seems to be about ranking students for university.
Higher education seems to be about putting students into debt to pay for credentials.
Of course there are exceptions, shining examples of how things could be. But how many of our systems do things that, if you look at them you think, that’s not the purpose of that system? And if the results aren’t what we want, if our systems keep giving us unintended results, at what point do we recognize that these results are the purpose of our systems? And then, what do we do about getting to the real, intended purposes?
