Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
In July, 2013, when I wrote ‘Positivity Memidemic‘, memes were not what they are today. The growth of the use of this word, meme, has made the idea of a new word, memidemic, even more relevant.
The definition I created in that post was a little off the mark:
mem·i·dem·ic
Noun ~ A widespread occurrence of a good idea in a community at a particular time: “a passion memidemic”.
Adjective ~ Of, relating to, or of the nature of a memidemic. Synonyms
I think I missed the point in my definition because it is the spreading of positive ideas, images, and videos that needs a new word to describe what’s happening.
The problem of not having a word like this lies in the current words we use to describe these positive events happening: Viral and Epidemic.
Both of these have very negativeconnotations to them. We don’t want viruses or epidemics to spread, but we do want positive memes to spread.
When something positive goes memidemic, it is spreading, and we want it to spread. We want to share the joy of it spreading. We want to see it shared, re-shared, and enjoyed. The word ‘viral’ doesn’t suggest that.
So the next time you see something adorable, inspiring, heart-warming, or wholesomely entertaining that is spreading and being shared, tell people that it’s going memidemic!
We want to see good memes about Greta Thunberg spread memidemically!
Sometimes I have a thousand ideas running through my brian and I can’t get them all out.
Sometimes I look at a blank page and my mind goes to mush. My mind isn’t blank, it’s not that I’m not thinking, rather what I am thinking involves being distracted by unimportant things. Writing a daily blog puts me in a dance between these two states. Sometimes I’m driving in my car and I think of 2 or 3 things to write about in less than 5 minutes. I will create draft titles and put a sentence starter or two on the page before I hit save. (No, I don’t do this while I’m still driving.)
Other times I can sit with a blank page and have no idea what to write? I go through my drafts and don’t really want to expand on any of them. I check the news, and search some of my social media feeds, and suddenly I’m no longer writing. This is when the discipline of just starting to write is important. This post was called ‘Wrapping’ and while it might sound interesting to some, the first few lines told me that I wasn’t going to unwrap the idea. So I deleted the title and once again faced the blank page.
In ‘The War of Art‘, Steven Pressfield said, “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” I have the audio version of this book and I have listened to it twice. The fact is, that although the blank page can be intimidating, it doesn’t hold any more power over you than you give it. It can be an unapproachable mountain, it can be a desert plain, it can be a white-out blizzard, or it can just be a blank page, waiting for you to add some ink, (or digital ink).
This page is no longer blank. From the second sentence, this has been easy to write. It has taken me less time than most of my posts usually do. The words have flowed, the quote I was looking for above came up very quickly in a Google search, and so even that wasn’t a distraction. I just had to get past the blank page.
What are the blank pages that hold you back? And what can you do to get them started?
The idea behind the glass ceiling metaphor, is that there are invisiblebarriers that keep minorities and/or women from positions of power. But when I think about the portrayal of women in media and social media, I realize that there are some very visible, sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle, ways that make that ‘glass ceiling’ much more opaque.
I do not always recognize this myself.
Yesterday I shared this tweet and image: (I decided not to link to it)
1980’s: Experts agree that…
2010’s: It’s true, I read it on Facebook… 🤔
To me, that’s both insightful and funny. Then I received this response in a tweet from Natasha Knox:
So true!
Side note – do you find the male/female representation in this meme problematic, or is it just me?
To which I responded:
Ouch, now I notice it.
The use of gender roles here is problematic in more that just one way!
When my two daughters were younger, they used to love Dora the Explorer. This is a great cartoon with a female hero (recently a movie too, but I haven’t seen it). In the cartoon, Dora relies on two animated objects: a map and a backpack to help her on her adventures. Dora has to ask the male map which way to go. The female backpack always needs ‘your help’ to figure out what item in the backpack Dora needs. Intentionally sexist? I doubt it. Perpetuating gender stereotypes? Absolutely!
It is this perpetuation of gender stereotypes that I think makes the glass ceiling more opaque than people realize. Because looking through that ceiling, or rather breaking through that ceiling doesn’t always get women to the same place that men above that ceiling are. Not when expectations and preconceived stereotypes are different when women are in those roles. I think ‘problematic’ depictions of women, like the 2 examples above, are seldom done with an intentional bias, but they are done far more than people think. One or two examples may not seem like much, but done over and over again, on many forms of media and across many social media platforms, I think things like this can become normalized and self-perpetuate. That it is not necessarily intentional is what makes the issue so cloudy. That it is sometimes intentionally perpetuated makes things even worse.
I think it is important to identify and call out these biases. Where have you seen them recently?
“Can we get to the place where there is no place to get to” ~ Michael Stone
I’ve been mediating daily since January 5th. It isn’t something that I feel I’m particularly good at, even months later. I wrote earlier about Embracing the suck, and although I know that on many levels, embracing this idea isn’t helpful, I have still stuck with it.
But in today’s meditation Tamara Levitt, on the Calm App, spoke about this idea of embracing that if we are trying to make something happen, then we are not accepting what is in this moment. Wanting to not be distracted is different than noticing I am distracted and focusing on my breath as a place to choose to put my attention. Rather than pulling away from the distractions, choosing to recognize them and letting go and accepting a new moment in time.
Even now I want to write that during meditation, ‘My distractions get the best of me’, when I know that’s counter to what I just said… this is a learning journey. But I thing it’s good to shift my thinking and realize that the journey isn’t to anywhere specific. I don’t have a destination, a place to go…. Rather I have thousands of moments along the journey to remind myself of this, and to embrace where I am, not where I’m trying to get to.
The four burner theory, as seen in this video shared below, suggests that we never actually live a balanced life, and if we do, we can never really be successful in any key areas of our lives: Family, Friends, Health, and Work.
The theory suggests that we have a limited amount of energy to distribute to these different burners, and so we need to decide where best to distribute that energy. The video also suggests that we might want to distribute that energy differently at different times in our lives.
I agree with this video in that I have seldom found balance in my life and I’ve often put one of the areas ahead of others, reducing those other areas in time commitment and overall satisfaction. However, this year I’ve also realized something else… we don’t need to accept that the limited amount of energy we have is completely fixed.
Since the start of this year, I have instituted a self-care program that has really changed my ability to give more to all 4 burners, so by giving time to a 5th burner of self-care, I have more to offer. This vlog shared my healthy living goals for 2019.
Does this mean that I’ve suddenly found balance in my life. Absolutely not! I agree with the idea that balance is not fully achievable if we want to excel in different areas of our lives. But I don’t agree that our fuel, our energy levels are fixed. I think we all know this too. Every one of us have had times when we’ve felt down, and low in energy, when trying to be successful in one area means we have nothing left for the other areas of our lives. We’ve also had times when we’ve had high energy levels and things are going great in more than one area of our lives. The question is, are these differences ones that happen to us, or do these differences happen because we create them? This year, I’ve been able to give more of myself in more areas of my life.
By taking the time to listen to audio books, and to write; by exercising more consistently than I have in over 15 years; by reducing my unhealthy snacking; and, by meditating daily for almost 10 months now, I have felt more energized, more level-headed, and more productive in other areas of my life. That said, I’m the first to admit I don’t have everything under control, I’m not perfect, and in fact I’m still my own biggest critic. The start of this calendar year was so crazy at work, I had days I just wanted to run away and move to a remote island. There were weeks where my only communication with my wife were logistical. There were days where 20 minutes on the treadmill started with 40 minutes of procrastination. But as I approach the end of September, the craziest time in the school year, I feel more on top of things than I did a year ago. I’m enjoying my family time more. I’m seeing leaps of improvement in my strength and conditioning. And I’m doing things like this daily post on a Saturday morning, while my family is still sleeping. Sunday morning, when this post goes live, I’ll be having breakfast with a friend.
The reality is that we may never have balance, but if make taking care of ourselves a priority, we have more fuel to add to the other burners in our lives.
When I moved to Vancouver in 1993, I brought with me an old TV, and it had a ‘converter box’ to change the channels. It was connected to the television by a long cord. It had 12 buttons on it and a 3-way toggle switch to triple the amount of channels it could go to. Even for that time it was a novelty to those who came to my apartment, why didn’t I just have a remote?
Now, in my basement we have a projector for a television, and we have 5 remotes:
The projector, the speaker/amplifier, the TV channel changer, the DVD player, and the Apple TV remote.
If I project my phone onto the screen using the Apple TV, my phone becomes a 6th remote.
None of these remotes looks the same or puts the controls in a similar place. Even a control as simple as the volume is something I need to search for when I switch remotes. There is no universal design for these tools. My upstairs TV starts and says, ‘Press ‘OK’ to watch TV’ but the centre ‘OK’ button is one of the only buttons on that remote that isn’t labeled!
I find this quite frustrating.
I think this frustrates me even more than it should because I actually don’t watch a lot of TV, so every time I use them I feel that I need to relearn the locations of everything. I will routinely change the channel instead of raise the volume, or jump back a full scene when I’m trying to rewatch/re-listen to the last 10 seconds.
I’m not advocating for universal design, that likely won’t happen. But what if remotes were to come up with some universal colour patterns? The yellow buttons change channels, the green is the power button, the blue button is are for volume, etc.
By doing something like this, remotes can continue to look different, but still provide a better user experience.
Where else does a lack of universal design hinder user experience?
Some choices we make are hugely influential and others are not, yet we seldom make distinctions when we should. Or at least, we get lost in the importance of decisions that are not important, giving them too much value.
We can spend a couple minutes choosing the right cereal to buy in the store… but both of our choices result in bringing home a breakfast that is loaded in refined sugar.
We can spend hours watching a TV series that is less interesting than it was when we started watching, but we feel committed to finishing the season. We don’t allow ourselves the choice to stop watching. On that note, when was the last time you chose to walk out of a theatre because the movie was bad? You probable chose to stay until the end… but it likely didn’t feel like you had a choice. You think or justify, ‘It might get better’, but it never does.
We can spend hours making a big purchase like a car, then let a salesman talk us into features and add-one we don’t need. Our choice for the car is done, and suddenly we are more easily persuaded and less likely to exercise choice.
How many unimportant choices do we spend too much time on? How many times do we passively do something without giving ourselves a choice to do something different? And how many times do we delay important choices to the point that our choices diminish? For example, you can’t decide what to do, and 2 hours later one of your choices is eliminated because there isn’t enough time to do it.
‘To do’ lists can become not do lists. I will choose to do a few easy things on the list, but those big things will sit on tomorrow’s list. I will write down the things I’m choosing to do later instead of now. I will add more things to the list so that I don’t have to do those things already on the list.
We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are big, but most are small. We also make thousands of non-decisions a day, doing something without realizing we can do something else or choose to do the same thing differently.
What’s something that you can do differently today? What’s something that you can make a choice not to do, that you do out of habit? Where in your daily routine can you empower yourself with better choices?
When I read this article about pharmaceutical companies that acquires drugs and increases their price for shareholder profit, it made me think of how many different ‘services’ actually focus on profit, and not the person who uses the service. Banks make huge profits off of the money you borrow, but shareholders benefit while you get almost nothing for putting your saving into that bank for them to lend to others.
Insurance companies help you prepare for the worst, until they have to pay you, then some of them are more interested in giving you less than you deserve. Profit and greed can work against you, when it should be working for you. The best example I can think of is real estate agents. They have your best interest up until a certain point, but the sale is more important to them than getting you the absolute maximum… when they are making $12,000 on a sale, it’s more valuable to them to get that money than to get you $5,000 more, which earns them just $100 more. Your agent’s advice of “I think you should take it,” might actually come from an agent thinking ‘I don’t want want to lose this sale now, and have to work more, in hopes of getting you more money in a week from another buyer. ‘This is the best I can do for my client’ might succumb to, ‘I have worked hard enough and I’ll take the profit now.’
Profit wins over common sense, over decency, over advocacy. It’s why cigarette companies exist even when they know their product causes cancer. Why vaping companies target children. Why pop companies add more addictive sugar into their already sweet drinks. Sell more, at all costs to the consumer. This is neither a healthy nor a desirable model to live in.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”~Mahatma Gandhi
Greta Thunberg asks, “How dare you?”
When I watch this i am reminded of Severn Suzuki’s speech at the Rio Summit in 1992.
There is something special about hearing impassioned youth showing genuine concern for the environment and for their, for our, future.
The difference of 27 years is interesting. Severn did her speech 13 years before YouTube. There wasn’t social media to spread the word. There also wasn’t a culture of mockery and resentment. I went looking for the full video of Greta on Twitter and I saw videos that made fun of her speech and one that was a full attack on her generation. It claimed that her pampered generation was the first to need air conditioning in schools, and technology in their hands. This video started with a frame of ‘this global warming hoax’, so I won’t share it here, I feel bad enough having watched it… giving it my attention, it doesn’t deserve yours.
I hope that Greta’s speech will stand the test of time and not get swallowed up by a subculture of hate, mockery, and ‘meme-ification’. I hope that the global conversation isn’t the equivalent of patting her on the head and saying, ‘good speech young girl’. I hope that this amazing young person can do what Severn Suzuki hoped to do, but didn’t have the stage and audience to do. I hope that Greta Thunberg can be the spark that ignites a real movement, one that makes us seriously look at our human impact on climate in a way that forces us to change.
