Crossing the Thin Line

Have you ever noticed that sometimes it feels like the days slip by. You follow a routine filled only with preparing for work, work, preparing and eating meals, your commute, and preparing for the next day? Sometimes there is a thin line between existing and living. This line separates what feels like a Groundhog Day from some simple things that make life great.

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Crossing the Thin Line

A genuine laugh.

A shared smile.

A deep conversation.

A thoughtful contemplation.

A short walk.

A long reflective pause.

A delicious lunch.

A worthy cause.

A kind gesture.

A little surprise.

A random purchase.

A twinkle in someone’s eye.

It can be internally driven, it can be externally motivated.

It can be deliberately sought after, it can be accidentally activated.

It’s not a chasm to cross, just a simple fine line… Between a day lost simply existing, and a life sublime.

I can be prickly

It’s hard to admit to yourself that you are stubborn, but in some cases I really am. There are certain colours that I just don’t like. There are pieces of art I just can’t appreciate. There are things that annoy me that don’t bother other people. The thing is, I’m not usually apologetic about this kind of prickliness.

I think the only people that really notice this are my family and close friends. I’m not terribly vocal about it, well except for sharing it here, and it’s not like I launch into public rants about my dislikes. But if I own up to it, I can be a bit over the top and annoying about some pretty small things. I think my wife has to put up with this more than anyone else.

It can be hard to admit that I have these annoying idiosyncrasies, but I think for the most part it’s me being annoyed and I leave the rest of the world out of it. Still, I probably need to reflect on that a bit, and when I get prickly about something really insignificant, I need to take a breath and not take my unimportant concerns so seriously.

I don’t want to be that old guy that took the ‘ly’ off of prickly. 😜

The most powerful paradoxes of life

I just read this thread of tweets by Sahil Bloom and it needs to be shared! Click on the tweet and read them all. More than one will speak to you. These are indeed paradoxes that you will have experienced and understood intuitively at some point in your life.

Beyond that, I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Another trip around the sun

Today I turn 54. I’m starting my 55th rotation around sun on this tiny blue rock. While I have been taking good care of myself and feel great, I also realize that there are things that time does to your body that are irreversible… like my hairline. 🤣

On a more serious note, it amazes me that I am now older than my parents were when I left home and headed to BC. They were in their late 40’s when I left. That means the vast majority of my memories of being in my family home are memories of parents who were spring chickens compared to me now.

How did I get here? Time passes so quickly. Five years ago retirement seemed a lifetime away, now it’s actually something my wife and I are planning for. 10 years ago ago I had 2 kids that weren’t even teenagers yet, and in a few months my youngest will be 20 and once again I won’t have any teenagers.

I feel blessed for having the life I’ve had, and I look forward to a lot more (hopefully healthy and happy) years ahead. I just marvel in the fact that so many years have gone by so quickly, and time seems to be speeding up.

I don’t usually think much about birthdays. The one birthday that made me sad we my 36th. A couple days after that birthday I had to fill out a form and the checkbox for my age went from ages 36-54. That put me in the dumps. I felt all depressed that I was now lumped in with the 50-year olds. Now that I’m at the tail end of that category, I simply look forward to what comes next.

Hairline be damned, it is going to recede and turn more grey no matter what. But I’m hopping on my exercise bike this morning, I’m going to shoot some arrows, and I’m going to have a wonderful family dinner. It’s a good day to appreciate the gift of life, and to use the time I have well, as I rocket towards this spot on the earth’s orbit again in another year.

Good-Cheap-Fast

As the saying goes, you can only pick 2:

Cheap and fast won’t be good.

Fast and good won’t be cheap.

Good and cheap won’t be fast.

Of theses I think fast is the most challenging. You can pump a lot of money into something to make it happen faster but it won’t necessarily be good anyways. When it comes to implementing change, time deadlines are important, and budgets are always limited. But going too fast undermines effort and cost.

Systems need time. People need time. And rushing deadlines quickly becomes counterproductive. Faster isn’t always desirable or attainable without sacrificing quality.

This doesn’t mean you can’t launch a beta product that isn’t quite ready. It does mean that nor everyone will be happy with the results. Even a beta product can be rushed and launched too early. It has to be affordable/worthwhile. It has to be be good (enough). It can’t be rushed… there are few things in life that can be rushed and good, no matter how much money is thrown at it.

It comes down to this

I just deleted 3 paragraphs that led up to me writing this:

If you can’t take care of yourself during your busiest times, then you aren’t actually taking care of yourself.

That’s the whole post. No excuses, no postponing, no making up for it later. Take care of yourself. You’ll get more done and feel better doing it.

Thinking and sharing in the blogosphere

Yesterday I wrote about this quote, “Mindfulness is a pause – The space between stimulus and response: That’s where choice lies.” ~ Tara Brach

And Shiela Stewart shared a post she wrote with a similar quote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  ~ Viktor E. Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning

Sheila wrote this in July of 2014, over 7 years ago. Although I wasn’t blogging every day back then I had already been blogging for 8 years. In those early blogging years I was an avid reader of other blogs, including Sheila’s, and a whole host of other educators. We were all writing, and reflecting, and learning from each other. We were in a community that understood the power of sharing our thoughts out in the open.

But there were other people who didn’t understand why we would do this. There were those that questioned how we had the time. Those that thought we were self-indulgent and thought we were only writing for self promotion rather than self reflection and learning. That’s still around today but not as much.

The reality is that I enjoy writing. I’ve enjoyed it since high school. And I feel like a writer when I share my work publicly… when I share my work in a community of other writers. When I add to the blogosphere.

And I absolutely love when another blogger shares their work with me. I totally see why Sheila connected the two quotes above. I understand her ‘blogger’s mind’ that thinks, ‘Dave will appreciate me making this connection’. I love that the connection was to a 7-year-old post, and the Sheila was able to put the connection together so many years later. Bloggers can do that. They can pull an idea up from a decade ago and see how it relates all these years later. And they aren’t afraid to share those thoughts.

This is driven by an understanding that when we learn in the open we are exposed to more connections and ideas than when we keep our learning to ourselves. The idea of being an open and connected learner is one that I think can still be misunderstood, but it isn’t misunderstood by those who are doing it, only by those on the outside that don’t get it. This isn’t ‘insider information’, it’s not a secret. We happily share it out in the open, here in the blogosphere.

Pause and think

A few days ago a quote was said in my morning meditation,

“Mindfulness is a pause – The space between stimulus and response: That’s where choice lies.” ~ Tara Brach

It’s amazing how seldom we give ourselves the time and space to pause, especially when we are making decisions. We feel the urge to respond, to fix, to appease, to vent, to impose, and most of all to decide… without a lot of thought, without reflection, and without hesitation… without being mindful.

“Let me think about that.”

“I’m not sure, give me a bit of time.”

“Let me ask a few people how they’ve handled situations like this.”

“I’ll get you an answer by the end of the day.”

Often a thoughtful delay brings a far better response than a knee-jerk reaction. Gut instinct can work, but our gut need not be the default decision-maker, when contemplation can provide us with insights not immediately available to us.

Sometimes a slow and thoughtful response can help things settle down a bit and reduce the tension or the anxiety around addressing the actual problem, rather than creating more problems by dealing with the symptoms of an issue and not the underlying problem itself… a problem that would be easy to solve, if we just allowed ourselves a little time to think.

14 years

I remember joining Twitter reluctantly in 2007. I thought, ‘I never update my status on Facebook, why would I join a new social media platform that is just the one feature of another social media platform that I don’t use?’ But as an educational blogger, I was reading about how powerful this tool was for educators and I hesitantly jumped on board.

After a short experimental phase I was hooked. Things like this happened all the time!

I was connected to a powerful network of educators who went out of their way to make connections, build community, and converse about teaching and learning. I’d go to conferences and connect with people I’d never met face to face, but whom I knew well, thanks to this amazing tool.

I even wrote a book to help others get started on Twitter:

Twitter EDU

Now I no longer use Twitter, and most other social media tools, nearly as much. They have become one-way transmission tools for my daily blog, which auto-posts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn when I hit ‘Publish’. I focus more on productivity, writing, than spending time consuming and using these tools.

But it’s still fun to get notifications like this yesterday:

I may not be on it as much, but Twitter helped me create an amazing community, and I cherish the connections and memories made.

Sleep cycle

I know that I don’t sleep enough, and I know that this can have long term health affects, but I can’t seem to get to bed early. And, I continue to wake up before my alarm, no matter what time I decide to wake up. My alarm has gone off once in 3 weeks and it was a night where I decided to change my wake up time during the night, rather than before bed.

But this morning I feel tired even if it was easy to beat my alarm. I actually stayed in bed until my wife’s alarm went off, but that extra time wasn’t restful as I thought about getting writing and meditation done to start the day. I run weight club today at lunch with the students and I’ll get a small workout in so that’s the time I can make up this morning.

I love working late at night. I enjoy the quiet after everyone is in bed. I usually enjoy waking up early and doing more to start my day before most people even wake up. I don’t love that doing both of these things end up giving me 7 or less hours sleep each night. I’m going to try reading in bed at night, and see if I can get myself to sleep earlier.

Just because I can consistently sleep less than 7 hours a night doesn’t mean that I should do so. There’s too much evidence to suggest this isn’t good for my long term health, and it seems silly to spend so much time exercising and taking care of myself, yet undermining my future with a lack of sleep.