Tag Archives: celebration

The gatherings

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The events couldn’t be further apart with respect to the kinds of emotions felt, but as you get older it’s likely that the only times you meet for large gatherings are weddings and funerals. Celebrations of new beginnings and ultimate endings.

The one thing they have in common is bringing people together. Family and friends making the effort to travel long distances to share a common space with each other.

A chance to see once little people all grown up, and to see the age lines in those who are like you, starting to show the wear of time. A chance to catch up on the news of lives seen in bits and spurts. A chance to hug, to chat, to laugh, to cry.

A chance to be together, sporadically celebrating beginnings and endings.

Feeling gratitude

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I think that gratitude is something to be celebrated. It is felt more when it is expressed and reflected on, not just experienced in the moment.

Yesterday I turned 58. I got to have an early morning coffee with a good friend, and I got to meet my daughters for a quick lunch. I had a couple cakes and many well wishes at work. Then I went to dinner and a movie with my wife and daughters after work. We were unexpectedly met at dinner by my wife’s sister and my brother-in-law at dinner, which was a very pleasant surprise.

It was a wonderful day all around. It ended with a few thoughtful gifts and cards at home after the show. My daughters have had a tradition of making personalized, hand-drawn birthday cards and I have always adored the thoughtfulness they put into them.

I can’t help but want to share my gratitude towards family, friends, and colleagues. I feel lucky, and blessed. Every year around the sun makes me feel more appreciative for the life I have lived and the opportunity to share more of it with the people I love.

Remembered and forgotten

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I went to a friend’s father’s funeral today. It was a Catholic service. The music was pleasant, the tribute was lovely. You can tell he was loved by family and friends. It was really nice.

This made me think a bit about what kind of service I’d want? If I had a terminal diagnosis and knew the date was looming, I’d probably want a celebration of life before I died. To me that is the time to actually get together and celebrate.

That said, I’d prefer to live a long healthy life and slip away in my sleep at a ripe, but cognitively sound, old age. Without knowing the date was coming, what kind of celebration would I want?

Two things come to mind. First, I’d want a long interval between my death and my celebration of life. Don’t hold it when the pain of loss is close, don’t make my death date a date to remember. That’s not a date I want defining memories of me. Second, it’s not very important what I want, after all, I’m gone. Let the people who I matter to pick a distant date, maybe my birthday for example, to gather in any way they wish, and to do with my ashes whatever they wish.

Forget the actual death, remember the life the way you want. The celebration isn’t for me, it’s for those left behind.

27 years

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Today is my 27th Wedding Anniversary. Including the time we’ve dated, I’ve now spent more than half of my life living with my wife. What a wonderful adventure it has been! I feel blessed to have found such a wonderful person to spend my life with. And together we’ve raised two amazing daughters that I couldn’t be more proud of. Tonight we celebrate as a family, breaking bread together at one of our favourite restaurants. Tomorrow we head off early to go to a funeral of a friend’s parent. The contrast in celebration is stark, and an important reminder to appreciate all that we have, while we still have it.

I’m also days away from my 27th anniversary of being an educator. And here too is a similar contrast, as I plan for this to be my last year before I retire. I don’t leave counting the days, I leave feeling like there is still more work to be done. I leave with a reminder that I’m going to miss this as much as I’m looking forward to the freedom of not working daily.

How did I get to two milestones of 27 years and still feel like things have only just begun? How does time go so quickly? How am I the parent of two adults in their 20’s? My oldest daughter is a quarter of a century old. My young wife and I are both in our late 50’s. She has been an amazing educator for over 30 years. Those just don’t feel like our statistics, those are the stats of older people. I saw a T-shirt on an older man, who rode past me a few days ago, and the message on his shirt said: “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” I haven’t connected so quickly to a T-shirt slogan in a long time.

All that said, today is a day of celebration. The past 27 years have not necessarily been easy, but they certainly have been rewarding and memorable… and I look forward to the next 27 years of finding joy, showing appreciation for what I have, and feeling younger than I am.

Happy Canada Day

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I’m not going to watch fireworks tonight.

I haven’t done anything uniquely Canadian.

I’m not wearing red and white, and I’m not waving a flag.

That said, I’m a proud Canadian. An immigrant who calls this land home. And at this time I feel uniquely free compared to living south of our border.

On top of that, I actually had a medical test today that would have cost me hundreds or thousands of dollars down south, and it only cost me $7.50 in parking.

No, I may not be celebrating Canada Day out in the open today, I’m only having a small backyard bbq with family. That doesn’t mean that Canada Day isn’t special… because it is.

To all the proud Canadians out there, Happy Canada Day!

Honouring Ceremony

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Last night I went to our district’s Indigenous Education Grad Honouring Ceremony. It’s a celebration of heritage and culture. It reminds me that we need to make sure that we provide spaces for people of all backgrounds to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be honoured.

This seems particularly prescient with what is happening south of our border. Using book-banning in Texas as an example, individual communities can decide what books are acceptable and not acceptable to be in schools. Books about different cultures or life choices can be banned simply because the majority are not in favour of them. I am dumbfounded that this is something happening in 2025. But it is.

Inclusion, acceptance, tolerance, and ultimately kindness and love are all being threatened. I grew up in a very multicultural family. We celebrated our differences through food, and at meal time everyone was always welcome. That was our way of honouring. We welcomed you even if your potato salad had raisins in it. But jokes aside, I see what’s happening in the States right now and it scares me.

Our work is not done yet. Inequities still fall along heritage lines, and injustices of the past are far from reconciled. And in this polarized environment, we need events like our Indigenous Education Grad Honouring Ceremony to remind us to celebrate our differences, respect and value heritage, and provide an avenue where the cultures and heritage of our youth are not only respected, but revered and truly honoured.

Spring formal

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Last night was our senior spring formal. Our school is small enough that we actually hold it for grades 11 & 12 combined because it would be too small for just one grade. This is only our second year running the event, and I’m convinced that we’ll do this every year. Watching our students enjoy the evening together reminded me what a wonderful community we have. Having not just every teacher but also our secretaries join us was also special.

Our students were appreciative, and enjoyed the whole evening, with many making the effort to thank us all for the event. I spent the entire evening taking photos and I am pretty sure I’ve got at least one of every kid that if they don’t love it, at least their parents will. I was reminded of my days taking wedding photos, except that I did that back in the film era and it used to take over a week to know if the pictures I took were good or not. Having instant results is so much better.

It’s wonderful to have a year-end event like this. We will still have our grad night, but for many kids getting decked out for the dinner dance will be as memorable or more memorable than walking across the stage and receiving their diploma. And so I’m glad we are able to provide this experience for our students… despite them not being in a big, more traditional high school.

My, my, time flies

My oldest kid turns 25 today. How did I get to be old enough to have a daughter that old? I only ask that question partially in jest, because there is a part of me that is really baffled about how fast time flies by. I remember holding her in my arms for the first time, her first words, and her first steps. Did all that really start a quarter century ago?

With age, time goes by faster. I think it has to do with reference to the length of our lives. To a 10 year old, 5 years is half of a lifetime; to a 15 year old, 5 years is a full 1/3 of a lifetime. To a 60 year old, 5 years is 1/12 of a lifetime. So that same 5 years is relatively shorter as we get older, and represents less significance to our overall lifespan.

I think about how much my life changed from ages 26-31… I moved to BC, met my wife, started my career in education, got married and bought a house. Then we started a family and the next 5 years are a blur of joy, stress, and core memories of our kids having first experiences.

In comparison, the last 5 years have felt a lot more like status quo, and have seemed to fly by a whole lot faster. I can remember the excitement of starting a new school year, and now it’s already just a week away from the Christmas holidays… where did the last 3 and a half months go?

I remember my mother-in-law saying to me that she didn’t know where the time went, and how she felt that she was a young person in an old body. I think of that now because about 26 years later I realize that I’m almost the age she was when she told me that. Is this just a cycle of life that the older we get, the more we recognize that time speeds up for us?

Today my oldest daughter turns 25. This is a reminder to me that I’ve got to value the time I have, and to spend it wisely… no matter how fast it seems to fly by.

Now and the Future – iHub Grad Address 2024

I can’t describe the joy of participating in grad at Inquiry Hub. These students are amazing. Our student focused show, with performances and videos that highlight the whole school are such a community building and community honouring event. The night warmed my heart, and I teared up more than once.

Here is my grad address. I really don’t have more to say, other than it was an evening that recharged my battery. It reminded me of why I love my job.

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Now and the Future – iHub Grad Address 2024

Greetings Honoured Guests, Parents, Family Members, Teachers, and Students including our very special Grads of 2024.

In your yearbooks, I wrote this as part of my message to you:

Asking questions is key to learning and I think at Inquiry Hub we do a pretty good job of getting students to ask good questions… and then answer them. There is a lot of conversations, dialogue, and debate that happen inside our school walls, and from that students learn not just about things, but they also learn the skills to discuss and negotiate and support their ideas in meaningful ways… and sometimes even to change their minds. A growth mindset is so much better to navigate life with, compared to a fixed mindset.

In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now, outside the walls of our schools, there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary. We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference. When we can’t have conversations with people that have different views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

That was a message for right now. There is so much conflict and strife in the world, and it can sometimes feel a little bleak.

But here’s the thing, I’m really excited about the future our grads have before them. It’s a future that is beyond my ability to predict, but I’m going to try anyway.

Our grads understand how to see the world from multiple perspectives.

You understand the challenges but you are also solution oriented. And you are going to have tools and strategies that no other generation has had. 

Here are four predictions:

  1. You will have better AI than we can imagine. What we think is amazing now will look like child’s play in the future. I didn’t have Google growing up, I had paper encyclopedias. In a few short years the Artificial Intelligence available will look to us now like what an iPhone would be to someone living in the 1920’s. (Oh, and by the way, I did not use AI to wrote this.)
  2. You will not live in a world that has an energy crisis, or one that harvests natural resources to create energy. Energy will be almost free if not completely free.
  3. You will live longer. Longevity research is reaching a point where more and more healthy years will be added to your life faster than you age.
  4. You will retire sooner. More of your life will be filled by doing want you want to do, rather than what you need to do to work and make an income.

All this to say that while it seems like us old folks have left you a pretty messed up world, we are less than a decade away from some key turning points where you have more freedom and choice, more access to cheap energy, and more free time than we could ever have imagined as recently as when you were in Grade 9.

It’s an exciting time to think about what the future holds, and when I think about you all as creators, artists, thinkers, dreamers, and leaders, I’m excited about your generation building the future I get to grow old in. 

Inquiry Hub isn’t perfect, but it is a very special school. It is a place where our students feel they belong. A place where you get to be courageous learners and leaders, and a place that I hope you carry fond memories from. 

To the class of 2024, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you… and for what you will do to help shape that future. Be brave, be strong, and help build a community where everyone feels they have a place, and a way to contribute. 

Thank you.

Go, go, go

The year has come to an end. Almost. Our grad is tonight night, I have a second grad to attend tomorrow night, as well as a couple luncheons… and the ‘To Do’ list seems endless.

There is always so much to do at the end of the year, but there are also celebrations and gatherings that need your full attention. That’s the trick, how do you squeeze everything in, and still give everything the time and commitment it all deserves?

You’d think I’d have it all figured out by now but I don’t. I’ll just put my head down and make the most of it. Friday afternoon will be here soon enough, and I’ll pick up all the pieces after the long weekend. The most important thing this week is fully committing to the task at hand and to the events I attend. Worrying about the next thing robs us of the joy and celebration of the end of the year. Go, go, go doesn’t work unless you spend time at each place you go to.