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.
Too many people try to go solo when they have a community of support around them. There are more people around you willing to help you than you think. You just need to ask… and that’s the problem. The help isn’t always offered.
The people who can be most helpful would be glad to help if they just knew you needed help. The trick is to make contact and be clear about what you are hoping for.
There’s a difference between: “Do you have time to…?” And, “I really need you to help me right now.”
There’s a difference between: “Hey, just calling to say hi.” And, “I really needed a friend I could talk to right now.”
Too many times in my career, and in my personal life, I only realized after the fact that I could have gotten so much more support to get over a rough patch than I actually got, more than I asked for… only because I didn’t know how to ask, or that I could ask.
Sometimes I’ve thought I’d asked, but it was a soft ask, a sort of ‘help would be nice’ kind of ask rather than an, ‘I really need help’ kind of ask.
I get it, it would be great to have people realize that the soft ask wasn’t just an ask but a need. The thing is, everyone is knee deep in their own stuff and the soft ask can easily be missed. So don’t assume your soft ask is enough.
If you need help be clear, be blunt, and ask. It’s hard to do the hard ask… just do it anyway!
There is a saying that I love, which goes like this:
‘You are the average of the people you spend the most time with.’
I’ve seen it over and over again at school. Take a kid who’s floundering, put them in a friend group that is doing well, and suddenly that kid is also doing well. Inversely, put a smart, good kid in a friend group with kids that don’t care about school, and watch that kid’s marks (and attitude) fall.
Entire classes can be influenced this way and in a small community minded school, we’ve seen how a culture of getting work done and showing pride in caring for our school and our community has been contagious.
Going back to the quote, it’s mathematically impossible that everyone could be the average of the 5 people around them… but there is no doubt that those around you have tremendous influence regarding how you act, and what you value. And the power in the quote is as much about what you do to that average as it is what others do to that average.
Be someone who increases the average. Be someone who finds ways to make the people you surround yourself with better. This simple act will increase the average for everyone and generate a positive feedback loop. After a while, you and your friends will never be just average again.
We didn’t know back in January 2021 that we would still be at it 200 crunches later, but here we are! Dave Sands and I were just looking for a reason to get together during Covid. We started back at school after a Christmas break locked into our family bubble, not seeing any friends socially. The rules did allow for meeting outdoors and so we decided to walk the Coquitlam Crunch together.
We met on a Friday after work, did the crunch, had a beverage sitting 6 feet apart on the parking lot railing, then headed home in separate cars. It felt so good to actually do something with a friend, that we planned to meet the following week. And a new habit was formed.
Starting our next school year, we decided that we would commit to at least 40 crunches a year, basically one crunch for every week of school. And we’ve stuck to this ever since. In fact we are boosting our average up above 42 by the end of this year.
Early on, Friday after work proved too hard to keep up and so we switched it up and met Saturday morning. A new after crunch ritual of coffee replaced the Friday night beverage. Our Crunch walk is something Dave and I often bend over backwards to make work. Last weekends Dave was heading out of town for the weekend and so we went on Thursday after school. The start of this weekend I was out of town so we did our crunch early this holiday Monday. In fact the reason we’re boosting our average by 2 days is because this year I think we only missed one week.
We’ve crunched in sleet, snow, and rain. We’ve started it in early morning darkness, we’ve ended in early winter darkness. In fact, in almost 5 years there is only one absolutely down pouring miserable day that we got to the crunch and both of us were not up to facing the weather. Besides that one time, we’ve faced some awful weather and still decided to commit to heading up and down this hill.
Today was a weighted vest day, and we were planning on doing it twice last week but my back wasn’t up to it after having IMS that day, so we just did one. So, we combined these two challenges and we did the double with weighted vests today. We did crunch number 199 and number 200 this morning, on our first ever double counted day. We’ve done a couple doubles before, not counting them as separate, but we figure if we are doing complete doubles, they should count as two!
Yes, this is great exercise. Yes, it’s an awesome habit to keep. But the real value in doing this activity 200 times is the connection to my buddy Dave. I can’t describe how mentally and emotionally rewarding it is to have this weekly connection to a friend. Not many people get to see a best friend a guaranteed 40+ times a year in addition to other meetings, plans and connections. We both cherish this time so much that we can’t think of valid excuses to not meet up, and we will consistently make up for lost opportunities when life gets in the way of us meeting on a Saturday.
So, we’ll just keep going, week after week, and our Coquitlam Crunch adventures are to be continued… starting again next week!
It’s amazing how good conversations with people you love and care about can help you through a day. It reinforces that we are social beings and that we require connections to sustain us.
I am someone who appreciates my alone time. I like solitude, and I’m much more of an introvert than people might think I am. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I value and appreciate time with family and friends. Liking solitude isn’t contradictory to enjoying rich conversations. Being an introvert doesn’t mean that I don’t want to build strong connections to others, I’d just rather not do so in larger social situations.
I have a friend who can go into any social situation, make connections with people he just met, and have a rich conversation that go well beyond discussing the weather, occupations, and general family updates. He can find common ground and start to instantly develop rapport and develop a relationship with people he barely knows in minutes. That’s not me. In a large setting, I’d rather find one person I’m comfortable with, maybe two people, and have a more intimate conversation rather than sharing things in a group. Both approaches are valid, they are just different. Both are about the same thing, which is making and maintaining connections to others.
At one point I used to have these kind of rich conversations on Twitter. I found like-minded people who I’d connect with and then we’d slide into direct messages and get to know each other. I’d go to conferences and connect to people I had never met face-to-face, and I’d feel like I already knew them. I no longer do that with social media. Now I use social media to connect to people in my life already, as a means to add one more layer of connection. My daughters get sent different things than my wife, which is different from what I share with my best friend, which is different from what I share with my uncle, and again different from things I share with my mom and sisters. In each case adding another avenue to build connections I already have.
Then there are text messages, phone calls, FaceTime, and even Zoom. In each case I’m building up a connection to keep the conversation going with people I care about. I’m looking to develop richer connections, richer conversations… essential to maintaining my wellbeing and my bonds that sustain me when I can’t always see people in person.
My buddy Dave has been on an amazing fitness journey, and has lost a bunch of weight while also building muscle. I’ve been on a journey to add healthy weight, lowering my percent body fat, while gaining muscle. At the start of this year we joked that we were going to meet in the middle, with his weight going down and mine going up.
Before heading to work this morning we went to the gym and worked out together. Then we took turns stepping on the scale. I weighed over a pound more than him! We did it, we met in the middle. Well, almost in the middle… Dave covered a bit more of the gap. Still, this wasn’t a real goal, just lofty target we put out into the universe. Now we are there. Next steps are for both of us to make gains together.
A buddy of mine from Ontario is in town for a couple days. He texted me saying he had Thursday morning available. The bad news, I have a 9:30am appointment. The good news, I get up at 5am to start my morning routine and he is on Ontario time so he’ll be up early too, here on the west coast.
So I’m meeting him downtown at a restaurant that opens at 7am. We’ll have almost an hour and a half together, then I’ll drive back uptown to go to my meeting. Easy. Sure, I’ll miss a workout, but I haven’t missed one this week and so I’m due anyway.
The most important thing is that I get to spend precious time with a friend that I rarely get to see. That doesn’t happen often and so the fact that I’ll spend about the same amount of time driving as I will with him doesn’t matter. Too often we bend over backwards to make work commitments and don’t think twice about cancelling or postponing opportunities for personal commitments.
Not me. Not today. Today I get to make the visit happen. Is it a bit rushed. Yes, but it’s short notice and that happens. The point is that it’s important to make time for good friends… especially those that we don’t get to see all that often.
I got away with a buddy to go fishing for a couple hours on Wednesday. It was part of a bigger day together, and we didn’t fish for long, or catch anything. But we connected and had an adventurous day. Good food, good company, and good scouting for a future fishing trip.
It’s one of the things he and I talk about, which is the idea of connecting for experiences. When you don’t see a good friend regularly, it might be easy to ‘pick back up where you left off’ and feel connected. But it can also feel like that’s all you do… Reconnect, reminisce, and repeat.
We didn’t plan a whole day of fishing, we took advantage of the resources and time available to us and made the most of it with a new experience. We didn’t just talk about the things we’ve done or hope to do, we had an excursion. Too often we think planing and organizing needs to be a drawn out part of connecting, with an event planned on some distant future date.
Last night another buddy texted to see what I was up to and just over an hour later I was sitting on his balcony. Then we walked to a delicious dinner. This was so refreshing compared to, “What are you doing next week Friday?”
Plans don’t need to be big, and novelty and newness make for great experiences. Also, last minute plans can be so much more fun than the bigger, much more planned events can be. Novelty keeps the experiences new enough that they become the things we talk about years from now.
We didn’t know on a cold, wet, and dark Friday in January of 2021 that we would make this a usual thing. Two friends, feeling isolated with covid restrictions decided to do the Coquitlam Crunch so that we could meet outdoors when indoor meetings were restricted to your family circle. Now, over 4 and a half years later, we’ve completed our 190th Crunch together, averaging more than 40 a year.
We were about 50 in when we decided that 200 would be a great goal to achieve before we retired, and now that is all but guaranteed. Did we fathom this when we had done just one Crunch? No. We didn’t even know if we’d go again. But sure enough we kept going, with a goal of 40 a year to match the amount of school weeks in the year.
Now, I can’t think of anything I’ve been more dedicated to (besides my wife of course). We do everything we can to not to miss a week. We usually go out on Saturdays, but we’ll squeeze in a Thursday after school if one of us is away on the weekend.
Imagine being just over a year into a routine and deciding on a 5-year goal… then sticking to it. Sounds challenging, but it’s something I look forward to every week. I’d never have spent so much time with my buddy, Dave, if we hadn’t made this a goal, and an expectation. And there are more goals to come… stay tuned.
As I head to retirement, I’ve been thinking a bit about community and friendships.
When I think about my friendships I’ve come to the realization that of the friends I keep in contact with regularly, they all date back to my first few years of teaching (25+ years ago) and before (university and high school). It’s a little shocking to realize that I haven’t added very close friends for the second half of my life. I have great friends and am not actively looking for more, but that’s still a surprising thing to recognize.
I have friends I connect with when I go back to Toronto, one friend from university here in BC that I try to see regularly despite our very different lives and schedules, and then my friends I met in my early teaching career. And in thinking about retirement I’m very interested in fostering community among these friends.
When there isn’t a sport or a club that we are all members of, how do we make sure we connect regularly? What do we do to build community. My university buddy and I try to make sure that we have experiences and don’t just meet to reminisce. Another buddy and I do the Coquitlam Crunch weekly and try to work out at least one more time a week together. My wonder is, what else can I do with friends to ensure we build community, and grow together rather than apart?
It has become abundantly clear that an isolationist policy is not one that will work in the 21st century. The question now isn’t about if things will get better or worse, but rather how much worse? We have a global superpower that is going to destabilize world economies, and no neighbours or allies are going to come out unscathed.
I just have to wonder what future generations will think of this era? Who will the good ancestors be? And who will be typecast cast as the villain? While I think the answer is clear, if I go south of the border there would be close to a 50-50 split in responses to these questions. And the divide between the responses would be from people who would not be too neighbourly with one another.
Be a good ancestor with your neighbours. The premise is simple. The outcome unifying and peaceful. We could use a little children’s book philosophy about now.
