Tag Archives: Life Lessons

Salvador Dali - clock

Fast and Slow

How is it that time seems to go by really slowly day-by-day, but months and years seem to just race on? I recently celebrated my 53rd birthday. As a kid, 53 was old. Ancient.

My youngest daughter turns 19 in a couple months. How did that happen so quickly? It sounds cliche, but where did the time go?

I heard an interesting perspective on time recently: When you are 12, 4 years of your life is 1/3 (33.3%} of your life, that’s so long! When you are 52, 4 years of your life is 1/13 (7.7%) of your life… much less significant. The older you get, the less significant a set amount of time is relative to how long you’ve lived.

Time doesn’t just march on, it marches on at ever increasing speeds. It’s up to us to slow it down by making our days worth living. What will you do to enjoy life today, rather than just let that time slip by into an ever-decreasing amounts of significance?

Can you drive me home?

I don’t pretend to be a perfect dad, but let me tell you one thing that I do that I’m pretty sure I’ve got right. Whenever one of my kids asks me to pick them up at the end of the night, my default answer is always ‘yes’.

My oldest shared this with me one night when I picked her and three friends up from a club… We just dropped the 3rd one home and my oldest said about the kids me we dropped off second, “You know what she said to me before you picked us up? She said, ‘I think you dad actually likes dropping us home’.” We had a good chuckle.

Yes, I do.

I want to be asked. I want to know they are getting home safe. I want them to plan ahead and ask me. I want them to know that I’m the backup if things don’t go as planned.

The fact is if I’m part of the plan, I know the plan is good. I know they aren’t driving with a designated driver that still had drinks, or left the party early. I know that my kids will call me if they feel stuck, or uncomfortable, or decide to leave before the person driving.

And I want them to know that I’m not rolling my eyes, or judging them, or doing it begrudgingly. As they get older, they aren’t going to come to you for the big things if they don’t feel like they can come to you for smaller things… And playing chauffeur for them every now and then in their late teens and early 20’s isn’t half the work that being chauffeur to sports and dance and musical theatre and singing lessons were when they were younger.

“Hey Dad, can you drive me and a couple friends home at midnight tonight?”

“Of course.”

A chance to teach

Our grade 10’s are working on resumes and yesterday I got to work with them on a lesson about job interviews. Their pre-lesson homework is to fill out an application form, I use an old one from Subway. I start by sharing some of my experience hiring as a Starbucks manager, then we discuss what makes a good application form, resume, and interview.

Then students take turns in groups of three, being interviewer, interviewee, and observer. They are given a 10 question interview, but the second and third person to go get 3 new questions each turn… this adds a bit of variety to those that have watched the other students go before them.

This is a lesson I’ve done many times before, and one that I enjoy sharing. It is practical and useful, and I share some personal, funny, and even embarrassing stories that help students get to know me a bit better.

In the craziness of school startup, it’s just wonderful to spend a bit of time teaching, to remember why I do the things I do. I have not had a lot of teaching time the past few years, and spending a bit of time with students like this really charges my batteries!

Turning off to find balance

It’s that time of year again when the ‘To Do’ list at work is growing. The last two days I’ve left work and then just kept working. I know that’s the time of year, but I also know it can keep going and that there is always more to do.

I try to use exercise and meditation to help me turn off, and I’ve moved these activities from morning to evening, but I’m not sure I like this strategy?

What do people do to ‘turn off’ work? What strategies allow a separation between work and home? I don’t mind taking the extra time at the start of the year, but I’ve had about 3 years of imbalance that have left me feeling like I am not doing this well.

Writing helps, it’s my way of unpacking ideas. What else do people do?

Appreciate what you have

I’m almost at the end of the novel ‘A Fine Balance’, written by Rohinton Mistry and narrated by Vikas Adam on Audible. Length: 25 hrs and 49 mins… it’s a fictional tome.

From the publisher’s summary, “With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975.”

It’s a wonderful story of different lives crossing paths and creating bonds. It is a story of hardship and of people making the most of what they can out of life, when life options and choices are painfully minimal. The main characters live lives where sadness and loss prevail and yet they find friendships through kindness and appreciation for what little they have.

It’s a fiction, but it reminds me that so many people live with less. So many people face hardships like I’ve never experienced. A book like this reminds me to appreciate what I have.

I realize that by nothing more than luck, I was born at a time and in a place that allows me privileges beyond the imaginations of many before me, and many born into different circumstances, in different parts of the world.

I won the birth lottery. If you are reading this, you probably did too.

A step behind

I asked my daughter if she saw this new way of cutting a mango?

“Dad, you are so behind on your Tik Tok trends, I saw that ages ago.”

Yes, I’m behind. We all are in different areas of our lives. There is always a new tool, a new approach, a new technique that you will bump into.

The iPhone did everything with one button, now the new ones don’t have a button. People try to put gas in Teslas. Light switches you touch instead of toggle. Apps update, move things around, and add features you need to stumble on to know they are there. And now even the rules for social engagement keep changing.

No one is ‘caught up’, everyone is a step behind somewhere. These days, that’s normal. Things change quickly. Some would say too quickly. But things change, and we catch up.

We just need to give ourselves a little time. We just need to accept some ambiguity and unknown. We need to be unafraid to ask questions. We need to know that it’s ok to feel a little behind… as long as we aren’t stagnating, we are moving forward.

Time with friends

We are camping with friends.

Weather doesn’t matter. It has been raining for 2 days. So what!

Time with family and friends is wonderful. It shouldn’t take a camping trip to come to this realization. Tell your loved ones you love them. Tell your friends how much you value them.

Don’t take the people you value the most for granted.

Limited shared reality

Have you ever thought of your bandwidth of sensory observation?

We can’t hear a dog whistle, but the sound is still there when someone blows one. We can’t see ultraviolet light. Our fingers can detect the location of a touch that are backs can not. Some people love cilantro while others think it tastes like soap. Dogs and other animals can smell things we can’t. Some of us see colours that others can not.

We are all, in our own way, like radio receivers, who can hear certain stations and not others. As we get older, our bandwidth decreases in what we are able to hear. But in keeping with the metaphor, that doesn’t mean the radio stations aren’t still playing.

We have limiting and limited senses with which to observe our world. We are only capable of witnessing and observing a narrow set of frequencies, because our receivers are limited… and imperfect.

Even within the scope of what we can mutually observe our shared reality isn’t fully shared. We see, hear, feel, taste, and smell things differently. Our cultures and upbringing influence this as well… some cultures can’t see/distinguish certain colours, some can’t pronounce certain sounds, some have vastly different tastes.

Our shared reality isn’t always as shared as we think. This invites conflict and miss understanding. It also invites the joy of seeing things from another perspective, and learning to appreciate our, and other’s, understanding of our world.

Let’s help each other expand our views of our shared reality. Let’s celebrate the difference and find joy in creating mutually appreciated, shared events.

The beautiful slug

It was the summer of 1997 and my wife and I were here on the 70km West Coast Trail with her parents and a couple that are family friends, who are few years younger than her parents. It had rained horribly the weeks before we left and just a week earlier some people had to be helicoptered out after two rivers flooded too much to pass through. So, we were prepared for the worst, but arrived to sunshine and heat that made each day less and less muddy.

We planned 6 nights, some people do the trip in 4, so we took our time and enjoyed an extra night at the prettiest of the stops, at a beautiful falls. My wife loves to keep a fast pace and with a pack on, she struggles to go slow. She’s also someone who speeds up going up hill, or when she sees the finish line… she can really move when there is a goal in front of her.

It was day 3, we were heading to the falls and we were pushing ourselves with our longest distance to travel when something happened… Four of us were well ahead of Ann’s parents and her mom fell. She didn’t hurt herself, but with the pack on she fell in a way where she was pinned down and struggling to get up. Ann’s dad is a bit hard of hearing and didn’t hear her calling for help, and when we looked back she was just getting up after struggling out of her pack.

That’s when we realized how heavy her pack was. She was fit and trained well for the trip (which she had done already) and decided to take the burden of more weight than she should have. Two new decisions were made at this point. First, I would take some of her weight – though my pack was heaviest, I had much of the food so it was already lighter then when we started. Second, we decided that my wife’s parents should not be at the back of the group.

The next day my wife was going crazy going slowly at the back with me. As I mentioned, it was still very muddy from the rains the weeks before and her parents were overly cautious as they traversed the muck. Where I would just slosh through, ankle deep with my gators on (think rain coats for your ankles and shins), her parents would carefully and thoughtfully choose the route with the least amount of mud. Makes perfect sense when you’ve got a heavy pack on and going through the mud is a bit of a balancing act.

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About two hours into our walk my wife said, “I can’t do this, I’ve got to go ahead,” and I told her to go on ahead, I’ll stay at the back. About 3 hours in, I was feeling like my wife did. I’d slosh through the mud then lead against a tree and watch my wife’s parents gingerly traipse around the mud, calculating each step. While I understood their need to be careful, watching them go so slowly when I was standing with a heavy pack waiting for them started to feel like work I. Just. Wanted. Them. To. Speed. Up! Every muddy section became a long slow chore of waiting and I was getting frustrated.

Then we reached a slow muddy section and after getting to the other side of it I saw a branch the perfect hight to rest my pack on while it was still on my back. This took all the pressure off my shoulders without me having to remove the pack. It felt great and as I took a deep breath I looked down at my feed and saw the most unusual slug. It was mostly yellow, but it had a bluish purple section as well. If it wasn’t moving I would have been sure it was fake. How did this ugly little animal have such beautiful contrasting colours on it?

After seeing the slug, I started to look around and really see the trail that until then was just a path to our next destination. Suddenly I was noticing birds, leaves, plants, colours and sounds, that before this point were just things in the background. Suddenly they were in the foreground. I no longer felt any need to rush. I was no longer waiting for my wife’s parents, I was traveling with them. I was enjoying the journey.

It was a big shift thanks to a small, beautiful slug.

Derek Sivers on Goals

I’m a fan of Derek Sivers. I loved his first interview with Tim Ferris. I knew him before that from ‘The first follower‘, and I think this little video about ‘Obvious to you. Amazing to others.‘ is brilliant.

I recently purchased and listened to his book, ‘Hell Yeah or No’ and this chapter really resonated with me: ‘Goals Shape the Present, not the Future‘.

From the chapter:

If it was a great goal, you would have jumped into action already. You wouldn’t wait. Nothing would stop you.
The purpose of goals is not to improve the future.The future doesn’t exist. It’s only in our imagination. All that exists is the present moment and what you do in it.
Judge a goal by how well it changes your actions in the present moment.

I think this is what I’ve always struggled with when teaching or talking about goals with students… they all focus on the plan ahead, the future, and not on the habits and attitudes needed right now. We don’t teach the ‘Hell Yeah’ part of creating goals that kids really want to do.

We don’t teach them about goals, we teach them about wishful thinking.

Present habits and actions lead us to future outcomes, and these need to be emphasized when we teach goal setting.