Tag Archives: Life Lessons

Piano keys

Tuning in

Yesterday the piano tuner came to our school for our piano’s yearly tuning. I asked him if he used a machine or if he tuned by ear?

”I use a tuning fork for the first note, then I’m good.”

Later in the day I was in my core fitness class and I was doing an exercise where I was supposed to be activating my gluteus (my butt muscles), but I kept activating my quadriceps (front leg muscles). The Physio at the class asked me to show her how I sit down, and it turns out that I don’t know how to go from a standing to a sitting position properly.

A little background here, I have a bad lower back, and deal with discomfort or pain on a regular basis. For decades now I’ve been compensating for my lower back by using it less and using my legs more. While this protects my back for working too hard at a given moment, it also limits my range of motion and creates tightness in my upper legs and lower back that makes things worse.

The challenge, however is that after decades of misuse, I have no idea what the sensation is to use the correct muscles? Essentially, I can’t ‘tune in’ to the feeling of what it’s like to do the right motion versus doing the wrong motion. As I’m being coached and physically guided to use the correct muscles, and my Physio says either, “No, you are still activating your quads,” or, “That’s good, you’ve got it,” my internal reality feels no different. I can’t distinguish what I’m doing differently.

While the piano tuner has spent 40 years finely tuning his ear to be honed to the sounds needed for his trade, I’ve spent almost as long dealing with a bad back and tuning out certain muscles that I should be using to help me be more mobile and agile. He has become an expert at doing something very well, while I’ve become an expert at doing something very poorly, and I am now a novice at doing it correctly.

Like with most things, it’s probably much easier to learn something correctly the first time, compared to unlearning and relearning it. But that process of correcting ourselves is seldom something we can do on our own. We can’t tune in if we don’t have that reference point, that tuning fork, that coach/mentor, or in my case physiotherapist. We often aren’t aware of how we’ve tuned out, and we need outside help to help guide us to tune in.

Where do you need to tune in more? Who are you going to get to help you?

My review of ‘Educated’ by Tara Westover

I just finished listening to this book, ‘Educated’ on Audible. It was thoroughly enjoyable and yet hauntingly disturbing. I left a review:

5 out of 5 stars
By David Truss on 2019-11-07
Two stories in one.
This wonderful book is at once the story of a woman escaping the clutches of a broken home, steeped in zealot faith, violence, and mental illness, while also being the story of a young girl yearning for acceptance and love from her dysfunctional family.

I can’t help but feel blessed to have had the upbringing that I had after reading this memoir. What struck me most, besides the horrible way Tara was victimized by her family, was how she kept returning, allowing herself to fall back into such an unhealthy environment.

I struggled to understand the draw, the appeal, to seek out her family’s love and approval when each time she tried she was pressured into conforming into a life that made her feel justifiably tortured. How could she possibly want to try again? And yet she did, and did again…

Tara’s story has helped me understand why an abused wife would go back to her husband, or why an abused child would remain silent. It defies logic. But logic is not the metric at work. In a way it is love, or at least the desire to be loved. In a way it is dependency, or at least the illusion of need, though I don’t have the experience to understand such a need.

Like I said in my review, this is a story of someone victimized by ‘zealot faith, violence, and mental illness’. This triangle of despair left Tara feeling trapped. It should have been easy to leave but it took courage to escape the bonds of family and the desire for acceptance. While Tara was able to escape, I believe that many do not. I believe that any one or two of these traps that victimize children are enough to take hold and imprison that child in a cycle of pain and suffering… to compel them to remain in an unhealthy environment, while someone from the outside ponders why the child would choose to remain in such a circumstance?

From the outside, it is easy to judge, to question, and perhaps even to blame someone for not escaping such a past. But that judgement or blame is undeserving. I am reminded of Plato’s Cave. But I realize that even when someone is able to see that life is more than just shadows on a wall, they might still accept the shadows as what really matters. We cannot easily break the bonds of our childhood and enter another realm. Tara struggled but she escaped the cave. Many do not.

Act your age

It was 21 years ago when I was on my practicum to become a teacher that a student taught me a valuable lesson. The kid was a bit of a handful and he often acted out in class. He was quite manageable for my teacher advisor, and for me when my advisor was in the room, but he’d act out in an exaggerated way when I was teaching this grade 6 & 7 class on my own.

I don’t remember what the issue was, but one day he did something and I held him back after class. I waited for students to leave then I went over to his desk and sat down next to him. I only remember one thing about the conversation, during my little monologue I said to him, “You’re acting like a little 9 year old!”

He spoke up in response, “I’m 10.”

I froze. Staring at him blankly, I thought to myself, I told him to act his age… and he is… he’s being a little kid in a class of little kids.

After that he was still a challenge at times, but I gave him more responsibility to help me out and he responded well. When he acted out a bit, I remembered his age and that he needed help and guidance. He didn’t need a teacher that was expecting him to act like a mature 15 year old when he was just a 10 year old kid with a lot of energy, being asked to sit at a desk for long periods of time.

I don’t think I’ve ever told a kid to act their age again. In fact, the only times I’ve ever thought that since this incident has been when adults act and respond like kids. I must admit I find that disappointing. But when kids make immature choices, that’s often when they are acting their age.

Angry people

It was many years ago, but I remember the situation well, having told it a few times. One of my online teachers was dealing with a student who was cheating. It was obvious, yet the student refused to admit it. His work was plagiarism of a student who had already completed the course… it wasn’t exact, but paraphrased sentence by sentence. This wasn’t done on questions with a single answer, it was done on two assignments where students were sharing personal opinions. Even if this student shared similar views to the original author, the essays could never match so well structurally, sentence by sentence, and idea by idea. The student’s father got involved and treated my teacher poorly and so she asked me for help.

When I called, I got a mouthful of rudeness, I could barely get a word in. I tried to explain but didn’t get a chance. Then the next day the student called me. He was condescending. He asked me how long I’d been out of the classroom, and asked me if I understood the word ‘collaboration’. He got to me a bit and I gave a bit of a snarky response. At that point his mom jumped in and I realized that I had been on speakerphone. She went on a full tirade.

I should have hung up. I should have ended the call. But two things played in my mind. First, that I should not have been snarky, second, that if they were underhanded enough to bait me like that, they were probably also capable of recording the call. So I listened to the abuse. I let her rant, I would occasionally begin to respond, only when asked, and then I would be cut off with another attack. And I took it. One thing made it bearable…

I’ve met a number of kids who have had a challenging parent in my career as an educator. A parent that was overbearing, or over-controlling, or unreasonable. I’ve met some kids that have both parents come in like two mamma bears protecting their kid, and while they might or might not be dealing ideally with the situation, they are genuinely caring for their child. I’d never met (albeit this was just over the phone) a kid before who had two completely angry and bitter parents.

I thought of what this kid’s experience at home must be like? I wondered if this kid had a role model that didn’t treat the world like it was against them? Did his parents treat him like they treated me? Did he have siblings or did he face their wrath alone? I imagined what it would be like for me if when I did something wrong, rather than my parents calling me out, they doubled down and defended me? I sat on the phone listening, but the abuse I took didn’t hurt. I felt genuinely sorry for this kid. I hoped this way of dealing with a problem that he was experiencing was not the only way that he experienced problem solving at home.

In the end, I gave a choice to the family. He could redo the essays, he could take the zeros for plagiarism on these two assignments and move on, or he could drop the course. I told the teacher that all email correspondence with the parent should be cc’d to me as well and that any phone calls should be directed to me. I didn’t want her to have to take any abuse.

There ended up being one more similar issue, and my conversation with the kid’s dad at that point actually went well for me, but I again felt sorry for the kid. I felt empathy. I wondered if the lack of face to face communication made my first interactions challenging, and maybe, hopefully, it would have been different had we met in person. I wondered if this kid’s parents were always angry or if this experience triggered something awful? I wondered what they were dealing with in their lives that I don’t have to deal with in mine?

I don’t think I would stay on the phone if something like that happened again. I don’t need to take the abuse. I know that I won’t be as likely to be snarky, even to someone treating me in a condescending way. But the best lesson I got from this was to remind myself that when I’m dealing with an angry person, I don’t know why they are so angry? I don’t know what their lives are like? And I don’t have to live the angry lives they live.

I get to choose my disposition. I can feel empathy for people that give themselves less choice than I have. I can move on after these interactions without feeling bad, if I know that I handled things as best as I could with the resources and experience that I have… and I need to remember that this applies to them too. They did they best they could, given their experiences and circumstances. I don’t choose to look back on this experience with anger. I’m not upset that I didn’t handle it better. I don’t pretend that it didn’t have an effect on me or I probably wouldn’t be writing about it now. But I will meet more angry people in my life, and I believe that I’m more resilient and more prepared for that time, thanks to this experience.

___

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This is my life

I was dreaming. In the dream there were a group of kids lost in play, and nearby a young boy was sleeping. His mom gently woke him up. The boy, as it turned out in the dream, had Aspergers. I don’t know why that was relevant? He lay there, newly awake, saying a few incoherent things, and then he said, “This is my life.”

Suddenly my entire dream was about this statement. In my dream, I actually planned out writing this down. A young boy wakes up and is disoriented, then he comes to a realization that ‘oh, I have woken up, and this is my life’. How seldom are we ‘awake’ enough to truly understand this profound statement?

Recently I listened to the audio book ‘In Love With The World – A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardot of Living and Dying‘ by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In it he spoke of the idea that we die every night and are reborn each morning. We completely lose our consciousness, our identity of who we are, when we fall asleep. And we wake up anew. With waking comes the realization of who we are, and our consciousness returns to us, ‘this is my life’.

Do we take the time to truly appreciate the wonder of waking each day? Of being reborn to who we are and who we can be? Each day is a new day, each breath a first breath, each moment a moment to be fully present… Like kids, fully immersed in play.

This is my life. This is your life. How will we choose to live it ‘now’?

Wake up.

The J-stroke

When you are in the stern of a canoe, you need to master one important stroke, the J-stroke. No matter how good the paddler in the bow of the canoe, the boat will drift towards the side that person is paddling on, and away from the side the stern is paddling on. Paddling at the back of a boat steers the boat the other way. The J-stroke is what you do at the end of the stroke to push water away from the side of the boat and steer it straight, rather than letting it drift.

The J-Stroke (Click image for instructions on openboater.wordpress.com)

When you first learn this stroke, it has 2 distinctly noticeable parts. First there is the power part of the stroke that pushes the the boat forward. Then your ‘J’ pushes water away from the boat to steer it. As a beginner, these two parts are quite separate and so the boat lunges forward, then is steered, lunges forward, then is steered… It should go without saying, but if you are spending time on steering, you are not spending time helping the boat go forward.

As you get better, you start to realize that you can put these two parts together and eventually the boat ‘feels more like’ it is heading in one direction, rather than bouncing between going forwards and being course-corrected. I say feels more like’ it’s heading in one direction because no matter how good you are in the stern, you are always doing some course correcting, unless you and your partner in the bow are perfectly in sync every stroke. It’s just that when you are good at it, this course correcting becomes a smooth part of moving the boat forward.

However, moving from two distinct parts to one continuous stroke is not easy. What makes it harder is that when you try, and it doesn’t work, you end up feeling like you have to steer even more to make up for not being able to pull it off. So many new paddlers will stick with the lunge forward then steer process, and avoid getting better.

You’ve heard it a thousand times before: “The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Paddling stern in a canoe can be one of those things, because if you don’t intentionally try to put the two parts of the stroke together, you will always be stuck in the lunge forward then steer parts of the J-stroke. Coaching can help, but intentionally trying to put these parts together, and failing and having to compensate, is far better than thousands of strokes just repeating the two parts separately. It will not go smoothly for quite a while, then eventually you’ll realize that things are smoother and you don’t have to think as much about steering with every stroke you take.

Where else in our lives can we take this lesson? Where do we break things up when we should be building them together? How can we use this idea to build up good habits or eliminate bad ones? What daily rituals do we have problems with, that we can integrate with things that we already do well? How can we steer ourselves in the right direction, without even realizing that we are steering?

Low battery mode

I spent most of Thursday night coughing on the couch, trying not to bother my family. Friday was a sick day and while I had respite in the late afternoon, I’m back on the couch tonight. When this gets posted in the morning, I hope to still be sound asleep. But I’m not writing about this to seek sympathy.

I just started thinking about my recent post, Adding fuel to the 4 Burner Theory. In that post I talked about taking care of ourselves first, and thus having more to offer. I still believe this. But sometimes you get knocked on your butt and you have no fuel, or battery, to give. For the last week and a half colleagues, students, and my family have all been under the weather, and it finally got me. Other times we have to deal with personal tragedies, or relationship/friendship challenges that rock us.

I just think it so important to acknowledge that sometimes being at our best isn’t our best, because our batteries are low. Like our phones, we sometimes have to put ourselves in ‘low power mode’ and just do the bare essentials until we can get charged again.

Adding fuel to the 4 Burner Theory

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.

Sharing the flame

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~ Buddha

There is one more element to this quote that I think is worth reflecting on. Not only does the lighting of other candles not diminish your own candle, but the joy of sharing your light increases the brightness around you!

How and where do you share your flame?

Motivational Speakers

Have you ever heard the term, ‘knowing is half the battle’? What a load of crap!

How many people know that:

• Smoking is bad for you.

• Eating poorly can lead to health issues.

• A sedentary lifestyle will take years off of your life.

• Focussing on negative thoughts will reduce your happiness.

How many people:

• Stay in dead end jobs that they hate?

• Remain in unhealthy or abusive relationships?

• Choose to self medicate with elicit or even prescribed drugs?

Most people that do these things, on some level, are ‘in the know’, and that is certainly not ‘half the battle’. I love this quote Derek Sivers, shared on the Tim Ferriss podcast:

“If information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

Knowing that you need to change is the first step in the process of actually changing. ‘Knowing’ is the compass that points you towards the battle, as opposed to being half of the battle. Once you have the direction you want to go, then the key thing that needs to happen is taking action towards that change.

Recently I’ve seen a lot of platitudes on Twitter and Facebook, as well as in searches for memes when looking for images to add to these Daily Ink posts. Words of wisdom and encouragement that I’m prone to sharing too. They sound nice. They feel good. They tell you that you are special, ‘You can do it!’, believe in yourself. These are wonderful words of inspiration, but there is nothing actionable about them.

They remind me of Matt Foley in his Saturday Night Live skit, ‘Go for it!‘, where he plays a motivational speaker who essentially says, change your life or you’ll end up just like me, “living in a van down by the river”! While most platitudes and words of wisdom and inspiration do not fall under the category of ‘change or you’ll end up being a loser like me’ they are similar in that they don’t really do more than provide encouragement.

A favourite quote of mine comes from John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the founders of NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming, “What is the difference that makes the difference?” This goes beyond platitudes because it identifies what can be done differently in order to change behaviour. It’s the ‘it’ in ‘You can do it’. It’s actionable.

There are some pretty amazing motivational people out there that understand what it takes to change behaviour in people for the better, and there are also a lot of motivational speakers who understand inspiration but don’t meaningfully inspire perspiration – the work needed to actually change… and to me, this is the difference that makes a difference.