Tag Archives: Life Lessons

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.

Through Persistence

We are living in a time of incredible change. It is not often that we have widespread changes in cultural norms, and shifts in the way we communicate with each other daily. Yet, now I have to read the signs on the floors of stores to know which way to walk and where to stand, and I need to navigate around people coming towards me giving them a wide birth. We also spend hours communicating digitally instead of meeting face-to-face, and shop far more online than ever before.

Amidst all these changes it is easy to forget that many important changes we want to see take persistence and time. My back aches every day, but regular exercise reduces this to the background of my mind, rather than having it become pain.

My daily meditation isn’t about reaching an end goal, but consistently being less distracted, and understanding that while meditating is a simple task, it is not an easy task.

My relationships that I foster do not get better unless I make an effort every day, every interaction, being intentionally giving, kind, and patient.

We can get lost looking for quick fixes and immediate changes. We can forget that certain aspects of our lives are about playing the long game, seeking incremental improvements, and keeping ourselves on a good path… making positive changes through persistence.

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ~ Ovid

Vulnerability can be a double edged sword.

This morning I did my second outdoor run (read light jog) since breaking kneecap at the end of February. I’m staying at my sister’s place down at the beeches near Queen Street, and jogged the board walk. It was early and fairly empty. Weird feeling to watch a man, a good 15+ years my senior, jog past me at a pace slower than I usually run. But I’ve been rehabilitating this knee for too long to do something stupid to acquiesce my ego.

After the jog I stopped at a bench to do my knee exercises with some other workout exercises in between and the walked up the hill home. At that point I decided to do my Calm App meditation while walking. At the end of each meditation Tamara Levitt always does a little lesson and today’s was about Vulnerability.

I enjoy these lessons and appreciate the insights Tamara shares, but today I struggled with the lesson. The main example Tamara gave was when someone at work asks how you are doing, and not giving the typical, ‘fine’, ‘ok’, or ‘busy’ response. Instead pause, and be willing to be vulnerable and share how you really feel.

While I appreciate how that could help someone who is struggling and feeling isolated, if this colleague is just an acquaintance, and not necessarily a true friend, it could make things worse.

We are all vulnerable in different ways, but to me vulnerability is not a good thing to share too openly. I’ve seen way too many bullying issues start because a student showed their vulnerability with the wrong kids, and grownups aren’t always much better.

It’s a double edged sword because if you hide your vulnerability and struggles from everyone, you are missing out on the love and support you could get in a time of need. However, if you are too open, the very vulnerability you are sharing could make you susceptible to being targeted, or the topic of gossip, and more in need of a real confident to share your vulnerabilities with!

Be vulnerable when you need to with those you trust and love… but beyond that, be thoughtful and careful.

Appreciating your family

Sometimes it’s easy to take advantage of the people that are closest to you; to leverage the fact that they are just ‘always there’. The very people that would do anything for you in a time of need are the same ones who you expect to be there without showing any gratitude.

Sometimes it is easy to get frustrated by your family; to roll your eyes and think ‘here we go again’, rather than seeing things from their perspective. The very people that most appreciate you for who you are do not always get treated as nicely as a stranger would be treated.

Sometimes it is easy to be triggered by your family; to be immediately upset by something they say or do, something that you would tolerate far more by someone unrelated.

There is the saying, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, think of the first word in the phrase: familiarity. It is the family, that you are in close association with, that you know best, that can lead to a loss of respect, or lead to disrespect, from close awareness of faults or repeated behaviours that you don’t like.

It only takes an absence of these people in your lives, through time, geography, or death, to help you recognize that your familiarity also breeds love, compassion, and appreciation for those that love you, and that you love. Familiarity breeds love. Familiarity breeds compassion. Familiarity breeds appreciation. Or at least is should.

Who in your family can you show gratitude for today? What’s stopping you?