Tag Archives: memories

Pain and perspective

Over 25 years ago my back was in bad shape. I was so compressed that I lost almost two inches of height, and I was in pain every day… for 9 months. An amazing Physio changed my life in two sessions. I still remember the day I woke up without pain, two days after my second Physio appointment. I was in the shower trying to figure out what was wrong, and it was only when I was brushing my hair later that I realized what was ‘wrong’ was that my back wasn’t hurting.

For the past week and a half I’ve been feeling a dull but constant ache in my back and neck. It has affected my sleep, and almost every waking moment. Just having a conversation can be mental gymnastics as I try to pay attention to the subject matter and not be distracted by the ache of my back… an ever present dull roar that steals my attention away.

While I’m feeling a bit better tonight, and actually fell asleep for a few hours without interruption from the pain, I am reminded of the respect I have for people who live with pain daily. I know that while I feel this way now, I will have a time in the next week where my back issue will be resolved and this dull roar will go away.

For some people pain is a permanent part of their daily lives. Dealing with this constant ache reminds my to be more thoughtful and caring for those who suffer daily without the possibility of pending relief. Between my stint of 9 months in pain mentioned above and a later 6-month bout of chronic fatigue, I’ve had 2 moments in my life where I’ve thought, “Is this what my life is going to be like for the rest of my life?” In both cases the answer was ‘No’, but how different my life would be if that wasn’t the case. I’m reminded of this for a third time now, even though the pain I’m experiencing now has only been around for less than 2 weeks.

For anyone who lives with daily pain, I truly empathize. And for those who live the luxury of a mostly pain-free life, remember to be kinder and more thoughtful towards those that do suffer. Chronic pain is a horrible master, and we aren’t built to be servants to it. So when we are faced with daily pain, it takes a lot of energy to live a happy and fulfilled life. It’s challenging to stay positive and to have gratitude. Pain management is challenging with long term pain in a way that is hard to understand by someone who has only experienced short term pain. This past week and a half has humbled me and reminded me of this.

Counting time

It my wife’s birthday today and so we celebrate one more trip around the sun for her. Actually we’ve been celebrating all week, I have been giving her small little gifts for ‘birth week’, something I started when we were dating. It’s fun to have our own little traditions to celebrate special events. My wife and family sing happy birthday on the phone, my less musical family don’t torture each other with that tradition.

Tracking time is something that we’ve done for almost as long as humans have existed. It would be important to know how long until a baby arrives, or when winter is ending. Recently, scientists discovered that dots near animals on cave drawings indicated the gestation period (in lunar months) for the animals. These cave drawings are some of the earliest forms of writing, and show both a sharing of knowledge and tracking of time dating back far before we thought humans did such things.

We have been fascinated by the passing of time for a long time now, and birthdays are one of those things that we track and celebrate. With grown up kids, I miss the unfettered joy of a child on the morning of their birthday, or Christmas. I loved to see that excitement, and anticipation of presents. A celebration of the the earth rotating one more time around our sun. One more time to be grateful for what we have… the gift of life, family, and reasons to celebrate together.

Family gatherings

A week ago we celebrated my daughter’s 21st birthday. This weekend we celebrated my father-in-law’s 90th birthday, and the engagement of my niece. It’s wonderful to gather and celebrate these milestones. Next month I will be travelling across the country to visit my parents and sisters. While we won’t be celebrating anything specific, we will have an opportunity to spend time together.

As a kid I spent almost every Friday night at my grandparents with aunts, uncles, and cousins. Now every gathering is planned weeks and even months in advance. The spaces in between visits, gatherings, and special events seem wide. Nobody ‘drops by’ to say ‘Hi’, there is no “I was in the neighbourhood’ visits, no last minute invites for dinner.

Distances apart play a role in this distancing between gatherings, but so do changing norms. Maybe it’s time to rethink the way things have changed. A spontaneous dinner invite, a visit between meals that requires no extra work. A phone call to say, “what are you doing for the next couple hours’ followed by a visit.

Gathering with family and friends could be done far more often, with far less work and preparation. It just takes a little spontaneity, and an attitude that time spent together is too valuable to wait for special occasions.

Milestones

Today my youngest turns 21. It sounds so cliche to ask ‘Where does the time go?’ And yet it feels like a legitimate question.

One day you are bringing a bundle of joy home from the hospital… The next you are making sounds for them to repeat.

First steps, first time on a bicycle, first time without training wheels, first big fall from a bicycle.

First day of school, first day of middle school, high school, university.

Thousands of firsts, thousands of milestones, skipping past as fast as a skipping rock across a pond.

The firsts may come farther apart now, but they are to be cherished. Each ripple, a new moment, a new milestone, a new memory.

The need for sleep

The last few months I’ve needed more sleep than usual. It’s not a surprise, between covid in November and an awful cough to start the year, I have mostly been in recovery mode for a few months now. I can usually get between 6 and 7 hours of sleep a night and consistently feel refreshed. That’s not enough right now and I’m letting myself sleep longer. This is a good thing… I know how important sleep is and I don’t think I get enough of it.

Back when I started my career I used to live on even less sleep. I’d go 3-4 days with 5 hours or less sleep, then catch up with 6-7 hours, and do it all over again. One very tired day when I was running on too little sleep my buddy Mark said to me, “Dave, you’re burning your candle on both ends, you are killing yourself… you’re going to die 10 years younger if you keep doing this to yourself.” The following night I sent him an email at about 1:30 in the morning, it read, “Yeah, I might die 10 years younger but I did the math and if you live to 80 and I only live to 70, I’ll have been awake longer than you.”

While the math was correct, and it’s kind of funny, there is a lot of research around the importance of sleep and I don’t tend to get as much as I should even now. I used to wear ‘I don’t need a lot of sleep’ like some sort of badge of honour. But sleep is essential, and I’m hoping that I can figure out a way to get more without feeling like I’m taking away from my day.

I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who sleeps 8-9 hours a night, and in fact I start to develop a headache when I’m in bed that long, but I hope to make 7-8 hours the norm with only an occasional 6-7 hour night. That would be dreamy. 😜

Tiny little boxes

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over examined life isn’t worth living either. 

Isn’t it interesting how two people can look at the same experience and see it completely differently? How is it that 2 prisoners of war with similar experiences can come out of the ordeal and one has PTSD while the other emerges strong and resilient?

I think some people let past experiences spill into their everyday life, while others compartmentalize their past into tiny little boxes. Some people tie their identity to things that make them feel like they are not in control, that things happen to them, that they must continue to endure what has already happened. The past is as in front of them as it is behind them.

Other people see past events in a metaphorical rear view window… there when you are looking at it, but the memories in the reflection seem distant. And the mirror is somewhere in your peripheral vision when you aren’t looking, and easy to forget to pay attention to, unless there is a reason to look back.

A loss of someone you love can haunt you, or it can provoke feelings of love and fond memories. A loss of limb can leave one person devastated with respect to what they can no longer do, and another person is left thankful for what they still can do. Both of these are painful things to endure. But the frame around the experiences can be very different. Two people and one experience. One frames the experiences into tiny little boxes, the other lets the past experience spill into new experiences.

Do we get to decide? Or are we wired a certain way? Maybe a bit of both.

Does our upbringing influence our ability to cope? Certainly! Trauma transcends generations, and growing up in a psychologically unhealthy environment will impact one’s ability to cope. Tiny boxes aren’t built in stressful environments, and it’s hard to ignore the rear view mirror when you are constantly reminded that objects there are much closer than they appear.

But there is always an opportunity to wrap things up in tiny little boxes… still there, still available, just not spilled out into the present when the memories don’t enrich the current moment. Because when we spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror, it’s hard to see the road ahead.

Language barrier

When we lived in China we lived in ‘a small city of 6 million’, Dalian, on a peninsula on the east coast. It was not unusual for my family to hear no English spoken by anyone except us from the time we left our Canadian curriculum foreign national school on Friday until we went back to school on Monday. We couldn’t go to a restaurant unless the menu had pictures. And if you were in a store and didn’t see what you were looking for, a game of charades ensued with hand gestures and singular Chinese words coming from us rather than sentences.

Google Translate was fairly new and most Asian languages were not well translated, especially Chinese. I remember going to a grocery store to buy baking soda for my wife. I put the 2 words into Google Translate and got two Chinese characters. But on the shelf were 6 or 7 different items with some having the first character and some having something very similar to the second character, and none having both.

I asked for help and the employee couldn’t help me. She asked a coworker, and she couldn’t help me either. I was stuck. I finally bought a plastic back with a white powder that looked like baking soda and on my way home I realized that the cost of this item was less than 50 cents Canadian, and had I bought all 5 of the most likely items, it would have cost me under $3. That would have saved me 30 minutes and a lot of frustration.

Now things have changed significantly. Language translation is so much easier. People can have full-on conversations with Google or an app translating voice to text and/or voice almost instantaneously. These tools will even correct themselves when the context of the sentence is recognized. For instance, I think ‘baking’ and ‘soda’ were two words that were translated for me independently, and so the words were loosely translated to ‘cooking in the oven’ and ‘bubbly drink’. Now translators know that these words next to each other mean something different than when the words are used in a different context.

All this to say that the days of language being a major barrier to basic communication are over. I can think of a lot of frustrating conversations and miscommunications I had in my 2 years of living in China that would not have happened if we went now rather than over a decade ago. I think of the conversations I wanted to have but couldn’t. I think of the questions I had that were just left unanswered.

Sure there were a few magical moments where we overcame the language barrier and made special connections, but these moments pale in comparison to what we could have said and done with the tools available today. While I hold some nostalgia about the way things were for us back then, I think I’d still prefer it if we had the language conversion tools of today back then.

Childhood memories

As I get older I find that childhood memories become one-dimensional. I remember a specific memory for a specific reason, and no other memories around that moment. In the retelling of these memories, I further solidify what the memory means to me and build a specific narrative around it.

One such memory is of telling my parents there was no way that I’d live in Toronto the rest of my life. I had walked home from Junior High, 14 years old, and it was late January or early February. The weather was bitter cold and I couldn’t feel my fingers, ears, or toes. I called out to my parents, “Family Meeting”. This was not a typical thing in our household.

A little background, we moved from Barbados to Toronto when I was 9, and this was my 4th winter. I sat my parents down at the kitchen table and told them I wasn’t going to live in this ice-cold country the rest of my life. I promised them I’d get my university degree, but then I was out! I remember saying, “When I leave, don’t ask ‘where did this come from?’ It came from right now!”

I’ve shared that story many times since, including recently. It’s part of a narrative that ended with me moving to Vancouver, the warmest part of Canada that I could find. I still say my parents ‘moved me’ to Toronto as part of that narrative, and although I stayed one extra year after graduating, I knew I was not going to live in Toronto from that day I held our first and only family meeting.

What’s interesting about this is I really have no other significant memories from that year. I have vague memories of Junior High but none closely associated with that day. None.

Most my childhood memories are like that now. Specific events, with a purpose for remembering them, and not much more. I wonder if that’s just me or do other people feel the same way? Do you have specific memories with a narrative attached that keeps the memory relevant, or do you recollect more than those snippets of time from your childhood?

First cough in years

Well, I’m testing negative for covid but staying home today with a cold and pretty bad cough. If I have to say one thing about masking up for coronavirus it’s that the last 2-and-a-half years have been the healthiest years I’ve had with respect to getting colds/flu/sinus infections.

But masks are off now and I’m stuck at home coughing and sniffling and remembering what a grouch I am when I’m sick. I spent yesterday staying in our guest bedroom, coughing, watching Netflix, and sleeping. Today I’ll get some work done even though I’m home.

I remember being sick at home and my mom saying to me, “Ill give you money for a hotel, go be sick somewhere else.’ And no, she wasn’t being mean, she was making a point about what a pain in the rear end I am when I’m sick. But I’m trying to be more adult and less whiny now. Yesterday I just kept to myself, and loaded up on Tylenol Flu medicine and cough drops. Today I’ll do the same and hopefully feel a lot better tomorrow.

My first year teaching

The school changed designations from a junior high to a middle school and that change allowed all the teachers at that school to have priority moves… and move they did. 17 teachers left out of about 30, mostly choosing to get a high school job. That departure of teachers opened the door for me and about 12 or 13 other brand new teachers (as well as a few with less than a year’s experience) to join the school.

Imagine working in a school where more than half the teachers were new… it was amazing. I was arriving at school before 7:30 every morning to get my day ready, and I was seldom the only teacher there that early. I’d still be in my room between 4:30 and 5pm and so would other teachers. I’d visit a teacher around that time, see what they were planning, and they’d share their plans and resources with me. I’d do the same for them… often even if we were teaching different grades. Teachers with experience were even more helpful providing leadership, resources, and time to help anyone who asked.

We’d meet each other at after school professional development presentations. We’d socialize together, we’d organize amazing opportunities for students at the school. We all coached, we ran spirit assemblies, we dressed up in costumes for any reason at all to get students excited about school. It was absolutely exhausting, and absolutely wonderful.

I couldn’t imagine starting my career at a better place… and the teachers that were there are still some of my closest friends today. I got together with a few ‘originals’ that were at our school that year, and I was reminded of all the good times. I was also reminded of how challenging the kids were that year, the most challenging in our careers. And yet the memories that linger are so positive. It was such an amazing place to be.