Tag Archives: metaphor

Getting unstuck

I remember teaching Grade 6/7’s about Nigerian fables. One of them was about a greedy animal during hard times. All the animals had collected food and stored it in a clearing to share, but each night some of the food went missing. To catch the culprit they put tar around the food and the thief got caught in it. The next day after an apology the other animals started trying to pull the animal out. He was extremely stuck and they yanked so hard that they stretched this animal and ripped of its legs.

The fable is about not being greedy, but the title is something like, “How snakes came to be.” I love when the moral is not explicit in the storytelling.

I got thinking about this for a totally different reason, one I’m far more explicit about in my title… the idea of getting unstuck. Sometimes we absolutely have to step out of our current experience in order to see what’s possible beyond where we currently are.

The saying, ‘No matter where you go, there you are,’ has come up a few times recently in conversation. This is only true if you let it happen, if you stay inside of the tiny box you put around yourself. There are people who travel all around the world and they look forward to seeing a Macdonald’s, Burger King, or Starbucks. They look to keep their world the same. But travel can give you so much more than that. There are people who keep friends that aren’t nice to them, who dismiss an entire genre of music, who stick to a plan and never take side adventures. None of these people might see themselves as stuck but they are.

For me personally, I’ve been stuck in pain and/or drowsiness for a couple months and while I’m slowly recovering, I am also stuck in the way my days go. I’m not following any healthy routines to consistently workout or meditate. I can still ride a stationary bicycle without causing any harm to the bulged disc in my neck. Meditation would actually be great right now and I’ve let my daily habit slip.

I’m going through slow (admittedly often dizzy) motions of the day waiting for moments of clarity, but when they come I don’t necessarily take advantage of them. I need to see beyond my current condition. I need to see what I what to accomplish in the future and I need to do things now to support that. I need first to have goals that I want to achieve beyond where I am now, then I need to move towards those goals.

Sometimes it only takes baby steps, sometimes it takes a massive leap. But you don’t get unstuck thinking ‘No matter where you go, there you are’. The issue with this is not about geography, it’s about moving who you are to who you want to be.

Nuggets of happiness

My dad passed away last week. Today we did the paperwork at the crematorium, and we’ll do a family gathering in the fall. He had a stroke while I was visiting over the March break and he never left the hospital after that.

While at the hospital, my youngest sister was staying with dad late one night and she was feeling hungry. She said to him, “I’m heading down to Tim Hortons, do you want anything?”

My dad responded, “No thanks, are you going to get some nuggets of happiness?”

Puzzled, my sister asked, “Do you mean Timbits?

Dad smiled and nodded ‘Yes’.

Nuggets of happiness. This is a great metaphor for coping with my father’s death. There are a lot of emotions, and a lot to deal with. There is great sadness. But then there are also those moments of fond, joyful, and humorous times that I’ll enjoy remembering. Little nuggets to love. Little nuggets that remind me he is still with me as long as I choose to remember.

I don’t think I’ll ever eat a Timbit again without remembering my dad.

And while there are many other emotions right now, I know the memories I cherish, the memories I will share with my mother, my siblings, my wife, my kids, and even grandkids in the future, will bring me joy and happiness.

Down the Social Media Rabbit Hole

I made a mistake last night. I was on Twitter and clicked on a video of a guy knocking down a surveillance camera on a street light in Australia. I then scrolled to the next video and went down a right wing rabbit hole. The first video was a voiceover of Tucker Carlson recently ‘dismissed’ from Fox News, and it was essentially trying to make humourous jokes about a transgender host taking over. Next was a Republican semi-automatic gun wearing black man praising the NRA and claiming the democrats are ‘coming for our guns’. Then came a Sean Hannity clip that I didn’t watch. Then came my first Canadian content with a clip bashing Justin Trudeau. And finally I called it quits after watching a geologist bashing climate change… in case you didn’t know, carbon dioxide is ‘plant food, not a pollutant’.

These crazy social media algorithms, and the deep fakes I spoke about a few days ago, are going to absolutely polarize us, paralyze us, and completely undermine us.

Don’t ignore opposing views, measure them. Don’t jump on the bandwagon, figure out if you want to travel the exact same route. Don’t criticize, question. Don’t SHOUT, disengage until cooler heads prevail.

Don’t pretend the algorithms aren’t already influencing you, be savvy and question why posts and videos are algorithmically chosen for you. You are either trying to be digitally literate or you are probably being manipulated and steered towards an extreme view.

Pain & piece of mind

My back/shoulder pain is still continuing after almost 6 weeks, and I have just started new meds that make me feel loopy. Trying to describe the pain, I thought of a play on words for the phrase ‘peace of mind’ and switching it to ‘piece of mind’.

There is no peace of mind when pain has a piece of your mind. Pain sits with you like an unwanted, unliked friend who is constantly nagging you. Sometimes the pain is in the background and while it’s only vaguely present, you can’t find peace. When it’s worse than that it sits in competition with anything else that’s happening.

I have some clarity now, but writing yesterday’s post would normally take me 20-30 minutes and it took me over an hour to write. I wasn’t doing anything else, I wasn’t distracted with other tasks, but I was feeling a lot of shoulder pain. Constant unrelenting pain. And a 30 minute task took me more than double the expected time. There is no peace of mind when pain has a piece of your mind.

I know this will pass, but it truly gives me a new respect for anyone who deals with daily pain. It’s not fun, it’s not productive, and it’s not easy to act in any normal way when pain has a piece of your mind.

Looking back in time

It’s hard to grasp the idea that when we look at a star, we are looking at that star from an era long ago. Even when we look at our own sun, we only see it as it was 8 minutes ago, because that’s how long the light takes to get to us. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri at 4.25 light years away. When we see the light from this star we are seeing it as it shone 4.25 years ago.

When we look at the night sky, we are looking at a history of the universe, with each distant star sharing a different part of its past with us.

We look at people who are close to us in the same way. We don’t just see them, we see our past with them. We see the last time we met. Did we get along or did we have a conflict? Did we create a fond memory or did we face a problem? Did we grow closer together or does the distance from our last meeting make us feel farther apart?

In a way, relationships can be like distant stars, fading into the past unless we make an effort to see people in a new light. Because our connection to people comes from the way we look at our previous interactions, our history together. This is all we have until we shed new light on one another. Glimpses of history that tell stories… be they stories of our universe or stories of friendship. In both cases we are looking at our past to make sense of our future.

The learning cliff

Whenever I am talking to new or potentially new employees of our online school I share the idea of a learning cliff. We all know about a learning curve… when you are learning something new, there is an effort you have to exert as you gain knowledge and learn how to use new systems and tools available to you. There’s a slow uphill climb to learn the new job. But some jobs have a few too many systems to learn just by doing things once. I call this the learning cliff.

In a new position you’ll inevitably get to a point where you don’t know how to do something and you need to ask for help: This is true for both the learning curve and the learning cliff… With the learning curve , you ask, you learn, and you don’t need to ask again. But in an organization where too many things are new, you try to absorb so much information at once that you don’t actually remember the help you got the next time you have to deal with the same situation… You asked, you got the help you needed, but you didn’t actually learn because your brain was taxed with too much new information to retain one more thing. So a few hours, days, or weeks later you have to ask the same question again.

You’ve left the learning curve and hit the learning cliff. I tell my new employees that with so many new systems to learn, we have all hit those cliffs and every one of us knows you will too. So, ask again. Ask a third time. We won’t judge. We remember hitting the cliff ourselves. We know you feel bad having to ask again when you feel you should know. We know you can’t, just like we couldn’t, remember everything and need to ask again. We expect it and want to assist you.

A learning cliff is not a scalable slope without help, so let us help you over the edge, and when you come back to the same issue, or a new one, and it’s still not a traversable slope… ask again. We are expecting it and happy to help.

Baked just right

It would have been harder 150 years ago to bake bread or a cake to perfection. There were no thermometers in the oven, few clocks to tell how long it was in the oven, no real way to regulate the heat. It was an art as much as a science.

That idea of being baked just right comes to mind when I think about our universe. So many things had to be just right to ‘cook up’ our existence. If we live in a multiverse with countless other universes, it is likely most of them would harbour conditions impossible for a planet like earth to exist. This is for some people a way to reconcile their belief in an omnipotent and omnipresent God. For without the divine intervention of a ‘designer’ we could not exist.

But for me this is simply a game of numbers. In the billions of universes in a multiverse, we were the lottery winners. We won the grand prize of being able to harbour consciousness in a universe among so many others that did not have the right ingredients, did not have the right conditions, and/or were baked for too long or not long enough.

We exist because our universe was baked just right. And the fact that it was right enough for us, suggests to me that it is right enough on another not-so-near-by planet. We probably aren’t alone in this universe, but our universe is probably lonely in comparison to other universes.

We might not be the only one, but just like we are alone in our galaxy, our university is probably alone in being baked to perfection… for us. Maybe there are some nitrogen breathing conscious beings in another universe writing about the crazy possibility of oxygen breathing beings in a universe like ours?

We probably won’t need a couple hundred more years to figure this out. We are too inquisitive and we keep looking out into the universe and asking complex questions beyond my understanding. What I do understand is that we live in a universe that was baked well enough to produce us, and while we may not be baked to perfection, we are the lottery winners (or likely one of very few lottery winners) in the multiverse.

History Repeats

We went to see a theatre performance of Fiddler On The Roof last night. The story ends with the Ukrainian Jews being kicked off their lands and dispersed across Europe and to America. After the show the lead star said that last night’s performance, and all of their performances, were dedicated to the Ukrainian people.

It makes me realize that we are not a truly civilized species. We fight over land and over resources. We kill in the name of God and Country. We judge based on skin colour and cultural differences. We act like unruly children against each other and we allow ourselves to repeat historical errors, none the wiser that lessons could have been learned.

We might have bigger brains, but we are no better than warring ant colonies, or a rutting animal fighting for dominance. We are animals pretending to be civilized. Power corrupts and corruption leads to injustice, and injustice undermines civility. We let history repeat itself because politics is more important that people and countries matter more than compassion.

Starting a new school year

As a kid I didn’t enjoy the first days of the school year. I feared getting into a class without any of my small group of friends, and then even if we got in the same class, the seating plan would separate us. I worried about who my teachers would be and if I’d like them.

Once in class with all my updated supplies, I always found it hard to start writing in a new workbook.

Even after writing my name and the subject on the cover that first blank page was daunting. My first words written were not the start of a new adventure, but rather the destruction of something perfect… and the start of a lot of work ahead that I wasn’t very excited about.

Now as an adult, I get excited about the metaphorical ‘blank page’ that the new school year brings. The year ahead has no blemishes, only an open book to be written in. The empty pages hold so much promise. The adventure ahead is real, unknown, and unrealized.

The year holds potential, it has promise, and it sits before us, students and educators alike, waiting for us to seize it. There are some nerves, even a little apprehension, but the open book is there before us and it is exciting… we just have to get the first few words out of the way.

In preparation

How much time do we spend in preparation for something that is coming up? A simple example is a meal, and all the prep work that needs to be done before the meal is made. There is also tidy up time before guests arrive, reading to do before a meeting, personal grooming, and travel time. It occurred to me that we spend a lot of time preparing for events, and in some cases we spend more time in preparation than we do at the actual event we prepared for.

Two thoughts come to mind. First, we ought to find joy in preparation. Cooking is an excellent example of this, it’s not just the consuming of the final product but the joy of getting all the ingredients cut and cooked that we can savour. Can a fun event start for us as we shower and shave, and get ourselves ready? If we are going to spend so much of our lives in preparation for something upcoming, how can we find more joy in this time?

The second thought is about daily exercise. When we aren’t athletes training for, preparing for, an upcoming event, how do we perceive such activity? Exercise is really just preparation for a better tomorrow. It is the accumulation of a healthy lifestyle that pays dividends in the future. It is the preparation for a future life that is more active and vibrant than a sedentary life would promise.

We spend a lot of time in preparation for something else, this preparation time is an opportunity to find joy, to feel accomplishment, and not just a chore to get through on the way to something else. Cooking prep isn’t work, it’s putting love into the food you make for people you care about. Workouts are work, and if done right they are hard, but you can find joy in pushing yourself to new goals, and feel the endorphins a good workout can bring. Life is not about preparation for other things, life is found in the preparation.