Tag Archives: nostalgia

The past and the push

When you hear great athletes talk about practice, they know what it means to push themselves. When they miss a shot, lose an easy opportunity, they don’t give up, they don’t negative self-talk, they double down and give more than they thought they could. When they are in a game and everything is on the line… there’s one more offensive rush, one more play to decide the game, they are 100% present with a singular focus.

I’m not a natural athlete, and like I said before, “…sometimes I could get in the zone. Sometimes the game slowed down for me and I could see more action around me. Sometimes I could see the play forming and feel the rhythm of the game. I didn’t have a switch I could turn on, I didn’t know what I could do to put myself in the zone. I didn’t have control of it.”

I wasn’t an athlete that could choose to get into that zone, it found me. And it might not have found me enough, but I have strong memories of those moments, I remember them and how powerful they were. But they are all in the past… and I find that hard. I want those moments again.

Perhaps I need to start archery again? Maybe I just need a regular workout buddy? I don’t know what will get me back to that, being someone who no longer does organized sports? What I do know is that I miss it. This isn’t about regret, it’s like nostalgia, yet different. It’s a yearning to feel the push, to feel the relentless drive, to be a reliable force in the pursuit of excellence.

It’s about feeling the push in the present.

Practicality over sentimentality

My brother-in-law was speaking to my father-in-law about moving into an assisted living home from a rancher. He said, “I guess practicality needs to be a priority over sentimentality,” and my father-in-law agreed.

Moving isn’t easy. Downsizing isn’t easy. Letting go of things with sentimental value isn’t easy.

The knowledge that ‘we can’t take it with us’ on the next journey anyway offers little solace. Furniture, framed pictures, books, souvenirs, trinkets, antiques, old treasures and keepsakes all hold memories within them. Reflections of the past stir, and the desire to hold on to yet another item, another memory, pulls at the heartstrings.

Eventually realization kicks in… practicality over sentimentality. You just can’t take everything with you.

Music and time

There are songs that send me back in time. I hear them and I’m suddenly in another era.

‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie or Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sherif’ takes me back to 7-9 years old.

Led Zeppelin’s ‘All of my Love’ sets me back into my friends house, it was 1979, the album In Through the Out Door came out and my friend called me to say “Get over here and listen to this.” Then he played ‘All of my Love’ over and over while playing and perfecting the piano part.

‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ by Dead or Alive makes me think of a dance floor and New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ sends me back to a university ski trip that I’d be better off not remembering… end yet I love the flashback I get.

Speaking of skiing, I got to know my wife on trips up to Whistler where she shared a group rental chalet. I remember our weekend drives to the chalet every time I hear R.E.M.’s ‘Night Swimming’.

Music is a powerful memory builder, and some songs take me back in time. Do they do that for you?

Fishing and time

There is a special type of time distortion that happens when I go fishing. First of all, it’s not something that can be rushed. You’ve probably never heard the phrase, “Hurry up and fish.” Fishing takes patience, and time goes slowly.

Time also shifts a different way for me when fishing. I can get nostalgic about past fishing experiences, and feel like a kid again. I can get enveloped into a different world where time goes backwards and I feel young again.

And then there is the simple appreciation of the time spent fishing, whether in solitude or with a friend. Fishing time doesn’t need to be filled with conversation. There is comfortableness in silence. There is the sound of casting and reeling which symbolizes the passage of time, like a ticking clock, it can be heard again and again. Until the pattern is interrupted by catching a fish… speeding up time and bringing a new sense of urgency to the situation.

And here’s the really wonderful thing about fishing: even if I don’t catch anything, it was still time well spent.

Generation bump

It’s the first one in our family. My niece, my sister-in-law’s daughter, is getting married today. This is the start of a new chapter for our family. I haven’t been to a wedding in many years, but they will become more frequent in the coming years.

It’s a little surreal to realize that we are now the parent generation. We are the sandwich generation often thinking (and sometimes worrying) about both our parents and our kids. We are the adults. That sounds silly to say, but I’m probably not the only one that questions how I got to this phase of life, how I’m not the kid still trying to figure things out?

New life adventures lay ahead, new firsts in a new chapter of our lives.

The cost of a photograph

Back in July, 2019, when I started writing daily, I wrote ‘Photographs in my mind’. In it I spoke nostalgically about the era of print film and the unknown of if I got the shot I thought I did, until after photos were developed. I also wrote about the photos I ended up not taking, and how some of those are more memorable than the ones I did take. Here is the end of the post with one particular shot that came to mind today.

There was the shot I lined up at Pike Place in Seattle, of an older man sitting on the hood of a parked car enthralled in a book, while cops on the street behind him tended to a fender-bender. I can still see the image that I did not take, feeling like I was invading his privacy.

We seem so much more free to take photos now, always having a camera in our pocket, and not a concern of the cost of taking one more shot.

But of all the shots I didn’t take, the photographs that still linger in my memory. These come to me from an era when film was the only option and the cost of the next shot lingered in my mind.

Today I thought of a different kind of cost, not financial, but maybe social, cultural, or personal. I thought of the potential photo I didn’t take above, and how I felt that I would have been invading this man’s privacy, stealing a moment from him. This made me think of children having photographs and videos shared on social media by parents. Precious moments, but also embarrassing ones. I then thought of photos shared without permission, voyeuristic images shared in confidence then reshared in anger, more often than not by a vindictive, jilted, or just plain mean ex-boyfriend.

I thought of photographs that perpetuate stereotypes, or promote cultural exploitation. I thought of videos that show people at their worst going viral and how they typecast a person on the bases of a single act, one transgression, an embarrassing moment memorialized as the defining of a one-dimensional character.

We don’t live in the film era anymore. We live in an era that is not just witnessed, but fully documented. And I wonder, what is the price? What costs are we paying for the free availability of endless videos and photographs?

Ashtrays and Newspaper Racks

If you are Gen X, then at some point in your schooling you probably made your parents an ashtray out of clay. I did, and my parents didn’t even smoke. And if you were in a woodworking class you probably made some sort of newspaper or magazine rack, which was something your parents might have had in your living room. Depending on how good it was, this wooden creation may or may not have been as prominently displayed in your house as the ashtray. But these were a couple ‘practical’ things we made in school ‘back in the day’.

Both my daughters, who went to different middle schools, made gum ball machines out of wood, which used a mason jar to hold the gum balls. And I think for both of them the other option was a birdhouse. These were their versions of ashtrays and newspaper racks.

I bet most kids today will come home from school at some point with a 3D printed keychain. Most houses don’t have ashtrays, or newspapers or even magazines. Most parents wouldn’t know where to go to buy loose gum balls to put in a school made gum ball machine. Times change and so do the crafts students create at school.

Some of the other things students might (and do) create at school these days include: Apps, websites, and online businesses. These are the modern day ashtrays. A bit more practical, and a lot more relevant. That said, I hope kids still get a chance to work with clay and wood. I still want to see art that is 3D but not 3D printed. No one needs a newspaper rack or gum ball machine but bird houses can still be made.

There are cookie-cutter style ‘everyone makes the same design’ kind of bird houses, and then there are versions of the same project which are open to design thinking and personalization. And it really doesn’t have to be a bird house… just a hands-on creation using tools rather than a keyboard. But when I said, “I still want to see art that is 3D but not 3D printed.” I also should have mentioned that I want kids to also 3D print things.

The message of this little, nostalgic visit down memory lane isn’t just to say bring back the old hands-on projects, and do away with the new ones. Rather it’s to say we need both. We need students creating physical crafts, with their hands, at school and we need them designing new digital products with new tools as well. I’d be a bit concerned if kids today came home with ashtrays, but I’d still love to see them producing creative works that involve building and creating physical things with their hands.

I also wonder what the 2050 version of the school made ashtray will be?

Do not go quietly

16 years ago, January 28, 2008, I shared a presentation I did in with some SFU student teachers. Here is a clunky version on Slideshare. Here is the post I wrote about it. And here is the video I made out of it for a presentation at BLC 08 in Boston.

Do not go quietly into your classroom! 

The video had close to 100,000 views on BlipTV, which died in 2011… like many of the place I shared that you could find me online at the start of the video. A lot of those links are dead now. But this slideshow and video were pivotal in sharing my transformation as an educator who empowered students with technology. I remember the hours I put into timing the slides with the music, and the the relief of finally thinking it was good enough to share.

A day or two before the original presentation to student teachers, I found out I was going to become a Vice Principal. I was inspired to share the things I’d learned and started another blog, “Practic-All – Pragmatic tools and ideas for the classroom.” Where I shared a weekly series called Dave’s Digital Magic. It only lasted for 19 posts, but it was my way to stay plugged into what was going on in classrooms and to have good learning conversations with some of my staff.

So hard to believe this was 16 years ago… And I’m still exploring the Brave New World Wide Web and sharing what I learn along the way.

Ice, fog. and snow

Before moving to Canada, I had no idea what winter was. Sure, I’d seen it on TV, and I was told snow was cold, but I had no concept of what it was really like. The biggest block of ice I’d ever seen was a block you put in your cooler to make your drinks cold.

I still vividly remember the first time I saw fog, I was 9, and had only been in Toronto a couple months. A dense fog rolled in overnight and on my walk to school I couldn’t see more than 15-18 feet in front of me. Everything was draped in a grey-white void that kept me connected only to the grass field underneath my feet. It was eerie, almost frightening. I couldn’t understand how clouds could take over the world.

Shortly after that I saw my first real snowfall. It was a mind blowing experience to see white puffy snowflakes for the first time.That snowfall was the start of a close friendship with a kid who I threw snow at in the snowball area of our school. It’s funny how some friendships can begin.

Shortly after that, an outdoor hockey rink was put up on the school field less than 1/2 a block from my front door. I went from only ever seeing ice that made drinks cold to borrowing friends skates and having a hockey stick put in my hand. I went home that night with a bruise from my knee to hip… every time I took a shot, I’d topple over and whack my right leg on the ice, with no protection since my arms were fully committed to holding the hockey stick and swinging it.

It’s amazing that I remember this all from 47 years ago. But that’s the way memories work. These were novel first experiences that were at the edge of what I found comprehensible. Whether I was standing in the field of fog, or surrounded by slow-moving snowflakes falling from the sky, or wearing metal blades on my feet to travel across ice, I was in awe of the experience I was having. How did this little kid from a tropical island end up experiencing these things?

Small moments that left a lifetime of memories.

Paper maps

I remember driving from Toronto Ontario to Phoenix Arizona over 3 days with only paper maps. That’s over 3,500 kilometres of travel before the era of ‘Sat Nav’ and GPS. A wrong turn wasn’t met by auditory instructions to turn around, or automatic rerouting. No, it was followed by being oblivious until you saw a highway sign that told you that you are on the wrong road, or looking for the name of an exit you saw, only to realize it’s on a different highway.

You’d drive into a city at night and then start looking for a hotel. No google searches or cell phones to call anywhere in advance. No instructions to get back on the highway unless you asked at the front desk.

But it was usually the last 5-10 kilometres that were the toughest. Highways are well labeled on maps, but side streets are a whole other story. You could spend 4 hours traveling at the maximum speed limit and make great time, only to flounder in the last few minutes and spend 20 minutes lost and frustrated.

I remember being lost in a suburban community with my wife once and we gave up, just deciding to follow another car out of the maze of houses we were in… only to be disappointed when he turned into his driveway. We were quite embarrassed after circling the cul-de-sac and the person we followed was standing outside his car wondering who we were and why we followed him?

It was a different time, and one I’m not yearning to repeat. I’m happy to have Waze or Google Maps take all the mystery out of driving somewhere I’ve never been before. I am glad my daughters don’t have to navigate with a paper map, although they will never know the joy of driving over the paper crease where you folded the map, leaving a section that you spent hours driving through. Unfortunately phones can be as big or bigger a distraction than a paper map, but make no mistake, when it came to trying to read a paper map, your attention was definitely not on the road.

We are over the fold now, never to return to the era of paper maps. There are no creases on a digital map, no more folding, unfolding, and refolding. No more getting totally lost with no clue what to do next. We can always have a little voice telling us that we are rerouting, and always have a digital line we can follow.