Tag Archives: perspective

High contrast lives

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It’s amazing how differently people live in the world. Growing up in Barbados and moving to Canada in the late 70’s, I faced a fare bit of culture shock. This is quite a different experience than a student at my school who has only ever left the province to go one province over, and hasn’t even been to the USA, just a 30 minute drive away.

But even that contrast isn’t comparable to a friend who grew up in a village with no electricity or running water, who now lives in a gorgeous home a couple towns over from us. She shared how her first husband was embarrassed by her when they went to a big city for the first time and she was frightened to go on an escalator. She’s younger than me and she has lived in worlds that seem 100 years apart.

This exposure to different worlds extends beyond travel. I spoke to a 91 year old man today and he shared how his father never once hugged him, and so he made sure that his kids always got hugs. Some people break the trauma cycle, others get stuck in it. Again, the contrast can be so extreme.

We walk around blindly unaware of what challenges people have faced or are currently facing. We see kids acting out and blame them for their outbursts, unknowing of what challenges they face at home. We fall into patterns in relationships that are affected by past relationships both in positive and negative ways.

Some people are exposed to experiences you or I could not imagine. Some of them do so with poise and grace. Others struggle and deal with more than we could handle, and might not be able to handle it themselves.

People do the best they can with what they’ve got. We don’t always know where they have come from, or what they’ve had to deal with. We don’t see the contrast, and so maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to judge.

Simplify rather than shrink

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I don’t remember where I heard this, but the concept has been on my mind recently:

Simplify rather than shrink.

The idea is that retirement doesn’t necessarily mean becoming less, but rather doing less. No I won’t be going into work anymore, and the titles and responsibilities will be less, but that doesn’t mean who I am will shrink. It’s way better to perceive the changes as simplifying my life. I’ll be able to wake up later than 5am, I won’t have to rush my morning workout, or race to get my writing done. On the contrary, I can work out for longer and write more.

I don’t have to rush the making of dinner, or choose a meal based on speed of preparation rather than preference. I won’t have to give up the quality and healthiness of a meal for convenience. I can also commit to some projects mid-week rather than waiting for the weekend.

This isn’t a shrinking of what I do, it’s expanding the things I want to do, while also simplifying my life. It’s removing the commitment to a job that can sometimes take 10 hours of my week day and creep into weekends, (if not in workload then at least in mental energy).

This frame of simplifying rather than shrinking is one than I think works for me. It’s a metaphor that allows me to get excited about my upcoming retirement. It allows me to see retirement as a wonderful opportunity to expand the use my time on things that allow me to be more of who I want to be. There will be no shrinking, there will definitely be some simplifying.

Observing time

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Yesterday’s post, ‘Let’s Do the Time Warp Again’ is still messing with my head a bit. The idea of the Andromeda paradox suggests that if we are in motion compared to another bystander, our view of very distant events can be days apart.

I understood relativity with respect to travel, a twin in a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light goes to a distant galaxy. When he comes back to earth a few years later he would be younger than the twin left behind… demonstrating the relativity of time. But the idea that distant events can ‘happen’ at different times for people witnessing it from almost the same spot, simply because of their relative motion to each other is perplexing.

So then I suggested that we could re-witness an event by changing our motion such that we are moving quickly away from a very, very distant event, so that from that relative perspective the event hadn’t happened yet. I’m no physicist, the distances would have to be huge, and I don’t know what speeds would need to be achieved, but it seems pretty conceivable to me.

What’s messing with my head is that if this is possible, what does ‘now’ mean?

We have to wait 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach us. When it reaches us, the sun is already 8 minutes older. We don’t see the sun now, we see its history. Our concept of now has a perpetual lag.

This then got me thinking about animals and their reaction times. Have you ever seen a video of a cat toying with a snake? A cat can avoid the bite of a snake, always reacting faster than we would be able to. How does a cat perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

How do birds fly in a murmuration? The flock changes direction in waves, so quickly that they can stay in formation despite hundreds of them having to coordinate with each other. How does a bird in a murmur perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

To a ten year old, 5 years is half a lifetime, to me it’s less than 1/11th of my life. Is it any wonder that as we get older, time seems to go by faster?

Like I said, these ideas are messing a bit with my head. They make me wonder what ‘now’ means and if in reality we share a ‘now’ with anyone? Is the mere act of observing ‘now’ just a relative glance of varying histories? And yet the only thing any of us ever experience beyond our memories and imagination… is now.

Spaceship Earth

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First: Two perspectives from a trip to the moon, shared by Victor Glover and Christina Koch.

“I don’t have anything prepared. I think these observances are important, and as we are so far from Earth and looking back at the beauty of creation, I think for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing.

You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe.

Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you — just trust me — you are special.

In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.

This is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve got to get through this together.” 

~ Victor Glover

And;

“So when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it.

Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.

I may have not learned — I know I haven’t learned — everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is:

Planet Earth, you are a crew.”

~ Christina Koch (See the full speech where she is talking about what it means to be a crew.)

Next: This insightful perspective from physicist Brian Cox.

“There’s only one interesting question in philosophy. The interesting question is, what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? I think the answer is, paradoxically, whilst we are definitely physically insignificant, I’ve just said that the Earth is one planet, around one star, amongst 400 billion stars, in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe, right?

So we’re definitely small, you can’t argue with that, we’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms. Our bodies were made in stars, right? So it’s all cooked over billions of years. And we’re in this pattern that can think, you have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us. And that sounds unlikely when you put it like that, that you can have a few things that were cooked in the hearts of stars, you stick them together in a pattern and suddenly it has some ideas and starts writing music.

There aren’t any other worlds where this happened, certainly in our galaxy. So it could be that this planet, notwithstanding its physical insignificance, is the only place where anything thinks.”

~ Brian Cox

We don’t often think of the significance of this tiny blue marble we live on. We don’t often ponder the idea that we are a single species cohabiting with other living organisms on an oasis in a sea of emptiness beyond our atmosphere. We don’t recognize that we are all connected, all crew, on a spaceship that is bigger than our political and cultural differences, bigger than the borders of our countries.

We are all crew on spaceship earth, our mother ship that supports us, and in turn we need to nurture and support her.

Honing Observation Skills with Questions

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I love this quote by James Clear:

“Observation is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained and honed.

Even if you’re not a negative person, you may be skilled at noticing negative things. Sometimes people are good at noticing the reason things won’t work out or have a tendency to fixate on the latest distressing story.

But you can train your eye toward the opportunities each day quietly presents. You can become competent at noticing your good luck: the little moments of joy, the stranger who helped, the small things that went right, the opportunity in front of you right now.

What are you competent in observing? And which types of observations seem to serve your life best?” ~ James Clear

I’d add one more question, and that is, ‘What questions are you asking to ensure you are making the right observations?‘

‘Why don’t things work out for me?’ …is a very different question from, ‘I wonder what good will come of this?’

‘What else could go wrong?’ …is a very different question from, ‘What opportunities will present themselves now?’

James Clear makes a great point about needing to observe opportunities, I just think the path to get there is giving our brains, which are massive answering machines, the right questions to ask and then answer.

In living satire

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A few years back I heard someone say that we are living in the timeline that is the laughing stock of all other timelines, and I’m routinely reminded of this.

I read a quote from the leader of the most powerful nation in the world today, shared in a social media post commenting on it, and my BS detector went off. This had to be fake… satire to anger those not intelligent enough to get the joke! So I went onto the web version of this man’s social media propaganda machine that bears the word ‘Truth’, (again this screams satire), to see if the quote actually came from the horse’s mouth.

It did.

He actually said this ridiculous statement. I know what you want to ask. I know I’m being too vague, and you are wondering, ‘What did he say this time?’ But here’s the sad truth: I could have written this a week ago, a month ago, a year ago… the only thing that would be different is the quote itself. Not the fact that it’s so obtuse that it is offensive. Not that it’s a disgrace to the office he holds. Not that it’s so off colour that you’d think it was satire if you didn’t read it at its source.

So here we are in living satire. Living in a joke of a timeline, where we can’t distinguish the difference between the truth and what is satirical, fake news shared on ‘The Onion’. And here I am writing a post that will be just as relevant a week, month, or year farther into our comical, if not sad timeline.

Traffic flow

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I’ve had a couple days of long highway drives in Los Angeles and despite significantly more traffic than in Vancouver or Toronto, I have to say that traffic here flows very well. Two things make the flow here unique compared to what I see in Canada. First of all, highway speed limits here are more of a suggestion than a limit. When the traffic opens up the speed goes up. Tonight, at one point I was going in excess of the speed limit and for about 10 minutes and many cars passed me, while I didn’t catch up or pass any. Even when traffic is heavy it seems every lane will travel at speeds seldom seen on highways I’m used to driving on back home.

Another thing that works far better here are lane changes. There seems to be an acceptance of lane changes here that is far more polite and efficient compared to anywhere else I’ve driven. I’ve seen, and in one case actually been, a car needing to cross 2 lanes to get to an exit in heavy traffic, and with indicators on, cars make way for the move.

In Vancouver, that would be responded to in two very different ways. First of all, there would be an angry horn blast and/or the person in the lanes you are trying to get into would speed up to squeeze you out of the lane change. Here, I have seen countless lane changes with neither horn beep nor accelerated blocking.

After hearing about the driving here, and stories of road rage in LA, I’d say, ‘Don’t believe the hype’! The reality is that I’d rather drive here than on any busy highway in Canada. Maybe I’m just in the honeymoon stage and living here would be different, but my sister has been here for 20 years and she’s often told me this is the case. Sounds a bit weird to say, but Vancouver and Toronto drivers could learn a thing or two from spending a little time in LA traffic.

It takes time to unwind

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It might have been slowed down a bit due to having a cold, but it has taken me a while to unwind this holiday. I always take a short while to get used to holiday mode, and not feel guilty for having a quiet day where I don’t do much.

Today I didn’t do much of anything. I spent a bit of the morning feeling guilty about not getting a workout in, and then late this afternoon I finally felt it… I felt unwound enough to just relax and enjoy doing a little bit of nothing.

The big plans for tomorrow are to head to a beach and rent some bikes to ride on the boardwalk. A busy day compared to today, but also, how chill is that for a day plan?

Now the holiday really begins. Now it becomes guilt free listening to a an audiobook for over an hour. I can just chill, and not feel like I should be doing something else. I can sip my morning coffee in the sunshine and feel like no matter what the day brings, it will be a good day.

I don’t have to fill time, I can just appreciate what I’m doing, while I do it… even if the thing I’m doing is nothing.

Intentionally disconnected

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Is it just me that has been intentionally disconnecting from the news and even social media around the war in the Middle East?

I truly understand my privilege in saying this, since I don’t have loved ones in jeopardy. And understand the desire of some people to know what’s going on because there are global ramifications. Yet I find myself unable to concern myself with the political posturing, the doublespeak, the justifications, and the outrage. I feel like I don’t have the mental capacity to either partially engage and feel insignificantly informed or to delve in and be fully informed… and ultimately powerless to do more than fill my brain with visions of destruction and violence.

Even though I usually choose to ignore the negativity of news, I still tend to keep myself updated on global issues and major news stories, but I’m struggling to engage right now. I find it too disheartening.

It makes me question the humanity of humans. That as a species we can construct such diametrically opposed ideologies; that we can live in societies that value greed over the welfare of the community; that we can choose leaders who do not care for the people that elected them into ‘service’… these are things I don’t understand. Or rather, things I don’t want to believe that humans could value more than peace, love, and kindness.

And so for now I lack the capacity to engage. It seems like a futile activity that will anger and upset me, with no gain. It is rare for me to actively choose to be uninformed, but right now is one of those times.

Appreciate the tiny wins

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Tiny wins are often hard to see. They don’t seem significant, but they accumulate.

James Clear explains in Atomic Habits that 1% better daily will compound into becoming 37 times better in a year.

You don’t go heavier on a lift in the gym, but you eke out a couple extra reps.

You walk into a coffee shop and get right to the counter before a rush of people that have to line up behind you.

You hit almost every green light on your way home from work.

You actually enjoy a meal that sounds too healthy to be tasty.

You write a single sentence and suddenly your muse has arrived.

We don’t always see them, we rarely celebrate them, but the tiny little things that we can choose to pay attention to and appreciate can be the highlight of the day… or the precursor to more wins, big and small, in the future.