Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
I spent the afternoon with my mom, her sister, my wife and my kids. My aunt had us in stitches. It was wonderful having a good belly laugh. My favourite line from my auntie. “I like living by myself. I’m fine to talk to myself, I don’t need anybody else. It’s only a problem if I hear voices talking back, other than that, I’m good.”
Before this, I spent most of the day with an old friend. I can’t travel back home to my mom and not find time to see my buddy.
It’s just wonderful to realize that what I value most are my family and friends. Give me this, and my health, and I really don’t need much else from this world.
A couple years ago I had a herniated disk. The herniation pinched a nerve going into my left arm and that’s where I felt the pain… a pain that seemed ever present. I was on very strong meds. I supplemented these with legal but more recreational drugs. The prescription ones made the pain tolerable. The recreational ones helped me move the pain from my brain to my arm, to relieve the anguish of being in constant pain.
The timing went like this: In early February the pain started. In early March I got the preliminary diagnosis, and was prescribed medication. I visited my parents for March break and the day I arrived my dad had a stroke. I spent the next 12 days in agony, helping my family deal with dad hospitalized, while making physio appointments and getting IMS treatment for the constant physical agony I was in.
When I got home from that trip I got prescribed much harder drugs. I was in constant pain. One day in late April I was driving to school and I realized that I shouldn’t be driving, my meds were too strong. This hit me hard, I instantly made the connection that if I shouldn’t be driving, I shouldn’t be in charge of a school. I was able to make a doctor’s appointment the very next day, and I got a letter to take some time off. That day I also got a phone call to say that I better get home to my parents. My dad, who never left the hospital since his stroke, had taken a turn for the worse and probably wouldn’t make it through the night.
I said a final goodbye to him over the phone before getting on a late night flight. I’ll never know if he heard those words. I spent another 10 or so days back with my mom, cleaning up things my dad left behind that needed to get cleaned up. At this point I was also supplementing my prescription.
I hit a low point after I returned home. One unusually painful night I had to ask my daughter to drive me to the dispensary… a dad asking his daughter to drive him to get his fix. That’s not really what it was, but it felt like that to me. Loser dad who can barely get himself from bed to the couch, and didn’t have the wherewithal to even get dinner ready for a wife working full time, having to get his daughter to drive him to buy drugs. Not a proud moment for me.
Within a couple more weeks, the inflammation reduced, the nerve wasn’t compressed as much, and I was able to get back to only a mild prescription… And then back to work after 5 or 6 weeks off. The whole experience was awful physically and emotionally, but it had an end! I knew it had an end, but sometimes at my worst I questioned it. I wondered, if this is life from now on, could I go on?
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My sister had an MS diagnosis for over 25 years. Slowly and incrementally she lost feeling in her legs. They were numb to the touch, but she felt pain, searing sciatica pain. Shooting pain that ran down her legs. For the most part things would stay static, then she’d have a small episode, and she’d lose a bit more feeling, be a bit less mobile, but the pain persisted. About 4-5 years ago the episodes escalated, and her mobility declined much more quickly. And still the pain.
Recently it became clear that she’d be moving from a walker to a wheelchair. A week ago she had six falls (only 6 that I’m aware of in that week). She would cut her finger cutting vegetables, and not feel it, only becoming aware of the injury from seeing the blood. And despite this numbness and lack of feeling, there was still the never-ending sciatica pain.
On Monday her daily pain was ended. 56 years old. Half of that time in incrementally greater pain. I can honestly say that she was stronger than me.
I’ll miss her dearly, and yet I’m thankful she isn’t going to suffer any more.
Sharon Silvera Truss May 15, 1969 – November 24, 2025
I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday morning. It wasn’t great. I had a vision for something I had planned to do in the future and I was suddenly faced with the reality that it wasn’t going to live up to the hype I had built up. I envisioned it completely differently to the reality of what it was. Now it has me questioning my plans I thought I had set. It’s not a huge deal but when this kind of reality sets in, it’s a bit of a wake up call.
It reminds me of a video I once made. It was called Brave New World Wide Web. I started building the slideshow and I had a Cure song, Just Like Heaven, in my head. It was going to be perfect, the long lyric-less intro was going to be an ideal opening. I would play the song in the car to and from work, and I couldn’t wait to put the video together.
Then it was finally time to sync the slides to the song, and it… just… didn’t… work. It was awful. I remember walking out of our little home office absolutely dejected. I’d built it up in my mind as the perfect marriage of song and slides and it wasn’t to be. A few hours later I found a song that couldn’t have worked better and all was good.
Yesterday morning I had another one of those unexpected moments. In the end, it’s not going to be a big deal, but in that ‘it just isn’t going to work’ vision-doesn’t-match-reality moment I felt like I was slapped in the face. It was a wake up call I didn’t know I needed.
It’s time to start thinking about a plan B. I’m metaphorically looking for the next song, one that will work. I found one for my video, I’ll find one for this… I just didn’t know until yesterday that I’d have to have an alternate plan. The great news is, I’ve got time. No rush, just a wake up call that there’s a mismatch between my vision and reality that needs to be sorted out. I’m glad that I see it now, and not a year from now.
A few months ago I wrote the following in response to a LinkedIn post, and then saved it in my drafts. The problem is, I didn’t copy the link to the original post properly. Furthermore, if I recall, it didn’t really answer the question that was posed. It was tangentially connected but not completely on topic.
I’ve edited my comment slightly, and I want to share it since I’m wonder if ‘it’s just me’ feeling this way?
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It’s the doing more with less that fuels my disillusionment.
Greater and often unrealistic expectations of parents and universities.
Greater student social-emotional as well as educational needs.
Greater demands to prevent litigation (more documentation, more protection of data, more health & safety requirements… all ‘necessary’, but time consuming.)
Greater demands and expectations from the Ministry of Education, and Worksafe BC.
Greater costs – pay hikes, heating costs, perishable supplies. Even with no cuts to education, less money gets to the classroom. I could go on. I’ve watched my role shift from educational leader to middle manager of an educational machine. I feel like a shield trying to redirect and manage the above impacts away from teachers so that they, rather than we, can do great things with kids.
Still an important role but a lot less personally rewarding.
As I approach the age of 58, it’s not only clear that I’ve lived more than half my life, I’m approaching the point at which, if I’m lucky, I’ve got about 1/3 of a life left. That’s not a sad statement, it’s just the reality of the genetics I’ve been dealt.
It’s a wonderful reminder of how precious life is. It’s as wonderful reminder to pause, to appreciate tiny moments, to find a reason to smile, to laugh, and to share special moments with others.
When we find moments in our day to appreciate, the day has been worth spending. When we go through the motions of the day in order to get the day done, we’ve simply wasted the day. Are 100 wasted days worth as much as 25 meaningful ones?
And so counting the days is not as important as valuing them. We need to appreciate the time we have such that if today was going to be our last day, we can say that it was well spent. Stack a few hundred or a few thousand well spent ‘last days’ together and you’ve stacked up a life worth living, no matter how much time you’ve got left.
The kids never put their shoes in the front hall closet.
I could go on, there are so many little things that family members do that can irk us. None of them are a really big deal, but they rub us the wrong way and perhaps even anger us. We might think them as thoughtless acts. We might even think they are doing it just to bother us… the thing is, they aren’t.
My wife, Ann, has a problem shutting cupboard doors. We joke that it’s genetic, her sister does it, and one of my daughters does it too. I’ll walk into the kitchen and one or two cupboard doors will be left open. It’s not an occasional thing, it’s a very regular thing. And when I see this, do you know what I think?
Ann was here.
That’s it. Nothing else. There’s no anger, no need to correct the behaviour. No lecture.
Sometimes it gets a smile out of me. Sometimes I try to guess what she went into the cupboards for?
What it’s not is an anger point, or a reason to lecture or correct the behaviour. This might seem like a little thing, but like I mentioned, this happens all the time. Just imagine what my life would be like if I let it bother me?
So what are some little things that others do, that you let bother you? How much better would your life be if you just let it go? That little behaviour isn’t being done to bother you, so if it does bother you, who is the one that has the problem?
After an argument with a loved one doesn’t end well, you re-live the argument with alternate endings.
After an angry exchange at a traffic light, you yell a profanity while sitting alone in your car. No one heard you, but you are now two lights away and still thinking about the incident. Replaying the anger, and the things you’d like to say to the other driver’s face, as if it mattered now as much as when the exchange actually happened.
After a witty exchange with a coworker, you think up other funny quips that you could have said. Nothing you will actually say later, just things that would have been great to say in the moment.
How many lives do we live in our minds, which never transpose to reality? Re-imagined scenarios, re-lived moments, re-invented futures. None of which will ever come to pass. Never lived in the real world… yet very real in our minds.
The idea of being in an echo chamber suggests that you are surrounded by people, media, and information sources that are constantly reinforcing your beliefs… without exposing you to opposing viewpoints unless arguing convincingly against those viewpoints.
I’ve discussed, a number of times, my concerns that we are living more and more in dichotomies, where sides or factions are so diametrically opposed, no one can hold a stance in the middle without being considered to be from the opposing viewpoints. You either live in an echo chamber or you live in an opposing echo chamber. Because the voices in the middle are ‘othered’ and so not part of any stance or view that can be snuck into an echo chamber. The voices of the middle don’t get to echo. And so the echo chamber narrows, keeping exposure to outside views securely away.
The echoes are getting louder and it’s getting easier to listen to them and nothing else… which ultimately leads to us spewing the same echoes we hear. So it’s up to us to seek diverse stances and viewpoints. It’s up to us to actively extend our searches for reliable information. And it’s up to us to question the reliability of our sources. It’s either that or voluntarily be just another voice echoed in a narrow echo chamber that seems to be getting further polarized and biased every day.
Last year we took students camping and it poured rain for most of the night. I recorded the sound of the rain from inside my tent around 2am and it sounded torrential. This year the weather was perfect: Hardly a cloud in the sky, warm, windless, and rainless.
I just came back from the trip. It could not have been better. It was well planned, the weather cooperated, and the students were awesome. The only kid ‘issues’ we had the whole trip, and I use the term ‘issue’ loosely, was speeding the slower kids up on our walks. That’s hardly an issue to deal with. There were zero discipline issues.
Looking back on the two trips, students getting flooded out of their tents, and getting soaked to the bone on our walks last year are things our students think back fondly on. The adversity didn’t ruin the trip, it emboldened the memory, and our students look back fondly at it.
Here’s the interesting thing. If I had to choose, I’d absolutely prefer the amazing weather we had this year over camping in the rain again. But for the students that went both years, I’d bet that in a few years they will remember the stormy night much more than they’ll remember last night.
No one wants to voluntarily go through adversity, but sometimes adversity is what galvanizes a fond memory. And getting wet on a camping trip, while uncomfortable, isn’t trauma inducing. In fact it can be character building. All that said, isn’t it interesting that I’d still pick a night like last night over a repeat of the rain storm we had last year.
