Tag Archives: reflection

OneWord: Pause

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In 2020, I appropriately chose a #OneWord of Resilience. For 2021 I chose Thrive. In January of 2023 I chose ‘Many words, not one word’, and these were: Consistency, Efficiency, Positivity, Vocal, and Gracious.

I’m not waiting for January to pick a new word. The school year starts on Tuesday and I’m picking a special #OneWord to focus on for my final year before retiring. This word is Pause.

The inspiration came on my weekly Coquitlam Crunch walk this morning. The past few weeks were prime blackberry season. They have been ripe for the picking, delicious and abundant. But last week it really seemed like the season was at its end. Today on our walk they were very few on the nearby branches and none were the large juicy variety that we could pick to our heart’s content just a week or two before.

Just like that, the season was over… Or so I thought. At the top of the trail we take a small detour loop through a more wooded area and just as we were about to get back on the main path, we passed a section that was filled with ripe berries ready to be picked. I grabbed one and kept walking. Then I stopped. I paused. I told my buddy to hold up. We paused our fitness trackers and spent a few minutes picking and eating blackberries.

A delicious pause in our day.

And there you have it: Inspiration for my last school year. Pause.

Taking the time to sneak in a final moment to enjoy the last of the blackberry season was my literal example of ‘stopping to smell the roses’. And that’s what I plan to do all year. Pause and appreciate, pause and celebrate, pause and experience.

There is a lot I’m going to miss when I leave this job, what I don’t want to do is miss things while I still have time to enjoy them. I’m going to seek out opportunities to take pause in my day and truly experience the things I cherish.

Remembered and forgotten

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I went to a friend’s father’s funeral today. It was a Catholic service. The music was pleasant, the tribute was lovely. You can tell he was loved by family and friends. It was really nice.

This made me think a bit about what kind of service I’d want? If I had a terminal diagnosis and knew the date was looming, I’d probably want a celebration of life before I died. To me that is the time to actually get together and celebrate.

That said, I’d prefer to live a long healthy life and slip away in my sleep at a ripe, but cognitively sound, old age. Without knowing the date was coming, what kind of celebration would I want?

Two things come to mind. First, I’d want a long interval between my death and my celebration of life. Don’t hold it when the pain of loss is close, don’t make my death date a date to remember. That’s not a date I want defining memories of me. Second, it’s not very important what I want, after all, I’m gone. Let the people who I matter to pick a distant date, maybe my birthday for example, to gather in any way they wish, and to do with my ashes whatever they wish.

Forget the actual death, remember the life the way you want. The celebration isn’t for me, it’s for those left behind.

27 years

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Today is my 27th Wedding Anniversary. Including the time we’ve dated, I’ve now spent more than half of my life living with my wife. What a wonderful adventure it has been! I feel blessed to have found such a wonderful person to spend my life with. And together we’ve raised two amazing daughters that I couldn’t be more proud of. Tonight we celebrate as a family, breaking bread together at one of our favourite restaurants. Tomorrow we head off early to go to a funeral of a friend’s parent. The contrast in celebration is stark, and an important reminder to appreciate all that we have, while we still have it.

I’m also days away from my 27th anniversary of being an educator. And here too is a similar contrast, as I plan for this to be my last year before I retire. I don’t leave counting the days, I leave feeling like there is still more work to be done. I leave with a reminder that I’m going to miss this as much as I’m looking forward to the freedom of not working daily.

How did I get to two milestones of 27 years and still feel like things have only just begun? How does time go so quickly? How am I the parent of two adults in their 20’s? My oldest daughter is a quarter of a century old. My young wife and I are both in our late 50’s. She has been an amazing educator for over 30 years. Those just don’t feel like our statistics, those are the stats of older people. I saw a T-shirt on an older man, who rode past me a few days ago, and the message on his shirt said: “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” I haven’t connected so quickly to a T-shirt slogan in a long time.

All that said, today is a day of celebration. The past 27 years have not necessarily been easy, but they certainly have been rewarding and memorable… and I look forward to the next 27 years of finding joy, showing appreciation for what I have, and feeling younger than I am.

Visually acclimatized

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I’m sitting in my basement and on the floor in front of me is a framed painting that should be on the wall. It’s one of a pair that used to side-by-side, but they need a couple Velcro strips to get them aligned. Unfortunately the strip unstuck from the one that’s currently on the floor, and I removed it because it looked way too crooked on the wall.

It’s an easy fix, but I haven’t done it yet. It’s interesting that although I’m downstairs a lot, before looking at the painting on the floor just now, I’ve barely noticed the fact that it’s on the floor and missing from next to the matching frame on the wall.

How many things are like that for us? Items sitting inconspicuously in the absolutely wrong spot but we are visually acclimatized to where they sit? We go about our day ignoring the fact that items have a new home in a location they shouldn’t have?

I wonder if that’s the same for our brains and the way we think about things?

Community & Friendship

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As I head to retirement, I’ve been thinking a bit about community and friendships.

When I think about my friendships I’ve come to the realization that of the friends I keep in contact with regularly, they all date back to my first few years of teaching (25+ years ago) and before (university and high school). It’s a little shocking to realize that I haven’t added very close friends for the second half of my life. I have great friends and am not actively looking for more, but that’s still a surprising thing to recognize.

I have friends I connect with when I go back to Toronto, one friend from university here in BC that I try to see regularly despite our very different lives and schedules, and then my friends I met in my early teaching career. And in thinking about retirement I’m very interested in fostering community among these friends.

When there isn’t a sport or a club that we are all members of, how do we make sure we connect regularly? What do we do to build community. My university buddy and I try to make sure that we have experiences and don’t just meet to reminisce. Another buddy and I do the Coquitlam Crunch weekly and try to work out at least one more time a week together. My wonder is, what else can I do with friends to ensure we build community, and grow together rather than apart?

If you could turn back time…

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If you could turn back time, what would you do differently? I try to live life without regrets. I do my best to think of ways to feel blessed with the choices I’ve made and the life I have lived.

Occasionally, I’ll wish that I travelled more, or that I chose to be a bit more adventurous… but then I wonder if that would have taken me down paths where I didn’t meet my wife, or my best friend, or if I wouldn’t have had my kids.

I don’t know how the road not taken would have diverted me from the life I have? And so I don’t want to turn back time, but instead I want to appreciate the time I have. And that’s why I think I’m going to retire at the end of the next school year.

More on this later, but I wanted to put that out in the universe. I’m not turning back time, but I’m looking to make the time I have left a little more special.

We don’t need more inputs

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I heard a quote on a podcast today and I really felt it: The podcast is Jimmy Carr on Chris Willamson’s Modern Wisdom:

“The answers you’re looking for is in the silence you’re avoiding. You need fewer inputs, not more.”

How often do we seek answers externally when what we should be doing is looking inward?

Sphere of control

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Do you ever think about the things that consume your thoughts and how much control you have over those things? What are the things that concern you that you can change versus those that you cannot change? And how does that compare to the time spent on these different things?

There’s a difference between living in anxiety and stress versus living a life you design for yourself. Spending time thinking about, and worrying about things beyond your control is anxiety building and stressful. On the other hand, although you might still feel stressed about making good choices and doing the right thing when you have the ability to control the outcome, this is far more empowering. Worrying about what you cannot change is playing victim to circumstance. Whereas, strategizing about doing well with the things you can change is designing your own circumstances.

Sure, there is still room for doubt. Yes, you might make mistakes. It’s possible to worry too much about things you do have control over… but in all these cases the opportunity is there to alter your own destiny. Meanwhile the person perseverating about things they have no control over is punishing themselves with worry and anxiety with no potential for positive outcome.

What’s within your sphere of control? That’s the healthy place to focus your attention.

Will you remember this day?

A day, a week, a month from now…

A year, a decade, a lifetime from now…

Will you remember this day?

When you call a sibling, text a friend, video chat with a kid or a parent…

When you go to a birthday, an anniversary, a reunion…

Will a memory from today come up in conversation?

What separates today from the many days before, now long forgotten?

Of course if every day were truly memorable, it would be unlikely that we could recall them all, and peak experiences do not feel like they are special if they occur every day… but the question still holds, “Will you remember this day?”

If not, what can you do to make it more than just another forgotten day?

Doubling Down

We learn from our mistakes… if we let ourselves.

The problem is that often when we should admit we are wrong we double down, we get defensive, we justify with bias.

Double down or learn. We can’t go both.

Although that’s not totally true. We can do both, just not simultaneously. We can double down in the heat of the moment, reflect later, recognize our error, and make amends, admit our error, and hopefully learn.

But learning is a whole lot easier, and less confrontational, when we can admit our error before putting our back up and defending it.

It’s not just better for us, it’s better for everyone around us… and we learn, and grow, and maybe spend a little less time doubling down to defend our errors in the future.