Tag Archives: reflection

Easy distraction

I’m finding my phone to be a painfully easy distraction that’s sucking away too much of my time. I need it to write this post. I need it to meditate. I need it to listen to music while I work out. I need it to listen to my book. These are all legitimate reasons to ‘need’ my phone.

I don’t ‘need’ it beyond that, but it still ends up in my hands, it still takes my attention. It still sucks time out of my day.

I’m realizing that I need to put it down more, tuck it away more, leave it alone more.

Less phone, more life beyond the screen.

Shifting Paradigms

TLDR: I’m not publishing any more posts on my Pair-a-Dimes blog (where this post is being cross-posted)… I’d be honoured if my Pair-a-Dimes subscribers, (and/or you), subscribed here on Daily Ink. To do so, fill in your email on the subscription form on the right-side column on your computer, or under the comment box on your mobile device.

Well, if it isn’t obvious yet, I will make it clear now. After whimsically naming my blog ‘Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts‘ on a blog service called Elgg, and publishing my first post on March 29th, 2006 (reposted on DavidTruss.com on March 26th, 2008), it is now evident to me that I’ve fully transitioned to my Daily-Ink blog. My last post on Pair-a-Dimes (Choice time for teacher Pro-D) before this one was over a year ago. The one before that (How do we get to ‘YES’?) was written almost two years ago. Meanwhile, on my Daily-Ink I’ve posted every day since July 6th, 2019 (It’s time…). That’s 3 days short of 3 years, or 1,093 daily blog posts.

To put that number in perspective, I had my Pair-a-Dimes blog for 16 years and I only blogged 356 times… less than what I did in my first year blogging daily. That said, Pair-a-Dimes was much longer in format, and much more focussed on education. And although I still write about education and learning on Daily-Ink, I will miss the educational focus of Pair-a-Dimes with the tagline, “Reflections on Education, Technology and Learning“. But committing to blogging daily, and adding more to another blog is too much for me… especially as I think about reviving my podcasts this summer, after an almost 2 year hiatus.

I absolutely loved the community I built around Pair-a-Dimes. This blog is the reason I got to present both for Alan November, and with his team. This blog got me connected to Connected Principals, a now defunct site where principals shared their learning (these are the posts I also shared there). This blog became a learning space for me.


This blog is where I learned to do html, it’s where I learned about wikis, it’s what inspired me to blog with students. It helped me become a better educator and a more reflective leader.

I may come back here to post again, but it’s unlikely. However, because I host both blogs on DavidTruss.com, this blog will stay up for as long as I choose to keep blogging or keep my personal website, so it’s not going anywhere… it’s also not going to be updated.

I realize that I have a significant number of email subscribers to Pair-a-Dimes who might enjoy getting 1-3 minute daily reads via email. If that’s you, I’m truly honoured. On your computer you’ll find the subscribe button on the right hand side column, near the top of this page. If you are on mobile, scroll down below the comment section to find the subscribe button. I’m going to try to transfer over the WordPress subscribers, (whom I don’t have an email address for), but I won’t send an email to the 450 people still subscribed to Pair-a-Dimes on Feedburner after all these years. Instead, I’ll post this and hopefully anyone reading via email will subscribe to Daily-Ink. Whether you choose to transfer or not, I want to thank you as a reader of my Pair-a-Dimes. Whether you read posts dating back to 2006, or if you found one post that made you subscribe, you helped inspire me to keep writing. Thank you for being one of over 370,000 Pair-a-Dimes visitors since I moved to DavidTruss.com, I’m honoured that you joined me, that you took the time to read, comment, inspire me, and contribute to my learning.

The blogging adventures continue here on my Daily-Ink.

Nothing and Everything

The earth has been around for 4.55 billion years. Homo sapiens for about 200,000 years.

200,000/4,550,000,000 *100= 0.0043956043956

Humans have only been on earth for 0.0044% of the earth’s history. Or if you look at the age of the one universe, 13.78 billion years, humans have only existed for 0.00144% of all time.

For a little more perspective, a single 100 year life is lived for only 0.00000073% of all time. Insignificant. Our lives are not even a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of the universe. Nothing.

Yet for us, it’s everything. It’s all we know. It’s all we have. It’s no wonder people want to believe in an afterlife… why, there simply has to be more… or so the thinking goes. But regardless of your beliefs, this life is unlikely to go past 100 years. Life is so short and fleeting. This begs the questions:

Are you passing time, or are you experiencing it?

Are you completing tasks or creating memories?

Are you treating life like it is nothing, or do you realize that, for you, it is everything?

Doing something special

I don’t know how to write this without sounding like it’s bragging, so I’m just going to say it… We run an awesome little school.

It’s not perfect. We have a lot to improve still, but in 10 years we’ve had 10 iterations, tweaking and improving each year. Yes, covid was challenging to deal with but the changes to the way we integrate courses and have students do SCRUM project management have been pretty amazing these past couple years. Student inquiries and their ability to present and make incredible visuals to present with have levelled up considerably. We keep getting better and we are all excited about more updates to our program next year.

So when we finish off a year and our staff get letters and emails like these, it feels pretty good:

There are no words to convey how much we have appreciated all your efforts. Reinventing high school is no small thing. We have had highs and lows but the skills my kids are learning are going to serve them well in college and life. Thank you.

And:

Hi! I’m sure you already know this, but as another school year ends I still feel the need to say what an amazing, life-giving, and nurturing place IHub is and to express my deep thankfulness to everyone who works so hard to make IHub what it is! You’re not simply saving some students from being chewed up and spit out in pieces by a more traditional high school experience for which they are not well suited, you are opening doors that would have been invisible, facilitating adventures of self-discovery that would have been impossible and changing futures. Deep thanks to all of you!!!!!

And this from a excellent student who would be successful no matter where they attended school:

Thank you for a wonderful first year at ihub! I can now say firsthand what an amazing school this is and how it is a perfect fit for me!

Sometimes I end the year dissatisfied that we, that I, didn’t do more. Wishing I’d somehow given more of myself, and contributed more to our students and our community. This year these notes hit me at the right time. I realize that we are doing something special, and while I know there’s more to do, I will head into summer holidays in a couple weeks feeling great about what we’ve been doing and what’s still to come.

Inner voices

Have you ever wondered about that inner voice you hear? Who is speaking? And who is the voice speaking to?

Is the voice lifting you up or pushing you down?

Is the voice helping you make decisions or making your decisions difficult?

Is the voice convincing you to take action or has it convinced you not to?

There are times the voice listens to your body, telling you of hunger, thirst, or need of sleep. There are other times when it listens to your mind, telling you to question, to learn, to problem solve. These are times when the inner voice makes sense, it is a collaborator, an ally. There is congruence.

And then there are times it negotiates with you, telling you reasons you should or should not do something… it is indecisive or in conflict with your instincts. At these moments I wonder who is talking to who? When the scales tips and the decision is made, whose decision was it? Where does the incongruence come from?

Is there a path we can travel where we live in full congruence with ourselves? Can we find a path where our inner voice always acts in our best interest? Where we do not argue with ourselves? Is this a path worth seeking, or are we indecisive by nature and require internal conflict?

What does your inner voice think when it hears this question: Can our internal voice be harmonious?

Is that a realistic goal or an unrealistic expectation?

Back to (almost) normal

Tonight, at the Inquiry Hub grad, will be the first time in a few years where I’m going to be talking to a live audience larger than a classroom. This is just another example of things going back to normal… except in 2019, when I spoke it was to an audience of most of the students and parents from our school. This year we only invited the grads and their parents, not the whole community.

The reason for the bigger audience in 2019 is that our grad isn’t just a grad, it’s an annual celebration with awards and we used to invite everyone. But the school was smaller and in 2020 we were planning to move to a bigger venue before the pandemic cancelled the big event. For 2022, after 2 years of grads crossing the stage individually with just their family in the audience, we chose this year to host only the grads at this event and to stream the event live for everyone else.

This is probably something we’ll do from now on. Times change. Traditions change. What’s ‘normal’ changes. That’s the theme of my speech, that normal changes, and this could be a good thing. We don’t have to go back to what used to be pre-pandemic. We can change things up, make things better, blend old and new.

When my family moved to China it was a major culture shock. Things changed for us drastically, and we adapted. When we returned from China, that was a really stressful point in my marriage. My wife and I fell back into old habits, but we weren’t the same people anymore. It was a major adjustment and a lot of work to create a new connection and relationship that wasn’t just the version from two years previous.

This is an exciting time to be living in, we’ve just had a very foreign two year experience, and now we’ve got to decide what do we keep from the pre-pandemic experience, and what do we change, for the better, thanks to living through the pandemic experience?

What’s the new normal that’s better than the old normal?

Stillness

There is a quiet that comes from being still.
A silence felt with settled body and mind.
A calm that seeps in and starts to spill,
Over busy thoughts and plans left behind.

Stillness envelops, quiet reigns.
Heart rate slows, gradually slows.
Nothing bothersome remains.
The quite settles, like gentle prose.

Breaths deepen, eyes close.
Awareness of how the breath flows.

Stillness envelops, quiet reigns.
Only tranquility remains.

Stuck again

I have this Murphy’s Law thing that always seems to happen to me. Whenever I am holding any kind of chord that is dragging behind me, or that I’m pulling, it will get stuck. Pulling an extension cord from behind the couch, it wedges underneath the couch leg. Pulling the vacuum into another room, the hose catches on some furniture forcing me to retreat. Holding my laptop and moving to another room, the power cord slides under the door.

It’s not an occasional thing, it happens all the time with anything from a loose thread, to a garden hose, to an article of clothing in my hands, to the dangling latch on our garbage can. If it can catch on something it will.

The thing is, I will probably always think that this happens to me more than to anyone else. In reality that may not be the case, because I don’t have a reason to remember the non-examples, the times I actually get away with pulling something that doesn’t get stuck. These non-events do not create a memorable moment. I don’t think, ‘Wow, it didn’t happen that time’, I simply don’t notice and don’t remember it not happening.

However each time it does happen it is self reinforcing:

‘See, it happened again.’

”This always happens to me.’

‘Damn it! Really? Come on.’

‘Of course.’

‘#@<&!’

My question is, is the cord or hose getting stuck again, with the universe conspiring against me to ensure it happens to me more than anyone else, or is my mind stuck focusing on these instances as if they are occurring far more often than they should?

What exactly is getting stuck?

Back on track

I ended up only shooting arrows once, last week, for the entire month of March… and I didn’t shoot well. Today I was back on track.

My personal best is a 289. Today I short a 288 in my first round, with no 8’s (all gold):

Then I shot a 287 in my second round with two 8’s, but also my first three X round in a while:

I made a couple minor adjustments since my last outing and they seemed to really work for me. Now I just need to get back to shooting a bit more regularly, and I think very soon I can break into the 290’s. I’m approaching one year (April 25th) since I first hit 289, and so I hope to crack this before my 1 year anniversary.

If I keep shooting this consistently, I’m sure a new personal best is within reach!

Blog posts from the past

I have been writing daily since July 2019, but I have had a blog since 2006. Yesterday I had a Facebook memory that was a blog post I wrote in 2010, while on vacation in Vietnam.

The Trap is a post that looks at tourist traps that hook you into buying souvenirs, and then equates this to some of the trappings we find in school like the textbook and resources that become the only thing that is taught. Re-reading my post yesterday, I was brought back in time to my adventures, and it made me think about how enriching travel is. We really expand our horizons and see things from different perspectives when we travel to foreign lands. The post shared a link to an earlier post, Bubble Wrap, that starts off, “After a month in China, I’ve come to realize that North Americans live in a bubble wrapped world,” and looks at how we try to (over) protect kids.

Being exposed to different places and cultures really expands and enriches our perspective. Visiting our writing from years ago allows us to see the influence that these experiences have given us. I miss traveling and feel like there is so much of the world still to explore… and to feed me creative things to write about. I don’t see a lot of travel in my near future, but I think I’ll do a little reflection on some of travel I have done, and revisit some memories that are still present, but slowly starting to fade. I haven’t revisited a lot of my past writing in a while either, so I think I’ll do that too.