works of wanderlust

Category: learning & study

  • i meditated daily for one month and…

    Hey. This isn’t my first mythic quest for enlightment. I’ve jumped on the whole mediation bandwagon time and again over the course of my life. Sitting still. Breathing. Realizing my eyes are dancing around behind my eyelids and wondering if that’s normal while little gong noises play from the speaker on my phone.

    Okay, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. Probably. Definitely.

    Cuz see, meditation is supposed to be good for you, and not just in a wibbly wobbly new agey kind of way, either. Mentally focusing. Resetting your own thoughts. Mindfulness. Personal awareness. Turning down the volume of life. Turning out the stress. Turning off the screen for a few minutes, if nothing else.

    But sticking to a meditation schedule is not as simple as it sounds at first. I mean, unless I ship off to an ashram and live some kind of autere life, finding inner peace in the Canadian suburbs just as the summer fun season is kicking off is decidedly more challenging than that. I needed a plan. And to suit that plan, I dcided I should get started with a clear goal. An experiment. How many days in a row could I set aside at least ten minutes to meditate?

    Here’s how it went…

    Day 1

    Okay. I’m all set. Kinda.

    I propped myself up in a quiet corner of the bedroom, sat facing away from the door and dimmed the light. I tried to quiet my mind and… my wife walked in and asked me for the amazon password. *sigh*

    Ok. Bad start.

    Instead I decided to focus my focus. I recall I used to have some app on my phone that was semi-free and was solid enough for my needs. Quickly I redownloaded that and set up a new account while I was at it. Hey, we’re starting fresh here, right? Two minutes later my headphones are plugged in my ears and I’m sitting back there on the floor facing away from the door, a quiet voice in my headphones telling me to get comfortable and relax my posture while focusing on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. And it goes on like this for a few minutes, all good, but I can hear the teevee in the other room and my foot is starting to tingle because it’s falling asleep and…

    Focus needs work. And maybe I should shut the door next time. Oh, and a pillow or something.

    I’ll make some tweaks to the plan tomorrow. Fifteen minutes later and it seems that my zen is still on order.

    Day 2

    I have other “important” stuff going on this evening and rather than feel rushed I decided to try out an afternoon meditation session, descending down in the quieter basement while everyone else was out for an hour or so.

    So there I went. Another fifteen minutes of sitting still and within five minutes while I’m supposed to be focusing on my breathing all I can focus on is my itchy toe, and my itchy nose, and my itchy earlobe and geezers it always this cold in the basement? I mean, I’m not expecting enlightenment on day 2 but I figured I’d at the very least be able to sit still for more than sixty seconds in a row. Boy, was I wrong.

    Day 3

    The house is quieter. Normal non-weekend life has resumed and the family is off at their dance classes, so I have a couple quiet hours with the house to myself.

    I’m not going to log every day of this, by the way. At some point this log is going to start skipping days, maybe even a week, but unless I fall off my meditation cushion and miss a day I won’t necessarily report on this quest for mindfulness. Partly that’s because it’s going to get repetitive, but the other reason is that guess what I sat there thinking about for fifteen minutes today: this. I had a little narrative running through my mind planning out what I was going to write as my entry for today. Congrats, dude, you just discovered another way to think about working. Multitasking is probably not the point.

    I set the timer for a simple fifteen minutes session and sat there, thoughts of my breath and my blog running through my head. The only one less settled than I was the dog, who seemed a little preturbed that I was sitting on the floor but had no interest in playing with her ball. Enlightenment eludes for yet another day, he writes sarcastically and knowing that nothing is ever that simple.

    Day 4

    My mind is awash with grey noise.

    I sat still for fifteen minutes in the late morning today having set my timer and settled onto the floor once again. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath and ignore the itch on the tip of my nose.

    The biologist in me explains it as some kind of neural cooldown. Optic nerves dealing with the lack of input and turning boredom into randomness. I sat there with my eyes closed and there was not darkness: there was static, a subtle static of dark hues, browns and oranges and blues so deep that they would be mistaken for black save but the twitching of my brain to the contrary. And I afraid to open my eyes to ruin the emergent light show watched as the static rippled like the tides upon a pond and then blossomed into shimmering rings of fire dropping away into infinity which then dissolved into flickers of hallucinated electric shocks from the edge of my vision, my eyelids hung relaxed and fighting the urge to open as the minutes passed before the chime rung once more from my phone.

    Day 6

    I have been reading one of the Sam Harris books on meditation and one of the first things that stuck out for me was the notion (tho I’m paraphrasing here) that meditating doesn’t need to mean cosplaying as a Buddhist monk. The concept of western-style meditation can just mean finding a quiet place to sit and practice refocusing and re-centering the mind, honing in on the breath. To me, this means losing that attention about ten times per minute and then trying to reel it back in each time. He explained it like, I dunno, pushups. You just do lots of pushups until eventually you are good at doing pushups, but you don’t expect your first, hundredth, or even your thousandth pushup to be some gloriously perfect pushup. It’s just the work of doing all those pushups that brings you closer to doing better pushups… and the strength follows.

    To that end, I found myself leaving the cross-legged position of my bedroom floor and for the last two days I have been out and about in nature, finding quiet places off the beaten path to sit and practice for fifteen minutes at a go.

    Day 8

    I have been unprepared these last couple of days, by which I mean that I sat down in a quiet place to do the mindfulness thing and within two minutes of the timer starting my throat got all chalky and clammy and, you know what, I am really thirsty. Why didn’t I drink a glass of water before I started this, huh? Note to self: drink a big glass of water before I start next time.

    Day 11

    The habit is falling into place. I mean, it is not yet simple nor easy, but I have found a kind of rhythm to the little blocks of time that I allocate to myself for this practice. And yet, here is the rub: I think I am just finding a new way of doing something I’ve already been doing for years.

    I have occasionally used the word “meditative” to describe running. This evening I went out to run club. I had already logged my fifteen minute mindfulness session earlier in the day, and as the evening pressed on I met up with the group for an hour of trail running. For about ten minutes I found myself running for a stretch alone, a few of the people a minute or so behind me and a pair of runners about a minute ahead. I haven’t been doing much solo running lately, and then there I was, with ten minutes of just me and the trail… and I was darting along, eyes wide open, focusing on my breathing, thinking about nothing much at all, and it struck me just how meditative those solo moments on the trail can be.

    So maybe it isn’t entirely strange that I find myself sinking into a familiar sort of feeling sitting with my eyes closed, focusing on my breathing and clearing my mind. The only thing really missing from these recent sessions is the trail, after all.

    Day 14

    Just through a busy weekend and squeezing in time for mindfulness is when there are places to be and schedules to keep is not very meditative. I found myself pinching in two sessions at inconvenient moments and then fighting the focus fight, trying to bring that newly practiced attention muscle to bear on the moment but fighting the agenda-scraping mental blur that was whirling in my head of thinking this is just another task I need to accomplish today. Counter-productive? I dunno. I need to reflect on if it helped or if it was merely performative for the app streak. Yikes.

    Day 20

    I feel a bit performative. It’s been a busy busy busy week with all the goings on around the end of school for The Kid and and I’ve been squeezing in these meditative activities in the cracks of life.

    Part of me is okay with this. That’s the point. I tried going back to listening to the guided meditations in my app (the free ones, because I’m not quite ready to pay for this experiment yet!) and they all try to assure me in a calm soothing voice that the whole point is to find five or ten minutes of calm in a hectic day, but my racing mind is nagging me about the dangers of seeking quick fixes for complex problems. My unsettled mind seems like a complex problem and a soothing voice in an app does really seem like a quick fix.

    Day 23

    I haven’t mentioned this, I don’t think so at least, but every single one of the last twenty two days of meditation have been, no matter where… sitting.

    Small detail. Sure.

    But today I thought I would mix things up and try one laying down on my back. Does it make a difference. I mean, I decided again to lean into one of the guided meditations in my app—there is either just a timer with chimes or there are podcast-like tracks of people telling you affirmations and breathing exercises and on and on—and the voice in my ears told me to find a comfortable position either sitting or laying down on my back, so I opted for the latter.

    There really are not any rules.

    I mean, I’ve been lurking in the shadows of latent skepticism about this whole thing, if I’m being honest. I have been side-eyeing the rational part of my brain telling me that there is purpose in method and method in a larger picture of what this is and that isn’t wrong it’s just not clear what the details are doing to the foundations of the larger picture of this thing. Do this. Or that. Whatever. It’s groovy. Just breath or don’t or both. You pick. My skeptic senses are tingling today, and I can’t help but tell you that no matter how clear my mind might feel—or usually just gently vibed—I’m not entirely conviced this road leads to enlightnment so much as a subscription to an expensive app.

    Day 26

    I wrote a longer article today about that earlier revelation I had connecting my meditative running experience with this whole sitting and meditating thing. To be honest, as the month nears its end I think I do prefer the feets version of this seeking zen.

    Day 28

    I’ve decided that twenty-eight days equals a month.

    This mythic quest, a personal experiment in search of pop cultural enlightenment has reached a kind of natural end I think.

    And what then are my conclusions?

    Look, I set out to find a kind of mindfulness in the cracks of my day. I knew going in that I had tried this before. I had played with the mental exercises that were meant to build focus and balance the mind and relax the soul. These, I still believe, are all good for us. We live in this frenzied world of social media doom-scrolling and never-ending attention seeking AI algorithms that are endlessly patient to prey upon our limited attention. Any ability we foster, any effort we make, any strength we seek to build our resistance against this is good.

    And maybe, just maybe, my two-bit attempt at finding all that in an app or method that was itself was always bumping at me to subscribe or rate it or rate a guided session to which I just partook, maybe, just maybe, and maybe more than maybe, that was not the right approach.

    I spent the majority of the month using nothing other than the timer inside the app to find what I had set as default: fifteen minutes of mindfulness… to which the same app would collect my meditation stats and add to my streak and ask me to set goals. I assume all those yogis and far off folks seeking enlightenment through these similar methods are totally posting their meditation bonafides on their tiktoks, right? No. I don’t want to blame an app trying to do the right thing, but it is easy to get cynical when the end game was always giving me vibes of monetizing my mindfulness. So… there’s that.

    But in the end what I think of the whole thing, from quiet moments in nature to surreal mental light shows from an under-stimulated brain to distractions by the dog or the family or the wasps flying around my bare kneecaps in the park or anything… it was an effort and it was… ok.

    I also realize that I find mindfulness in other ways in my life: walking through nature, running along rainy trails, reading in the park, and making art as I focus on light and colour and lines. Parking myself on a cushion and closing my eyes is alright, but it didn’t bring me peace or enlightenment.

    It brought me a great big shrug.

    The modern meditation movement, after participating with faith for one month is like the protein shake of the healthy eating movement: a quick fix in a bottle with glitzy branding. What we all just need to do, and I already have been, is eat a balanced diet and live our lives.

    Will I go sit in the park with my eyes closed again? Of course. But I’m bringing along a sketchbook and some music, too.

  • study’s end

    Twenty four hours from when I started penning these words will mark the start of the final module in a bit of professional upgrading I’ve been working on. That’s to say, class starts this time tomorrow and then after this final weekend of lectures—and one more big assignment to submit—I’ll be complete.

    On a weird side note, one of the reasons I decided to take the course was to spend a small bit of inheritance left to me by my grandmother, and to spend it on something both experiential and useful: education. The last class of the last modules is on Sunday, two days from now, which would have been her one hundred and fourth birthday. Unplanned. Coincidence.

    I spent over a decade working for the local municipal government, and that was after a previous decade spent hopping around between project and program coordination and management roles.

    I was trained for none of it.

    I had done a pair of degrees, one in science and one in education, and both pursued out of some vapid obligation to a sense that I was “supposed” to do something both useful and that would pay well. I hated lab work. And then I emerged from my education degree in a hiring freeze.  Instead I landed at a sweet job in the not-for-profit sector out on the west coast. 

    Long story short, I never went back to any job that used either of those degrees directly, but instead I bopped around using all those critical analysis sciency and stand up and educate others skills to become an ad hoc project manager, systems designer, and eventually a straight up middle manager guy.

    …with a science degree.

    After nearly a year and a half of a career transition, having done some personal projects, part time work, and personal reflection, I figured my next obvious step was to put some credentials behind all that experience I had gathered on my meandering journey through the work world. Sure, I could do it. Sure, I had a seventeen page resume giving examples. But there is just something about those educational bonafides that throws a brick through the glass walls of future employment prospects. So I’ve been working on a business certification: a piece of paper from a high class university that says, hey, Brad studied this stuff formally, listened to experts, wrote words about it, handed in assignments, and got adjudicated on his effectiveness in these things.

    And in a week or two, when that final grade appears on my transcript and they tell me I’ve completed all the pieces, I will be able to add to my resume an extra line that says “Business Analysis Certified, University of Alberta, 2025.”

    Thanks Grandma.

  • hiragana

    We have loosely settled on a trip across the Pacific.

    Unable to confidently travel southbound across the border for our semi-annual pilgrimage to the house of the mouse in California, my wife has set her sights on the sister park near Tokyo for sometime, hopefully, next year. And of course a couple weeks checking out more than just Disney, too.

    I love the idea of visiting Japan. The art and culture and food and architecture and everything that I feel would be familiar from the exports of media and such in which I partake locally.

    And as is my oft-usual approach to these things, I’ve started to prepare for this still-hypothetical trip by taking language lessons. In other words, I’ve been studying Japanese…for about a month now.

    And while the actual need to speak the language as a European-toned North American tourist has been repeatedly called into question by many friends, many Asian-descended themselves, I can’t help but feel having a basic grasp of how to (at the very, very least) read some of it might come in all too handy.

    I mean, let’s just forget for a moment the academically-rewarding aspect of learning any language, and take that as a given: Learning new languages is simply, well, human.

    But instead picture Brad stumbling through the Tokyo subway system or down a bustling alley and having some basic ability to read the signs for a shop or a washroom or even an exit. In that aforementioned Euro-centric approach I’ve taken to travel, the languages are almost always close enough and use the familiar latin-descended alphabet system. I get by. But arriving in Tokyo I would assume that recognition and some general familiarity with hiragana and katakana script will give me some advantage. And increase my enjoyment and comfort on such a trip, too.

    Thus, I have been learning. Learn slowly, of course, using apps and flashcards and online resources. But learning.

    And that hypothetical concept of a maybe trip to Asia next year seems a little bit more real in the process.

  • about all the little details.

    As Ferris Beuller wisely reminded us, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

    I spend a lot of time rushing. And this shortcoming often applies to my painting, as well.

    Of course, one of the so-called rules of watercolour painting that I picked up on early on in my artistic efforts was that in watercolour timing is gosh darn nearly everything. Almost every technique and method somehow relates to the timing of the application of the paint mixture onto the surface during a window of time while there is a certain moisture level on the paper or a particular dryness of the last application or at a very specific moment of diffusion of pigments. Timing can change the final look of a piece dramatically. Vibrancy comes from precision.

    Another of course, because of course, I mistook timing for speed.

    That is to say, I have had this knot in my brain as I reach for my brush to put paint onto the page that precision timing was all about being fast and efficient. I got tangled up in the notion that one wet the page and then zip-zap-zooey one flung the paint around in a glorious way, without hesitation, to create the perfect piece of art. I foolishly thought it was about racing the evaporation of the water.

    And sometimes it is.

    But usually it is not.

    I have learned, slowly, that in fact is goes a lot more like this: some artists are not so much good because they are fast, some artists are fast because they are good.

    short backwards strokes

    Last fall I realized that there was a certain beauty to be found in boundless intracacy. In the details. I dug into the art of sketching backwards from where I usually started. Usually, I would draw the shape of the whole then work inwards to elaborate on the details. A building would materialize as a box on the horizon and then the doors, windows, eaves, ledges, bricks and more would fill in the inside as if I was colouring inside the lines. A tree would begin as a silhouette and then I would scribble in the leaves and the branches and the shadows and all the internal shapes to make it more tree-like.  But taking that backwards, a building might start as  a valance light fixture on a brick wall that extended outward to fill outwards. A tree might start as a collection of inner branch-like shapes with some details leaves and shadows and then maybe only imply that the tree went beyond that. I think our natural inclination is to show the whole, but the edges of objects are only artificial boundaries we impose on them and in telling their stories through art sometimes its the details that are the most interesting.

    I finished the last week of the latest watercolour course just the other night and the instructor mentioned offhand that sometimes he will work on a painting for months, for a couple hours each session a few times per week. He didn’t outright say it, but it pretty much told us that his best work is slow and methodical.

    My goal for this summer is, I think, to narrow in on the details and slow down.

    When I gifted away a bunch of my painting last chrishmus I got asked repeatedly: how long did it take you to paint this?

    I dunno. I’d reply. Like, an hour.

    The paintings were nice. Simply, but nice. A work of efficiency and speed and, yes, even a bit of proficiency in a small handful of watercolour technique that allowed me to work fast—maybe even forced me to work fast.

    But those paintings were only detailed in as much as the randomness of the techniques I used implied detail. There was beauty in randomness. But the detail did not come from precision or intention, rather it fell out of accident and organic chaos, and was good because I had lightly harnessed that randomness.

    Just like when I had to re-teach myself to draw outwards from detail, I think I need to rethink my painting hangups too. What does it mean to paint the details slowly: to start with the heart of what you want to paint and then wrk outwards, rather that trying to affect the whole of the subject to the page and then fill in the bits and pieces with speed and precision?

    I dunno. But it seems like it’s gonna take a lot longer than an hour.

  • of birches in autumn.

    Summer has flitted by in a whirlwind of action, but not without a lot of paint staining the various papers and notebooks in my house. That’s to say, while I don’t really have an excuse for not posting for two months, it has not been because I have abandoned my art efforts, nor fallen to idleness.

    Autumn has left me inspired, however, and I’ve been out in the trails taking photos, sketching, and generally enjoying the orange-hued palette that nature has provided.

    I will reserve the specifics for future articles here, but I have found a few vibes sitting in the grass on multiple occasions, sketchbook in hand or watercolour paints at the ready, and enjoying some cool-air, low-bug plein air art time.

    I took a long walk through the local dog park and then sat on the ground to paint a low-sun scene of the turning trees.

    I pen-sketched some detailed work of various close-up fall foliage.

    I used tall grasses as a mask to try out a watercolour technique for painting birch trees.

    People always come by. People always look at what some guy is doing sitting on the ground with a notebook. People sometimes ask, sometimes sneak a peek, sometimes are obviously not sure.

    It’s been a blast.

    technique reps

    In my minds-eye I have a picture of bold and tall birch trees with their pale hued bark with scratches of deep brown and black making distinctive styles set against a pattern of fall foliage. My idea was to mask off the trees, paint the foliage, unmask and then paint the tree detail. Simple, right? On my sixth iteration I got closest to that minds-eye picture, but in each of the six repetitions of basically the same painting I did a little something right and a little something not-quite-right. If I was being methodical about my art study I'd do this more often: paint something. Then paint it again. And again. And as many times as it took to get what I thought it should be.  Because I've done some pretty respectable work this week and it's largely down to persistence and reps.

    Over the past weekend I got hung up on the idea of birch trees in the autumn. If I was attempting realism then the complexity of stark white trees set against a spectrum of fall foliage would be a considerable challenge. But there is a bit of the scene of birch trees, bare as they are in their mid-sections, where they stand out stark and crisp against a backdrop of colours, and after six repetitions of the same subject I’d started to get a feel for what the colours, layers and shadows should look like.

    So after a summer of painting and practice, it all came down to birch trees.

    Over and over and over again.

    Winter is coming and idleness will fill the cold spaces and I’ll be looking back to my summer of painting adventures with envy at the opportunities I had and a little bitterness at the opportunities I missed.

    But I am sure glad it’s still autumn for a few more days.