works of wanderlust

Category: deeper thoughts

  • One Million

    Call it civic pride or call it mathematical curiosity, either way the latest census data for Canada was released this week and my city officially recorded one million residents for the first time in history.

    One million.

    That’s a lot of neighbours, most of whom I’ll probably never ever meet. A great big crowd, busy streets and an ever-more bustling mini metropolis with which to contend.

    We sometimes talk about the switch from being a big little city to becoming a little big city, and what that means for everything from being a resident here, to welcoming visitors, to building and growing and changing now and into the future.

    Admittedly, it’s been a tough couple of weeks to think about the future of our city and my country. The crowds are pressing against each other and it’s getting uncomfortable in here.

    If you watch the news these days, Canada is abuzz for mostly the wrong kinds of reasons, including blockades of borders and an occupation our cities by protests that have been spiraling into more complex political movements. Even last week, as I drove south of town for a family event, we passed on the highway a parade of (literally and at least) a thousand flag-waving semi-trucks, tractors, SUVs, and other supporting vehicles en route to my city to protest vaccine and masking rules. And whether you’re on one side, the other, or stuck in the fuzzy middle it’s hard to sit back and watch with anything resembling hope when such protests are driven mostly by heated emotion, divergent ideologies, and ever deeper pits of self-affirming misinformation.

    Alas, my golden rule, and one that has served me well living in a big little city — and now living in a little big city too, perhaps — is whenever possible to lift those around you instead of pushing them further down.

    You can interpret that how you will, but in this great big city, and this great big world, one million of us or seven billion folks spread across the globe, I recommend to try it for a few days.

    Stop honking. Stop blocking. Stop insulting. Stop trying to crush others to climb for yourself a little bit higher onto the pile.

    Instead, elevate someone else’s opinion, even for just a moment. Clear a path so someone else can climb a step up. Complement a friend and give a stranger a boost. Think what would happen if we all did that.

    One million people might feel less like a crowd and more like a community.

  • Better

    One word that sums up your theme for 2022

    Better.

    Just… better.

    Better days.

    Better minutes.

    Better hopes.

    Better self.

    Better efforts.

    Better me.

    Better you.

    Better world.

    Better everything.

    Better.

    Happy New Year!

    See you in 2022.

  • Groundhog

    One of my favourite films stars Bill Murray as a weatherman who, while visiting a small town to report on the festivities taking place to celebrate groundhog day finds himself trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of reliving the same day over and over and over again. He wakes up on the second of February countless times, makes his way through the day working out the various consequences of his small choices, and no matter how that version of the day ends he wakes up once more on the same day to restart exactly where he began.

    Groundhog Day, the day, has long been a kind of pseudoscientific celebration where we turn to nature (in the form of a large rodent’s reaction to it’s shadow) as a prediction of the remaining duration of winter weather.

    Thanks to the film, Groundhog Day has become shorthand for being stuck in a time loop and being forced to relive what is seemingly the same day over and over and over again as if the universe is testing one’s resolve to find a way to escape and that escape can only come at the cost of self-actualization and some kind of genuine epiphany of the soul.

    One word that sums up your
    theme for 2021.

    grownd - hahg

    A groundhog, also known around the world as a woodchuck, is a large rodent who obliviously predicts each year with stunning fifty-fifty accuracy the fate of spring at the hands of fading winter.

    I don’t yet know if 2022 will lead to an escape from the endless cycle of seemingly living the same day over and over and over again, but throughout the last three hundred and sixty-odd day, saying that it feels like groundhog day has become our go-to tongue-in-cheek analysis and recurring theme of our feelings of 2021.

  • Perspective is Everything

    As another year comes to an end (in the next few days) it’s hard to remember that just one year ago we were looking with all the hope in the world at 2021 as it approached and left behind a monumentally bad 2020 somewhere in the past.

    This year hasn’t quite been the surprise gut punch that 2020 had been, but those second, third and fourth punches tend to hurt just as much as that first one, even if you start to get used to them after a while.

    Certainly it wasn’ that bad, you say.

    No. Certainly not. Certainly it could have been worse.

    What is one thing you’d like your kid to know about the year 2021?

    In fact, I’ve had plenty of reason to look at the world from a different perspective this past year.

    That old life, the one we had pre-pandemic, was still pretty much hanging on by a thread back at the start of this year. I don’t write about a lot of these things, but between work, home, self, and family a lot has changed since we hung that old calendar up on the wall twelve months ago.

    So, really, my perspective has really changed… even though I’m still sitting in that same desk looking at the same screen day after day.

    Pespective. It’s something a lot of us have gained this year.

    Putting things into a new perspective is not an easy thing to do, and sometimes it takes a jostle to one’s life to make that shift. Travel does wonders for giving us perspective. New experiences, new sights, new foods, new cultures. Waking up in a different climate or time zone, with the sun shining through a different set of blinds shakes us out of our routine.

    Or, one can live through a disaster, one of nature or of health or of countless other dark horsemen. That’s something a lot of us tried this year, and it shook us all out of our routines.

    What did that teach us?

    I’m sure it taught us lots of different things, each individually something unique and personal… but I’d be willing to bet that all of us have learned a little about perspective in the last year.

    Not every year is going to be this way.

    But that was 2021.

  • Don’t Take Participation for Granted

    You can read these words.

    You have access to knowledge unknown and unfathomable to any generation before you.

    You are online, connected, exploring big ideas and complex thoughts.

    Explain a valuable life lesson you learned in 2021.

    I restarted blogging at the beginning of 2021 after a fairly long absence from the sport. I put fingers to keys once again not because I think I have anything particularly important to say or even to add to a conversation already a billion-voices-strong, but because everyone should be able to have a space among those voices.

    Everyone should at the very least be able to participate.

    Equally. And if not, then equitably.

    This is definitely not the case right now.

    Voices are amplified because they are already louder.

    Voices are lifted because they come from someone famous.

    Voices go viral because they say something ridiculous, hateful, dumb, or nonsensical.

    Some people like to talk about deplatforming.

    Some people opt to complain about cancel culture.

    Others seem to be hung up on who has the right to speak about one thing versus another thing.

    We can and should have authorities on topics of importance, voices who speak with weight on certain topics or issues or policies. We should hear those voices and measure them against rational, thoughtful indicators of truth, reason, and the tools by which we measure the same.

    But we should all participate in the conversation. At the very least, weigh in, converse, listen, and hear each other. Participate in two-way or a billion-way exchanges of position, idea, and respect.

    This is definitely not the case right now.

    You can read these words. You are participating. I am participating. We shouldn’t take that for granted. It is a gift, a responsibility, and part of being alive in this time when we all live.