works of wanderlust

Category: wandering & thinking

  • Unpoliticalish

    It’s not that I’m not a political guy. In fact, usually kinda the opposite.

    But I’ve made a very deliberate decision to keep this space fairly free of politics and opinion that links (directly) back to those topics.

    That said, it’s election day in Canada and today the nation was off to the polls to pick a federal government.

    Traditionally, I pour myself a glass of whiskey, settle onto the couch, turn on the television and watch with bated breath as the results start to roll in.

    With a country as geographically expansive as Canada, there is literally a rolling in of the results as we cascade east to west waiting for election zones to close down and start reporting results.

    My region closed a few minutes ago and numbers have started appearing on the bottom of the screenful of commentators on the CBC coverage.

    The glass of whiskey will either be a celebratory drink or a mournful way to drown some political sorrows.

    As of now I don’t know which, so I’m sipping and watching and sipping some more.

  • Daily Goals (and Such)

    Back in January of this year I decided to re-invigorate a habit that I’d been neglecting for a long time, and start writing more frequently. You’re reading the results of that effort right now: after more than eight months of daily (with a small break for summer fun) blogging resulting in over two hundred posts to this space.

    Daily habits seem trivial, but in my experience become a drumbeat of steady progress towards getting stronger, faster, better, or simply more attuned to the nuances of an effort.

    Over that aforementioned summer break I took up a couple more daily habits that have been fitting into my waking routine and are starting to show progress and results.

    The first of those habits has been a daily body strength workout, involving a minumum number of push-up and sit-ups and some other equipment free exercises. None of it is a proper workout, but the payoff after two months of, say, thirty push-ups every day has been a cumulative progress towards some creaks and groans that were developing after eighteen months of working from home during the pandemic.

    The second (and more interesting) of my new daily habits, and something I wrote about a couple weeks ago, is that I’ve dug into my old (and bought some new) art supplies, and dedicated myself to daily sketching.

    If the day has been busy and my time is short, might just draw a simple thing like my car keys, a pen sitting on the table or any other curious object laying around the house. Ten minutes with a pen and a paper.

    Or, if I have more time and inclination, then all that inspiration from reading, watching, and absorbing the work of other artists around the theme of rough watercolour sketching turns into a more elaborate project. I’ll snap a photo, dig through my travel pictures, or prop up my notepad out and about in the city and draw a small scene.

    The habit of exercising my artistic soul every day has paid off.

    The work that I was doing a month ago was not terrible, but it was markedly weaker than just a few weeks of practice has left in its wake. (I won’t even post those early sketches.) I won’t claim to have found some kind of greatness or unlocked a hidden talent, but I am starting to get a feel for my own style and building a great deal of confidence around things I can bring to life on the page. I can only imagine that this will steadily improve over the next months and beyond.

    All that (plus two hundred blog posts and some improved upper body strength) from a little daily dedication to a simple idea: habit building.

  • Back in the Blogging Habit

    Nearly a week into September, and coming off a summer blogging break, I’ve had to get myself back in the mindset of writing daily again.

    Producing a personal blog with daily content is a lot of work after all.

    Not that I’m alone in this kind of effort.

    A summer break, as much as it was an interruption in my daily routine, was also a good chance to spend some of my screen time consuming the work of others for a while rather than putting my head down and creating my own.

    After all, almost eighteen months into this pandemic, all those other folks who eked out from a world-changing, soul-crushing medical lockdown an opportunity to pursue their passion project — like writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even producing a Youtube channel — many of those folks are now also (as much as) eighteen months into that passion project and seemingly in the mood to share some thoughts on their success.

    Like, just this morning I watched a video by an online creator who spent fifteen minutes meandering through the story of her decision to start vlogging about her hobby in March 2020 and the many ways it has changed her life since.

    It’s that same old story.

    Or at least it’s the same old-but-new story.

    In the wake of this terrible moment in history, someone with a curious hobby takes to the internet to fill the digital spaces with their words, photos, art, thoughts, ideas, and opinions.

    Time passes.

    Lives change.

    Positive vibes spread.

    My own story fits into that same narrative family, though my success is still something that is (a) much more modest than some of the people I follow back, and (b) largely accidental as I stick to my core philosophy of just writing what I like and not caring much if it ever becomes more than that.

    A summer break cemented that resolve to keep building on that story and continuing to see where it takes me.

    Letting time pass.

    Maybe changing a few lives.

    Spreading positive vibes all over the world.

    But I do need to work myself back into that daily blogging habit again. And it’s a lot more work than you might think.

  • Dog Days of Summer

    It’s officially summer here in Edmonton where I live, and the days are marked by a sharp increase in temperatures and an equally sharp decrease in my motivation to move with any sort of speed … yes, even when I’m running!

    Also, it’s been a long, dark winter … at least sixteen months if I recall … and this summer seems more welcome than any of us can put into words, I think.

    With the arrival of summer, the re-opening of our world (locally at least) following a long, exhausting pandemic, the end of the school year for my daughter, and the wrapping up of a huge project I’ve been involved with at my real job, I’ve been eyeing the arrival of July with no shortage of excitement.

    I’ve been writing this blog for nearly six months, every day, and making it a daily exercise has not only resulted in one hundred and seventy plus blog posts since January, but has given me great motivation to go out into the world more openly, explore more deeply, cook and eat more adventurously. Six months is not long, but it has been long enough to kickstart a respectable quantity and tone of articles that I’m (mostly) proud to have online.

    Of course I never wrote about how I intended to keep blogging every day, well … forever. Because… to be honest I didn’t intend that. I intended to write daily for as long as I could manage to keep it interesting for myself and for my readers, and (more importantly) for as long as I wasn’t trading the living of my life for the writing about it.

    Summer is short and definitely for the living of life, and with all those simultaneous moments approaching with the first of July, I am in the important moment and existential position of asking myself if I’m following that very rule: I don’t want to sacrifice adventure to the publication cycle of a blog.

    You may have also noticed that more than a few of my articles lately have been a bit … um … navel-gazing? Bland? Space-filling? I’ll be the first to admit I’ve phoned in a few posts this month. Gak!

    So, here’s the thing…

    I’ve decided that I’ll be switching over to a summer schedule for July and August.

    This summer we have some mountain vacations planned, some technology-free camping trips in the north country to do, weekends at the lake or on the river to enjoy, and a whole of lot of intention to get away from our screens as much as possible. I will still be posting here, probably more regularly than I should, but look for my posts to be a little more scattered over the next two months as of the first of July.

    Expect your daily dose of cast iron guy goodness to resume to full daily schedule in September, and with any luck I’ll have a long list of stories to catch you all up on.

  • The Value to Comment

    Readers may have noticed that I don’t make commenting available here.

    This is a conscious choice on my part to limit the conversations about these things that I write about to more open and public platforms and in doing so keep this blog something more personal and deliberately curated.

    I tend to lean towards the idea that comments have a strong role in social media but not an obligatory one.

    I only bring it up because yesterday the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, announced that they would be turning off Facebook comments for one month on their news posts if for no other reason than to give their reporters a break from the never-ending barrage of attacks that fill those comments.

    (If you thought Canadians were polite, look no further than Facebook for evidence to the contrary, I guess.)

    It makes me wonder if there is a better way to create interaction with people in a public space like this blog than simply having a text box for someone to type their thoughts into. Why? Because as I post each of these articles each and every day, yes, I do care that someone is reading them, I do care that someone has thoughts about them, and I do wish there was a better way to interact with my readers than the comment firehose that comes with creating a community around a topic I love to write about.

    On a side note, I do not use Facebook. I have my reasons. In fact, I deleted my account a couple years ago and have no interest in diving back in.

    I do use many other social platforms, however, and enjoy the conversations I have there.

    I enjoy them so much that often I’ve been tempted, holding my finger over the toggle switch on some posts, to turn on the comments here just to see what happens.

    I know what happens, of course. I’ve seen it for years.

    Spam, mostly. Then a large collection of negative comments. All that peppered with a barely visible seasoning of enjoyable feedback.

    Comments are not just about the positive love-giving vibes, but it helps. Comments are not exclusively for validation, but people who validate are often less likely to write something than those who are just out to quash ideas. Comments are meant to be about exchanging ideas, but too often boil down to anger and disagreement.

    So… I don’t turn them on. Even though they would have some value to me, I would rather lose that value and continue to write, curate, and share in my own little bubble, than to have a few happy comments at the price of wading through the garbage that would certainly crush my spirit.

    I get why those reporters need a break, and I’d rather not need one too.

    So. Thanks for reading… even if you can’t drop a note back.