works of wanderlust

an infinite well of curiosity

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What do you want to learn in 2026?

I mean, heck, if I put one more thing on my list of side gigs and hobbies I’m going to burst.

Art, music, languages, code, swimming, running, cooking, creative writing, and… deep breath… jeeze, I can’t even remember all the little hobby projects and learning adventures I’ve kicked off in the last couple years. Hell, some of the things on that list are just categories for lists of their own.

It’s almost as if I need to play a little catch up before I dive into anything new.

I mean, that’s never stopped me before, but what I guess I’m saying is that sitting here writing against a blog prompt on a wintery Saturday morning I should probably pause to reflect on the state of my life and available free time before I commit to say, learning to bake French pastries or, um, tackling the mystic art of underwater basket weaving.

It’s almost as tho I need to learn so skill to focus and organize my learning itself. A kind of meta-learning. You know, answering the age old question of how do I focus and attune my limited attention and energy into productively advancing the skills I have already committed to learning… but, y’know, without adding a whole new field of study and distraction.

Lifelong learning is one of the pillars of my very existence. But I get it. Not everyone looks at a piece of art or tastes an interesting foodstuff or hears an instrument and then reacts with the “hmmm… I wonder if I could learn how to do that” voice in their head. I do, for better or worse. I get this compulsion that gnaws away at me until I read more about it and dig deeper into it and next thing I know I’m finding out that, you know what, learning Japanese can’t be THAT hard or I can get a student violin for ONLY a few hundred dollars. True stories.

But sitting here this morning I have a nudging notion that during my last year of my forties perhaps I should queue myself up for more success in my fifties and learn some kind of temperance of self-education—that I should study how to study but studying the things I already study with more focus and structure. It sound so easy when I put it that way, but truly, such a thing could be one of the more difficult subjects I’ve ever had to study. Damn this infinite well of curiosity.

Deep breath. Again.

December 6, 2025
fear of stupid

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What do you wish you’d done less of this past year?

I have a terrible case of something I’m going to call FOGWI… or fear of giving the wrong impression. It is awkward to admit it, but I really find that I (often subconsciously) make stupid choices about even the most mundane choices because I over-think the impression it could have (but almost definitely does not have) on others. I do this in particular in reference to what I consider to be my professional persona.

I know, I know… we probably all do this to an extent but let me use an example to make it more clear.

Imagine you are waiting for a phone call about a job interview. You applied for something you think you’d like to get, you know the deadlines of the application and the approximate timelines for their HR department to get back to you. So for a span of about a week you live in this cloud of knowing that (a) the phone might ring at any moment during work hours about said job and (b) you want to answer it when it rings and make a good impression… or at least not the wrong impression.

YOU might turn the ringer on your phone and (rationally so) go about your life.

I probably would turn the ringer on and (irrationally so) overthink everything I do for the next week. Should I go out for a walk because I don’t want to ever be out of good cell service range? I definitely shouldn’t run or go to the pool. Should I drive to the store because I would feel weird having that conversation on the speakerphone in my vehicle. Or in the grocery store aisle. Or sitting in the mall food court! Hell, should I even leave the house, get distracted by a video game, have a shower, or mow the lawn because what if I get THAT call just then and in doing so I give the wrong impression, buff the opportunity and ruin my life forever, GAH!

I know, I know… it’s one hundred percent irrational. But in moments of vulnerability any of us is at risk of making stupid choices to reduce the perceptual imbalance of the circumstances. And rationally, I know it is all silly. I should just get on with my life, do what I need to do, and deal with the hypothetical phone call in a more existential, take it as it comes sort of way.

And to make all this worse, the multiple times I have got calls from various HR departments or potential contracting customers can you guess what they did? Yeah, they emailed me or texted me a “can we chat at such and such a time” message and we set up an appointment.

I did too much of that irrational overthinking and FOGWI this past year. And honestly, when I caught myself doing it I worked to correct it. But I definitely wish I did it less. Maybe I would have gone for more walks, logged more klicks on the running trails, or focussed my energies on other more productive and creative tasks. Or maybe I would have just played more video games. Either way, any of that beats pacing around the kitchen thinking the phone might ring, huh?

December 5, 2025
little or lotta lazy

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What do you wish you’d done more of this past year?

A few months after my daughter was born and as the days counted down to the stereotypical New Years Eve regrets and resolution-making, my mind shifted towards fitness. Something compelled me to log onto the website for a local running store and sign up for a running clinic. So it was that starting the second day of January a week or two later in the year 2008 I arrived in the door of the local run club and started their “learn to run 5k” training clinic.

I have only taken short bits of time off running for injury (or maybe vacations and holidays) since.

That will be exactly eighteen years ago in just less than one month. *sigh* My running career will soon be old enough to vote.

But 2025 has been a bit of a slide, if I’m being honest.

Sure, I ran a streak in September and a race in October. Sure, I did a Park Run in Tokyo in November. And sure, I have not so much missed a stretch of time in my training… so much as I have just been maintaining. But, it was not what I would call a peak running season.

My doctor has told me on a couple of occasions that not only is running probably keeping me relatively fit and young(ish) but it is something of a alternative sort of diagnostic tool: if you ever find that you can’t run because of your heart or lungs, come see me, he said. Otherwise, you’re probably gonna live for a while.

It wasn’t my heart or lungs, tho, really. Turns out it was my stomach and some secondary symptoms related to reflux and digestive health that has left me hesitant about longer distances for the last while. That, and I have been a bit lazy about it, too.

Admittedly, it was probably a lot of lazy.

And yet now that the year is coming to yet another close and I get to look back on my stats for 2025, I realize that it was a relatively grim year for my milage. I kind of wish I had pushed myself a bit further this year, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah… health first, and there were genuine health quirks that slowed me down and shut off my desire to push out into the depths of the river valley wilderness this past year. Turns out that having a coughing fit what seemed like every ten minutes for six months throws you off your game. You are cautious. You are hesitant. You second guess your own ability.

Had I cracked that nut earlier, I may have jumped back into half marathon training or something. And now… well, the snow is flying out the window even as I write this, and the temperatures are grossly unfit for anything I feel like partaking in today.

Lazy? Or self preservation? You can make up your own mind. But I do feel a little sad I didn’t cover more trail in my footprints this past year.

December 4, 2025
lucid professionalism

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What made your job
interesting in 2025?

Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

They are wrong.

I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food. We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff.

But I digress.

This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now.

The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting.

Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

December 3, 2025
cheap-ish therapy

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

Who or what are you
leaving behind in 2025?

I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit.

It has not been a simple reset.

I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business. And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

Not that it has worked.

And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now. It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?

December 2, 2025

blog.8r4d.com

Ah. Some blog, huh?

I’ve been writing meandering drivel for decades, but here you’ll find all my posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, parenting, and overthinking just about anything and everything since early 2021.

In fact, I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me.

Enjoy!

Blogging 419,675 words in 553 posts.

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