Ease up on the gas, that’s the first thing. Drop your speed to just a little slower than “necessary”, because to do this right you can’t be getting ahead of yourself.
And there could be kids around. Maybe yours even, if this is one of those times when you don’t know what they’re up to. As always, you’re in a china shop, so be gentle. Continue reading »
“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” – George Bernard Shaw
I have been a bad parent. I only did what I knew, but I can no longer deny it: I never gave them a good home. I never made them feel useful or showed them any respect.
Today I dropped off hundreds of former possessions at the Goodwill shop. Maybe they’ll find adoptive parents who will be better than I have. I don’t even remember ever deciding to take them on as my dependants. They just happened. But somewhere along the line, all those things became stuff, and lost my respect.
Most of us live amidst stuff. We do have a few things too — well-used, well-enjoyed, and well-respected items that have an established place in our lives. But most of it is stuff.
Stuff makes us feel bad. It fills the mind with fading hopes about what we might one day do with it, taunts us with our obvious inability to manage it, and gives us the ominous sense that we’re losing track of something crucial, either in the physical mess of stuff itself, or in the mental mess it creates in our heads.
I don’t want stuff anymore, only things. Continue reading »
Hidden somewhere in a pile of my own bad prose and abandoned bucket lists, in a tattered grocery bag in my storage room, lies the secret to happiness and peace.
It’s scrawled on a fifty-cent note of Canadian Tire Money, in dark purple Jiffy marker. Just four potent words, but they triggered a flood of insights into my life, and started me on the long and winding road to happiness.
The night I wrote those words down, I was in trouble. I was marching down a career path that made me nauseous to think about, I had no friends nearby, no passions, no ambitions, no confidence. I had lost, by that time, any real belief in a bright future.
The optimism I’d carried so easily through grade school was a distant memory, by then as alien as photos from someone else’s life. Small obstacles completely derailed me, I expected to fail at everything, and human beings generally scared me. It was a particularly bad night in a bad year, and I was in mourning for myself.
I was also totally naked.
When you’re depressed you don’t want to leave the shower. It’s one of the few safe, warm and inviting places to be. I found it so difficult to turn off the water, because then it was back to real life. Cold, dirty, unpredictable life.
One night, when I didn’t even need to, I took a shower. I stayed in there so long, basking in the heat, that the water started to run cool. As dreadful as it was, I had no choice but to get out. To make things worse, the window in that bathroom never closed properly, even in the winter. I knew icy prairie air was pouring in continuously throughout my shower, filling up the bathroom on the other side of the shower curtain. Continue reading »
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Peggy has the day off today, and we are getting out more and more things for the rummage tomorrow.
At first I was dreading the process of this sale, but my spirit has found a new phase through it all. I have been saying, as I have for 40 yrs, that I am a pilgrim and a stranger in a foreign land. My eternal hope is heaven and that life is as real to me as ever it was. But I have not always walked as a pilgrim — with little holding me back. For too many years I have dragged along the detritus of life, not really attached to it, just too lazy to actually take it off our metaphorical “wagon of life” and leave it behind.
But with each item I put onto the sale table it’s like I hear a voice saying, “go find something else, some more, let’s get rid of it all. And practically I can’t really do that — we need to keep living here for some time into the future — until we get our zoning deviation, the kids get their house sold, and ready to move in here. So, whether it’s a week or 10 months we have no idea; and we do need to plan accordingly. Continue reading »
I have always been fascinated by Albert Einstein. There aren’t many people who are capable of thinking absolutely new thoughts; of conceiving that which has never been conceived before. Or, even extrapolating to uses of ordinary things that had never been considered before. His genius was a much art as science.
And like many a genius before him, he held views that were very unpopular. Thinking outside the box often takes you to places no one else wants to go. In particular, in this essay is his view in paragraph 5 on the military. As a lifelong pacifist and an artist, I happen to agree with him in many ways. But I don’t have the street cred to get away with it so easily.
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.
“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…” Continue reading »
For example:
• You smoke everyday, and you become a smoker.
• You drink everyday, and you become an alcoholic.
• You overeat everyday, and you become obese.
• You neglect your health every day, and you become sick.
• You neglect your relationship every day, and it turns sour.
• You spend beyond your limits every day, and you become poor.
• You practice being unhappy every day, and you become depressed.
Likewise:
• You exercise everyday, and you become fit. Continue reading »
If a dog were your teacher, you would learn stuff like:
I came across this article I received from my mom when I was about 20. After looking it over again, realizing where I am in life at this time and I think she’d be pretty happy. I know many of us have seen something similar to this in recent years on the Internet. The newer version I find to be much shorter and maybe not quite as interesting. Anyway, I thank my mom for her success.
Precious advice for a lifetime: (in her hand)
All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to di, and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandbox at nursery school.
These are the things I learned:
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Don’t hit people.
- Put things back where you found them.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
- Wash your hands before you eat.
- Flush.
- Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
- Live a balanced life.
- Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some time.
- Take a nap every afternoon.
- When you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Continue reading »
