Tag: Writing a Book

This is a writing accountability blog. I have committed to publishing a book by March, 2024. I invite you on the journey as I plough through the internal and external obstacles I face. As the great Bette David loosely said in the movie “All About Eve.” “Buckle your seatbelts. It’s (likely) going to be a bumpy (ride.)”

Changing Direction

Change is the only constant in life, they say.

I both hate change and I don’t. Whatever change I am on the brink of causes me stress whether I expect the change to be positive and, obviously, when I anticipate the change will be negative.

I haven’t always been able to accurately call how a situation is going to work out or how I am going to feel about it. Not in the beginning anyway.

I have enthusiastically embarked on new jobs only to discover several weeks or months later that the work and the situation were not what I expected.

Maybe the work hours were too demanding and draining. My colleagues may have been less than I expected. Testier, maybe. Or uncooperative. Backstabbers.

Sometimes I felt I just didn’t fit the job or the job didn’t fit me. Those jobs obviously didn’t last all that long. Their choice by times, and at other times, mine.

The trouble is we cannot know what lies ahead of us. We make the best decisions we can based on what calls to us or what we are forced to choose. The former are the lucky ones. The ones who pursue a path in life just because it feels right. Not because Mommy or Daddy did it for a living or are telling you to do it.

You can burn a lot of daylight and productive years following someone else’s dictates and expectations. Many people feel they have no choice. Many people do it because they can’t conceive of other alternatives. Many can conceive of other alternatives but are too afraid to try.

The people who imagine a different future and don’t pursue it are the ones I feel most sorry for. It is like that old saying: a taste of honey is worse than never having tasted honey at all.

You cannot continually negate or ignore what is most important to your soul and realistically expect a good result. Yet many ignore the calling of their soul anyway. And many pay a very high price for doing so. The “go-along-to-get-along” crowd.

Believe me, the crowd doesn’t give a care. Your life is yours. Believe that. I fear many don’t. It is hard to establish a path, set goals and establish boundaries that will help you get there. There can be a lot of choppy water to get through.

I reflect on this as I have been reading book coaches websites. They know intimately (or at least claim to know) the excuses, the obstacles, the distractions, the temptations, the naysayers scripts (both external and internal) that prevent people from writing.

Book coaches have advice to defeat them all. They have it because they have heard every excuse imaginable.

There is no question that if you write your truth honestly the feeling it generates may be akin to taking off all your clothes and running down main street carrying a flaming torch above your head. Risky, chilly business.

I write what I know because of what I lived through and what I learned from it. Then I share what I experienced and learned with others. I may not be the choir director but my voice is as necessary as any other to add texture and complexity to the choir’s harmonies.

That is a massive change in direction for me. C’mon, I’m a Leo. We are astrologically ordained to be showy, flamboyant and annoying. But that tactic is no longer working for me. I don’t want to be the sharpest tool in the shed. I don’t want to lead the parade. I am happy to follow along in the flow of life and add my steps when and as I am able.

And that is what terrifies me most. Who am I if I am not always in charge? Who am I if I just let something slide? Who am I if I admit my limitations? Maybe just another struggling human being?

That may not be so bad. I have always sensed most people are more forgiving of me than I am of myself. Getting to a place of consistent self-forgiveness would be a nice change.

Maybe I’ll try that for a while and see how it works out. At least, it’s not a job I can be fired from or quit.

Who Knew Department

This may be something. It may be nothing.

When I find something that makes sense to me, I want to try it and I want to share it. And I will.

So here is something about bay leaves that I never knew. Now I do. And so do you.

Did you know this? I didn’t know either:

Many women add bay leaf to their foods, especially on red meat and wild game meat.

Without knowing the reason for adding bay leaves to food, when you ask a woman why, she tells you: to add taste and flavor to the food.

This is wrong because if you boil bay leaves in a cup of water and taste them, you won’t find any taste .

Why do you put bay leaves on meat?

Adding bay leaves to meat converts triglycerides to less fat to test and confirm this.

Cut one chicken in half and cook each half in a pot, put one bay leaf and the second without the bay leaf, and note the amount of fat in the two pots.

Helps to get rid of many health problems and dangerous diseases

Among the benefits of bay leaf:

Bay leaf cures digestive disorders and bay leaf helps to get rid of bloating.

Heartburn.

Acidity.

Constipation.

Antibiotic.

Anti-parasitic.

Digestivo.

Stimulators.

Sedative.

Regulate bowel movement by drinking hot tea.

It lowers blood sugar and bay leaf is an antioxidant.

It allows the body to produce insulin by eating it in food or drinking bay tea for a month.

Eliminates harmful cholesterol and frees the body of triglycerides.

It is very useful in treating colds, flu and severe cough, because it is a rich source of vitamin C. You can boil the leaves and inhale the steam to eliminate the cough and reduce the severity of the cough.

Bay leaf protects the heart from attacks and also protects against strokes because it contains compounds that protect the heart and blood vessels.

Rich in acids such as caffeic acid, quercetin, egonol and parthenolids, which are substances that prevent cancer cells from forming in the body.

Eliminates insomnia and anxiety if taken before bed, and helps you relax and sleep peacefully.

Drinking a cup of boiled bay twice a day melts kidney stones and cures infections.

Good Thinking

My friend Margo Talbot https://margotalbot.com/ is a world-renowned ice climber, author and mental health advocate.

Margo has led expeditions in such far-flung locales as Antarctica and the Arctic. She is a motivational speaker and writes a powerful blog about her insights along the road of life. She promotes women’s personal empowerment through workshops and coaching.

Her book All That Glitters: A Climber’s Journey Through Addiction and Depression, is a story of healing and redemption; a story about losing oneself, and then finding one’s way back home. https://margotalbot.com/book/

Margo writes about family dysfunction and healing from it and regaining/preserving mental health. She once gave a powerful TED talk on this very subject. https://youtu.be/kayj6oew9_M

In her youth, Margo got into trouble with drugs. She was eventually arrested for drug dealing. She has spent most of her adult life figuring out how she got there. She helps others to get out or stay out of similar places.

I met Margo Talbot as the group leader of an Outward Bound survival course I took in Ontario, Canada over a decade ago.

Margo taught us how to live survive in the woods. We chopped a lot of wood that week. We made a lot of fires out of forest detritus. We took a lot of swims in a cold and uninviting (but admittedly invigorating) lake.

Margo organized a solo camping trip for each participant on the final night. That was the “big finish” to the course.

Mid-afternoon on the next to last day, each of us were taken by canoe to separate remote campsites. We were left alone to spend the night with a tarp, some rope, a box of matches, snacks and a barebones breakfast. My nerves were pretty steady until nightfall neared.

I went wandering once I landed onshore. I came upon a derelict and uninhabitable shack in the woods with a two-hole outhouse beside it.

On the side of the shack hung a sign. In huge letters, it proclaimed: “Bear Country.”

I can’t even pretend I slept well that night. But I did survive. Bonus.

Margo once shared this wisdom below in a post and it has stayed with me.

I share her perspective.

Make lemonade.

“Things you don’t see coming in life: your sister trying to legally prevent you from seeing your dying father.

Your brother taking your father’s hearing aids from the nursing home to prevent you from having conversations with him.

Your mother defending both of your siblings and their actions.

Your extended family standing by doing nothing to prevent these emotional crimes.

The upside is, I don’t know ANYBODY who gets handed such PRICELESS stories to fill their books with!“

– Margo Talbot

Wait One Day

TRIGGER WARNING: This post describes attempted suicide and discusses suicidal ideation. If this topic distresses or otherwise triggers you, please don’t read further. Thank you. ED. NOTE.

When I was eleven years old, my mother made a serious and life-altering suicide attempt. She slit her wrists, was somehow rescued from the brink of death (I never knew the exact details), and landed in a mental hospital an hour’s drive away. For months. That was memorable.

My mother tried to escape the misery of her life and mostly her marriage, and by so doing, she altered the course of her children’s lives. Well, this child at any rate.

My mother’s way of handling her suicide attempt when she and we got older was to ignore it. She had a whole quiver of dismissive sayings to lessen the gravity of her failed attempt at self-annihilation. She referred to it only as “the bad thing.” The strong, unspoken proviso was that this was not something we should ever talk about.

That event, much of what led up to it and most of what followed shortly afterwards was a blur. No details. No one to ask. A mere blip and black hole in the narrative of our family’s life. By my mom’s account, it was nothing. Inconsequential. The addled addict is nothing if not cunning.

I grew up in the shadows of domestic violence, alcoholism, addiction and sexual abuse. But to hear my mother describe our childhood, it was a happy, sparkly place of constant love and adventures and fun and parties.

Which doesn’t exactly ring right considering the dark activities going on under our roof. I remember the first time I tried to engage my mother in an adult discussion about my childhood. After I brought up one or two uncomfortable memories, her facial expression aghast, she stopped me: “But Margot… don’t you remember all the parties?”

She emphatically didn’t like my refusal to go along with the sunny, cheery, “We’re all right, Jack” narrative she so carefully cultivated. If there was a poster child for positivity and “survival- at-all costs”, it would have been my mother.

When a former neighbor brought up their mutually unfortunate marital choices many years after the fact (“Didn’t we pick ourselves a couple of dandies?” she is said to have said), my mother demurred and coquettishly replied: “I only remember the bright years.”

Clancy Martin is the author of a new book, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind. He has solid credentials as someone who attempted suicide ten times. His book strives to educate the reader about suicidal ideation and how an individual can be pushed to such an extreme.

Martin takes pains to assure survivors that there was likely little they could have done. Suicide is primarily about the individual and their very personal inner struggles – often chronic. When you live in unrelenting internal pain for so long, suicide can look like your only escape.

I’ve been there. I was flailing badly as a young adult. First year of university was proving to be a challenge. It offended my ego that I did not effortlessly master the academic format and content.

I was madly in love with a boy I had no idea how to be a partner to. I could feel us falling apart and I was panicking. I was drinking excessively. I could not see any way out.

My mother and I had never became confidantes. There was no one I could trust to talk to. Actually, there was simply no one. One night along with the booze, I managed to ingest an unreasonable quantity of sleeping pills. In the hospital, all I wanted was my parents to rescue me and tell me what to do.

My father called from several provinces away and talked to me long enough to ensure my care was in somebody else’s hands. My sister ran into my room beseeching me on behalf of my mother. “She feels so bad and needs to see you.” By then, I knew my mother well enough to know she likely only felt bad because what I did made her look bad. I eventually saw her and I was right.

I was surprised at how little follow up there was on me after I was discharged. I guess I’m still surprised at how unsophisticated and ignorant the mental health system is. The mind is mysterious enough that most people don’t much care to look closely at its darker, deeper aspects, except in the guise of TV crime shows. And most especially in themselves.

Martin’s book seeks to address some of those issues: people’s inadequacy in dealing with such a sensitive and big a topic as suicide; the general mess/clusterfuck that is the mental health system. His most important message is, if you are considering or have ever considered suicide, wait one day before you act. A lot can change in twenty-four hours.

Martin is forthcoming when asked why he writes as honestly as he does about his own suicide attempts. He explains that coming from a background of addiction and abuse promotes secrecy and lies as adults. Secrecy and lies kill people, he asserts. He said people need to hear and share their truth without judgment and rejection if we ever expect suicide rates go down.

Suicide, they say, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

When you lay all your cards on the table and say, look what a mess my life is, look how much pain I’m in, look how much self-loathing I’m dealing with—but if you feel like I do, trust me, you can wait another day. 

https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2023/11/interview-clancy-martin-author-of-how-not-to-kill-yourself-a-portrait-of-a-suicidal-mind/

I concur. My own “suicide attempt” (basically very poor judgment after a night of heavy college drinking) was the proverbial “call for help.” In truth, no help was forthcoming. But I got lucky. I made my own luck.

Oprah and the self-help movement were taking off about the time I was trying to heal and move on. My childhood experiences eventually triggered a lifelong healing journey.

Today, life is good. I am at peace. I am grateful.

There are so many other places I could be other than I presently am.

Thanks to some extraordinarily gifted and insightful counselors, self-help authors, dumb luck, children and sobriety, dead isn’t one of them.

NATIONAL SUICIDE HOTLINE:
988
(the new national mental health crisis number: call if you need to)

Selling Instant Happiness

The high road is always an option. Finding a way out of difficult circumstances may not be easy but it is available. Usually with hard work and commitment. But let’s not get carried away. Radical transformation of your life or person is not possible for everyone. If it is, it is rarely easy.

And not always logistically possible at a given point. I was a single parent. My options were limited. Every parents’ options are limited if they are serious about being good parents. Kids are a major and serious time suck.

It taxes my patience to watch the endless carousel of “better you, better life” salespeople online. What bothers me most is the “one size fits all” approach that most of them take. Or worse, the purveyors of instant, easy healing tell us “YOU TOO” can be whatever you want to be.

Seriously? Endless possibilities may be a great message for the young and unformed. Who wouldn’t want a fast and easy ticket to “instant fame, success, happiness and wealth”? The problem is, life doesn’t work that way.

The message that “good things take time” doesn’t seem to be delivered much these days. Maybe it is but is just isn’t getting through. How can it compete with the messages of the fast, easy and no-fail crowd?

The notion of taking life step by step seems old-fashioned and irrelevant today. The rules for building a life and a family and wealth have been shaken to the core. Everyone is looking for a shortcut or fast track. Because they have been repeatedly told and reassured it is out there.

I believe there is a rude and widespread awakening coming. Time runs out. Responsibilities and urgent demands – emotional, professional and financial – increase exponentially as we get older. Or they should. Life closes in.

If you are still working as an Instagram influencer in your late 40s without a family or assets or anything else to ground you, there is very likely some harsh reality ahead.

I get angry because so many are pushing a “bill of goods” at us. The consequence is that instead of setting and pursuing concrete goals for self-development and self-improvement, many opt to take a shortcut to their dreams. So what happens if those dreams of “easy, instant success” don’t pan out? What is Plan B? Your fallback? Does anyone even think like that any more?

Physics has immutable rules. Life has immutable rules. Consequences are real. Life is finite. I have apologized to myself for pursuing the path that most of my peers elected to follow, instead of the road less taken. My loss. I was only half-brave, half-confident, half-committed to my own happiness. I didn’t believe I deserved it.

I am now at a place where I realize I deserve happiness (aka peace of mind) and getting there is up to me. I recently did some stock-taking. The track record of my life is a little spotty but it held me together for as long as I needed it to.

So my rant (and this IS a rant) is this. The madness of the world today needs a major course correction or it needs to come to an end. The extreme disconnect from reality and sanity we are living through today is unsustainable. Sadly, it is usually catastrophe that brings us to a screeching halt.

Teasing out a human-focussed, self-directed life of your own choosing is a hard slog. But the formula is pretty easy. Put yourself at the center of any discussion about what happiness is and what you want your life to be. Steel yourself for pushback.

My idea of happiness is a life awash in books and flowers and great food and loving, lively relationships (well, maybe that is your idea of happiness and if so, email me). But that may not be yours.

And if it isn’t, then what is? Only you can answer that and it is the main question you must answer and frequently come back to. Set your path and life will cheer you on even as it is putting every imaginable challenge in your way. For some incomprehensible reason, that too is part of life’s rules.

You are the center of your own life. Examine your idea of what “selfish” really is because that is what they will call you.

Everyone else has an opinion of you that suits their own experience and agenda. It is up to you to establish the life and goals you want to pursue during your precious time on this planet. When you do, then be prepared to do whatever it takes to reach them.

Is your main life goal is attracting two million followers on TikTok and reaping the financial rewards well into your 50s and 60s? Are you 35 years old and setting out to give me financial advice that will “turn my life around”? Are you telling me what I did and didn’t do wrong in my life and what I should and shouldn’t have done?

If so, don’t bother to send me that email.

I can already tell you we have nothing in common.

Home Safe Home

A common consequence of being raised in an abusive household is an adult survivor’s ambivalent feelings around the concept of ”home.” My feelings about “home” certainly were.

Maybe because of that background, I was determined to create one. I was as ill-prepared to do that as a chef who had never stepped foot in a food market, much less a kitchen. Home was foreign territory.

An abused child is powerless. The only option they have is to adapt and survive the environment they are in. When bad things happen or they see bad things happen, an abused child often believe it happened because they did something “wrong.” Children are notoriously egocentric..

I eventually came to distinguish feelings of “guilt” from feelings of “shame.” Guilt is feeling bad about a mistake you made. Shame comes from the feeling you are a mistake. Major difference.

I only know that I emerged into young adulthood with the twin challenges of navigating life having grown up without the basic blueprint everyone else seemed to have.

A label that sums up my childhood environment might be “bohemian intellectualism.” Or “intellectual bohemianism.” Basically an environment of free thinking adults without many rules and utterly inconsistent.

Which is pretty scary for children. If there is anyone on the planet who needs structure and boundaries, it is children. They need limits for many reasons. First, they cannot impose them on themselves. Their judgment isn’t all that. Children don’t always realize “when is enough.”

I have come to understand that setting boundaries and limits on children allows them to safely test the parameters of their lives. Life is overwhelming enough for adults to say nothing of small children. It is why parents try to protect children from life’s harsher realities before they are mature enough to handle them.

Trauma teachers frequently reference the resiliency and survival skills of abused children. All children are known to have some innate ability to “bounce back” from loss and disappointments. I believe I had that characteristic. But as a child, I remember wishing there was someone or something to guide and protect me. I concluded early that my parents weren’t capable of doing that.

Not for a lack of trying on my parents’ part, to be fair. Neither of them had healthy coping skills themselves and very poor judgment when it came to hiring babysitters and caregivers. My memories are mostly neutral or unhappy looking back on the dozen or so housekeepers we had come and go when we were children.

Caregivers infractions ranged from the benign irresponsibility of a babysitter having her boyfriend over while she cared for us. Greater violations came from imbuing trust in troubled adults to take care of vulnerable little girls. It seemed there were so many of these defectives who came into our life.

Home was never a place of safety for me. Those final few steps before arriving home from school often churned up a mixture of apprehension or anxiety. Maybe Mom was passed out on the couch, or in her bedroom. People might be sitting around drinking. Well before the sun went over the yardarm.

Those were just the daytime anxieties. On many nights, especially after guests’ drinking heavily, the anxiety got worse. One night I went into my bedroom and found a man I didn’t know passed out in my bed. I’m not all together sure where I slept that night. Maybe the couch in the basement rec room.

The work of keeping myself calm internally – both in my heart and in my mind – still requires effort. Like any “practice,” remaining calm and centered and focussed especially in the face of severe overwhelm and stress, takes commitment and repetition.

Life guided me to a healing path. I’ve figured out that the home and safety we crave is ultimately found within us. It took a long time to learn that. It is a process of building trust and belief – in the world around us and in ourselves. I don’t know which of those was harder for me to achieve.

When I compare how I am now to how I used to be, I drolly remind myself and those who witnessed me struggle, “I am much better now.”

It has taken a long time and much personal work to shake off that desperate and dogged insecurity. I have read that a loving and happy marriage can heal emotional wounds if the partners are truly there for one another.

I appreciate the safe harbor I’ve landed in. It might never have been. I look at this loving relationship with the same degree of wonder as I look back on what it took to me to survive.

Mine has not been a “normal” path. But I learned to keep myself safe and that I was worthy to have it. The evidence being that I am here now.

I can write down heartfelt words of gratitude for what is and, most especially, for what no longer is.

Perchance to Dream

It is rather brilliant how we keep the harsher realities of life at arm’s-length as we go about our day-to-day lives.

Death occurs around us all the time. It is happening somewhere right now to someone we don’t even remotely know and now never will. We rarely feel death’s bite until it is up close and personal. When someone in our family dies, or in our circle, however, the hole left in our own little world is palpable and vast.

Whether suddenly or after a long illness, the transition from interacting with a thinking, breathing individual to internalizing their utter absence is wrenching. It can stir up all manner of emotional reactions and invite you into a period of self-reflection. If you’re lucky.

Starting out in life, mostly we are lucky enough to ignore all of that. As young people struggling to find their feet and make their own lives, the primary focus in early adulthood is on building an education and career and home and family. Not for everybody, especially these days, but for many.

In his book, The Myth of Normal, author, physician and public speaker Gabor Mate challenges the collective concept of “normalcy.” He challenges our notions of what currently passes as “normal” in our physical and psychological lives in the Western world.

Instead, Mate says, our culture and the institutions it has created, are founded on very unhealthy and unstable ground. We have built most of our health and support systems focused on intervention and not on prevention.

In this sense, our society has built responses based largely on reactive and superficial markers. Doctors rarely have time to dig deep enough into a person’s history and social/emotional context to gather information about conditions that might underly and caused their illness.

Mate asserts that personal and cultural trauma contributes significantly to all health problems – both physical and psychological — and the physical and psychological cannot be fully separated from one another.

I could not agree more. It is life’s inequalities and access to opportunities that shape us. Also – as Mate explains – we are all defined for better or worse by the circumstances of our birth and the family we are born into. The continuum is widely divergent.

We paint over the divergence from our personal experience of “normalcy” with stories or rationalizations. Our co-created narrative attempts to explain away why our “normal” family is somehow legitimately different or unique or better than or less than others.

In our family, my mother dictated the value of accomplishment above almost everything. My father saw value in great wealth. While these were their espoused values, their reality was markedly different.

Ongoing struggles in both parents with addiction and self-esteem. Inter-personal violence. Destructive power struggles between my mother and father as they sought to prove superiority over the other.

So we had a house. And cars. And my parent’s had careers. And a marriage. And social standing. Until, one day, suddenly, they didn’t.

It is hard to grieve the death of a way of life. I look back now on how radically and permanently my life changed when my parents split up and we left the town I was born in. It would be rare for a child to make sense of what was happening to them in a traumatic environment at the moment. Children’s primary job is to survive and grow. Making sense of how they did that must come later.

I think of this when I reflect on the Ukraine or Gaza. The reality they are living through – the children in particular – will become their memory of ”normal” up the road. Yet we all seem to proceed with the expectation that to succeed in life, the survivors must simply put the past behind them, step up to do what must be done to make a life and integrate themselves as productive and “normal” citizens.

We do ourselves no favors by ignoring death’s reality and eventuality around us and for us. Traditional farmers seemed to have a better handle on this than city folk. The cycles of birth and death can be daily occurrences in lives lived close to the land.

Collectively, we are all “whistling past the graveyard.” So the trick is not necessarily to focus on death and its certainty while we are living our lives. But we shouldn’t discount it either.

Poet Mary Oliver dealt with an abusive childhood background by turning her focus to nature and exploring her own sense of wonder. It is available to all of us if we but look. We all need to figure out what Oliver famously asked of us: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

Answering that question for yourself and living it out is the rebuttal you will draw on when facing your own death. It will also allow you to create your own personal and unique sense of “normalcy,” and not one imposed on you by others.

It’s in you, believe me. All you have to do is find the courage and character to act on it. That is what I tell myself anyway and, for the most part, it is working.

Infinitely Meaningful

If we pursue a path of lifelong learning, the possibilities are infinite.

Too many people eventually arrive at a place in life where boredom and ennui settle in. Those people walk around with a general attitude of “been there, done that.” There is nowhere else they want to go – nothing else they want to do. What a pity.

We stop learning because we stop looking. We stop asking questions. We park our curiosity. We lose our innate sense of joy and wonder. That loss is both a choice and a process. To keep our curiosity and learning skills sharp, “use it or lose it” applies.

I have been thinking about this as I plan and plant a garden. Again. I once said that remarrying is an expression of hope over experience. I have similar feelings about gardens.

My gardening experiences are awash in a mantra of frustrations and disappointments. And, if I’m honest, learning. Much like life.

There is something about planting and growing things that repeatedly ropes me back in. At about the point I am ready to throw in the trowel forever, a redolent night-blooming jasmine grabs me by the nostrils and I’m off to the nearest nursery.

I have said that in the harsher learnings of life, I would much rather have read about them in a book. Nice thought but not how the game of life is played. Or gardening.

In recent days we have embarked on a petit patio planting project. A little lemon tree. A larger and leafier Hass avocado. A spindly bamboo that I bought just to see what it does. I hear they are super fast growers. I’m curious to see if that is true for my one tiny, little trooper. Out of an abundance of caution, I will hold off on ordering the koala bears for now.

With the careful placement of a smattering of new greenery, I feel a slight lift in my heart. Akin to falling in love. And like falling in love, I have no idea how it is going to turn out.

Gardeners must have great faith in a higher power. Call it Mother Nature or Gaia or a green thumb. I know that beyond my role as a caretaker, I don’t have much to do with the eventual success or demise of my planting. I will likely reap the rewards of this planting to the exact degree that I invest my love and care.

We’ve lost sight of the magic and wonder of plants because – like so many other practices – we have given over our management and control to others. We no longer grow our own food. We have placed our trust in others to do that for us. We have lost and gained in that process. We no longer know what harvesting and eating our own food “feels like.”

I have zero to little idea what I am doing. That’s kind of the fun in it. The sense of adventure and entering into the unknown. The challenges ahead and whether I will have the insight and fortitude to rise to meet them.

And yes, I am aware I am simply talking about plants. And that plants are everywhere. And that on a scale of one to ten, keeping plants alive is probably pretty low on the list of life priorities. Or is it?

I remember delightful lessons in Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, written 80 years ago in 1943. Saint-Exupery’s protagonist, the little prince learns that investing time and care and love in something makes that something important to us. As humans, we have an innate need for connection and the drive to make sense of our lives. The little prince finds a rose.And it becomes his whole world.

I know what will matter most to me at the end of my life will be those people and things that I choose and chose to love and how well I am/was able to do that. It is a deep and persistent longing and calling in all of us.

So here’s the question: what’s your rose?

“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…?

“They don’t find it,” I answered.

“And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water…”

“Of course,” I answered.

And the little prince added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2180358-le-petit-prince

Thank You In Advance

What ever would the world do without war? How ever would it have evolved without brave men and women who donned uniforms and weapons when called upon and did their bit “for the side”?

The two latest world wars seemed to have a clear sense of purpose. In my Dad’s eyes, the goal of World War Two was simple: “Defeat Hitler.”

Our debt to veterans is honored on one day each year on this continent. Remembrance Day, it is called, in Canada. Veteran’s Day in the US. There may be similar occasions honoring the fallen in other countries but my research has not advanced that far.

Those who fought for our freedom paved the way for us to continue a way of life. That can be argued ad infinitum but is simply out of place on Remembrance Day on Saturday this year.

I was always struck by how deeply Remembrance Day services affected me. There is something profoundly moving and tender about watching declining old men and women rise shakily from their lawn chairs.

They gain their footing and toss off their lap quilts to salute their flag. Of course, we see broken old people and cannot see the strong, youthful soldiers they remember in their minds’ eye.

War is easy to forget and discount if you aren’t touched by it personally. For my parents, it was a huge and affecting chunk of their adulthood that solidified their pride in and allegiance to their country. It gave them a common purpose and a common cause.

Hitler made an easy, if evasive, target. He was so unarguably evil and psychotic. He surrounded himself with similarly sick souls who shared his inhumanity. Sadly, the harsh truth is that bullying and intimidation are effective short-term tools for pulling and keeping people in line. RIP six million Jews. Hitler’s brownshirts were merely thugs and criminals and they were good at it.

It baffles me how widespread and entrenched the banality of evil can be. Most local Germans living close to concentration camps refuted any knowledge of what had “really been going on”. Perhaps the worst is, had they known, what would or could they have done?

It was heartening in the wake of World War Two to see many international cooperation organizations emerge. Devoted to achieving and maintaining – if not global world peace exactly – then overarching institutions dedicated to wide scale cooperation and information sharing.

The United Nations. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Food and Agriculture Organization. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The World Health Organization. The World Bank. And more than a dozen others.

Spotty and underwhelming as the overall record of United Nations organizations may be, it serves the world to have them in place. Yes, they are big, gangly organizations that don’t have a great track record at fulfilling their mandates or promises of defusing conflict or stopping wars. But I would argue, it is better we have them than not.

The world when the last World Wars took place is not remotely the same world as it is today. Young people today have little to no connection to the costs of war or what exactly the evil was that our ancestors fought.

It is good to have international organizations who ostensibly have an eye on the “big picture” as concerns the world. It is also good that our present military and government sets aside a day a year to thank our veterans.

It serves to remind us who were not there of what others lost and gained for our benefit. Their sacrifice was not only of time. Their youth, and youthful ideals, rarely came home from the front intact.

So I will plant myself somewhere quiet on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour. I will happily spend two minutes to remember those who went before to fight for our freedom and protect us from living in oppression.

I don’t mean to sound like Pollyanna. I don’t much like war either. And, of course, I wish there were better ways to resolve conflict. But November 11th isn’t really about any of that.

It is a collective expression of honor and respect for those gutsy men and women who joined up to join forces against evil when they were most needed. What they left behind is not perfect by a long shot. But they did accomplish this.

Theoretically, we can follow our own inner dictates to build the lives we want. Imperfect, I realize. But when we celebrate our collective victory over the failure of that twisted little Austrian, I know my thanks are abundant. Simply because we don’t have to live in a regime according to the dictates of him and his fellow henchmen.

For that reason alone, I happily say thank you day after day after day to my many ancestors who served, and I will say a special thank you, especially this coming Saturday.

RIP Dad RIP Scott RIP Monty RIP Joyce RIP Frank, et. al.

You Move Too Fast

In my oft-used marketing spiel to executives about building awareness campaigns, I often used the potter’s wheel analogy. Executives as a type are eager to demonstrate and push to get quick results. But quick doesn’t always translate to “best” or even to “better.”

Every bowl that is thrown starts with the proverbial pound of clay thrown onto the wheel. As the wheel begins to turn, the potter engages with the clay in a mutually creative endeavor. The wheel starts to spin, slowly at first, and the water is thrown on the clay. The potter gets into the slurry with his/her hands.

It is a common mistake for newbie potters to have difficulty controlling the shape and speed of the bowl or vessel they want to make. Therein lies the craft. The slow, steady coaching of that amorphous lump of clay into an object of beauty and utility is not easy. I learned that in a pottery class.

My New Brunswick potter friend, Tom Smith, who make beautiful raku mugs and sold them by the hundreds, chuckled when I told him that, and said: “We love pottery courses. It’s the quickest way people really find out how hard it is to do what we do.”

New potters let the clay get away from them. The clay can flop over precariously in one direction or another. Hold the clay too long or too firmly and the undisciplined form rushes upwards through your fingers. Speaking personally, flailing about with your hands and fingers trying to tame and pull the wayward clay back into submission is a fool’s errand.

The emerging product on the wheel looks more like an ostrich in need of a chiropractor than anything remotely resembling a serving dish. Once the clay has reached a certain height, there is little option but to scrap the whole project and start over from scratch.

The potter may have learned valuable lessons in this botched attempt. Still, it may have cost considerable time and effort. The corporate world doesn’t graciously allow, or forgive, much botching. Ergo my caution to eager executives to build a campaign slowly and methodically for the best outcome to their marketing/sales/communication plans.

It feels like we have lost our trust in process and investing the necessary time, often years, to perfect our craft. What used to be called apprenticeship seems to have gone extinct along with the late lamented dodo bird.

Writers bandy about a story about meeting a brain surgeon at a cocktail party who declares to the author: “After retirement, I am going to write a book.” To which the author replies: “Isn’t that funny? I was thinking that after I leave my writing career behind, I am going to take up brain surgery.”

Point made but likely lost on the surgeon who could likely never equate the intricacies of his craft with what writers do. Everyone can write, they reason. Which is true, I guess, if qualitatively variant. Writers are used to insensitivity about the actual skill and rigor required to practice their practice.

As Ringo Starr would put it: “You know it don’t come easy.”

Lately I have been having two key thoughts. Some empathy and concern about young people lulled into believing they are “ready for prime time” long before they know what “prime time” even is.

It used to take years to become an overnight success. Today any cute kid with a shtick can publish, perform and profit from an online presence. My question always is, “But for how long?” I wonder how long their audience will continue to be enthralled by make-up application videos once they have aged out into the real work world, had babies and are trying to snag a mortgage.

I am as guilty of techno-distraction as the next person. But I am trying to find a way out of that dependence. I want to revel in the joy that comes from sitting at a potter’s wheel for hours creating pot after pot with well-behaved lumps of clay. (Full confession, I don’t ever expect to get there. But I can dream, can’t I?)

I want to lose myself in amazing books that transport me. Almost anywhere. I’m selective, of course. I prefer to traipse through the mysteries of the heart, mind and soul. Some authors manage to take me on that journey. I often opt for trusted experts who have taught me more in a week with their book than I might otherwise have learned in years.

All to say, I feel an urge to slow down. Not as a surrender to the vagaries of age but to the value and quality of time. Satisfying as completing tasks may be, I don’t see countless hours knocking items off my to-do list as the memories I wish to savor on my deathbed.

I want to spend more time with family, friends and loved ones. I want to spend more time with myself. I want to spend more time in my garden. Yesterday, the HASS avocado tree we ordered arrived. I am beyond excited to see how it grows.

Note to self: Slow down long enough and frequently enough to make sure you can enjoy the process. Big work for a Type A personality like me, but necessary.