Allow me to delve into some crass nomenclature to describe my teenage years:

I was an idiot.

My saving graces were strict parents, smart friends and a desire to learn. I’m thankful they softened the blow for all the mistakes I’ve made and continue to suffer the repercussions from.

One advantage I thought I had actually worked against me as I got older—school was easy.

I could get by (well) with little studying and limited effort as I was quick to grasp ideas and produce what the teacher wanted. Inevitably, this led to bad habits and a psychological roadblock to confront anything challenging; a fixed mindset would be the most pedagogical term.

However, there was still a hunger to learn and a desperate need to be less of an idiot. I’ll defer to my wife whether I’ve made any significant progress on the latter, but the learning has been satiated with developing another skill: learning how to think.

Learning how to think isn’t so much about the process of learning (there’s endless debates on that subject), but of actually doing the hard work of thinking. Not just looking for prepackaged answers that simply need repeating.

In our current environment of automated systems and low friction barriers to accessing information, we are being lulled into a false sense of our own thoughts. What we need is more time to stop, be humble and do the work of thinking on our own.

It’s a skill worth learning.

In considering the absolute necessity of needs for our survival, the list is minimal. It’s the further expansion of our genius and lust for what others have that increase our desire for more.

And while there are pockets of backlash to this ever constant treadmill of increased “needs,” we cannot ignore progress. People travel, eat, communicate and have a desire (or so I hope) to keep healthy.

Which is where we enter into a conflict of discontent.

‘There’s what we need, what we want our needs to be, and a consideration of what others need. That consideration of others is our foundation for ethics, which has been a constant struggle to find the right balance. Somewhere between complete selfishness and altruism at the sake of the self is where we’re trying to land.

As a society, I don’t know if we will ever do it.

As an individual against society—almost impossible.

But, as an individual connecting with something deep within ourselves, beyond ourselves and outside the realm of rationality, a minimum is all we’d ever need.

The greatest experiences; that of the mystics, poets, artists and those committing the feats of the superhuman, are unable to be communicated through language. Even the highest of all attachments, love, is something beyond words and can be felt at the deepest moments.

This is the struggle of the Theologian, or the spiritually devout, as they cannot express the ineffable in a way that will satisfy the populace. It’s the reduction of experience to words. Or worse: labels.

And it’s the approach from doubt, rather than wonder, which makes it impossible to invite others into the depths of our human existence. Yet, it is wonder—not radical doubt—that allowed us to build wonders and discover the stars.

To validate only those experiences that can be described, or labelled, misses the greatest experiences of those that cannot. It is akin to wallowing in dust when what we really want to do is dig into the soil.

Not everything can, or should, be described.

The joy of age is recognizing the need to slow down and the appreciation for the moments of time you can relish in. This comes at a time when the battle for our attention is at a fevered pitch and the mildest of distractions are enough to derail us for huge swaths of our day.

Even the discipline of meditation is being sold as a mass market fix, which, unfortunately, is pitched as a utilitarian solution to accomplish other things. It simply defeats the purpose.

However, there’s something more sinister at play in our world: we are being stripped of our joy.

Yes, major news events have an effect, as does our current state of the world, but this has been happening for decades. The further we entrench ourselves in the world of others, the less we think of our own. And there’s nothing more than technocrats and leaders want than to get lost in their worlds while forgetting our own.

To combat this doesn’t require great efforts. It simply requires the wisdom of recognizing the simple as beautiful and immersing yourself in it.

Put on some music. Sit down. Just listen to it. Do nothing else.
Have a cup of coffee. Sip it slowly. Converse with someone.
Sit outside and listen to nature.
Read something simply for the pleasure of reading it.
Have a hobby for the sole purpose of having a hobby and enjoying it as such.

We can’t travel through time (yet), but we don’t have to be swept up in the torrent pushing us to forget that we live within it.

Many moons ago, I was taken by a film version of Into the Wild—the loose biography of Christopher McCandless and his break from society, ultimately ending him in the Alaskan wild. Watching it in my twenties, there was something that called out to me.

The wanderlust of our desire. The break from norms. The colonization of the American dream (or Canadian one).

Even though I dub myself the great indoorsman, there was something very appealing about what I was watching. Looking back, I was probably taken in more by the performance of Emile Hirsch than the actual story. As I revisit it now, reading the updated version of the original work from Jon Krakauer, I have very different thoughts.

McCandless is constantly referenced to by the people he came across as highly intelligent, which leads me to believe two things:

• there was a disconnect between what the world was and what he wanted it to be
• it came with an intellectual ego

He was a stubborn young person, disgusted with the expectations life has placed upon him, having an existential crisis. Had he lived another ten years, I am almost certain he would’ve been fine and figured it out.

What bothers me is the author’s obsession with solving the mystery of exactly what killed him. The assumption being some kind of poison from seeds, but that misses the point completely… which is a point the author keeps trying to convince the reader is not true: what really killed him was a complete lack of preparation, combined with an ego smothered with a romantic vision of the wild.

Even my complete inexperience taking to the wilderness could recognize he wasn’t properly prepared or equipped. Just the simple act of living in Canada and knowing how people pack, dress and hunt here, had me shaking my head at this foolhardy attempt. The people from Alaska who he met while hitchhiking his way there even warned him and were baffled at his refusal to accept their offer to buy him proper equipment before he head out.

This isn’t to take away from the tragic end to his life. He was a smart enough guy, but overestimated his intelligence when encountering people who had wisdom from life experience.

What I can still give McCandless credit for is his lustre for life and a dreamer’s eye for a radically romantic vision of the wild. In today’s world of pacification by digital screens, it’s something that we still need.

Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you didn’t have them.

Marcus Aurelius

I am currently typing this post on a keyboard that (after trying five different ones) I think is perfect, on a computer that is the most powerful I’ve ever used. All this is in a basement office that I share with my tremendous spouse, who uses 3/4 of the room for her sewing.

This basement is in a house we desired within a neighbourhood we couldn’t find any more perfect, sharing it with two beautiful children I was never meant to have.

My finances are good, my investments are secure and after ten years, and I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do when I first started in education.

I have family nearby who host us every week for dinners and help us in numerous ways that I’m so grateful for having. My parents (who have sacrificed to give me everything) and siblings are all alive, healthy and in constant contact with each other.

I have a tight-knit group of friends who are incredibly supportive and push me to be the best version of myself.

My health and mental faculties are still in check.

I want for nothing.

In all honesty, I don’t know how it can get any better and I would do well to remember that.

I’ve been out of sorts for the past three weeks and largely quiet about it. While there have been numerous positives to be thankful for during this time, it’s hard to focus when the city in which you live has turned into a hotbed of international attention.

Everywhere you go, every news site you bring up, every social media platform is just inundinating you with what’s happening with this protest downtown. There’s no point in even linking to an article about it for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. All I can say is the longer it went on, the more radicalized people were becoming.

You were always careful of bringing it up in conversation out of fear of the fights you may get into as a result. I remember during my weekly trip to the library with the kids, they had a display for the olympics and many Canadian flags up for grabs. My kids each grabbed them and started waving them around while chanting, “Canada is the best!”

If that happened at any other time, I’d just smile and tell them to keep it down because they’re in a library. However, I felt uneasy this time because this city has connected people waving flags from their windows as agitators. And what worried me is this paranoia of why I would even care what people were thinking.

It took a while for me to nail it down, but I’ve been able to follow a very concerning thread.

Two years ago, we had videos of people singing to each other from their balconies, cheering on health care workers and sharing their secrets for sourdough starter. Then, slowly, as the effects of the pandemic lingered on, something different happened.

We slowly became radicalized.

Whatever the underlying issues were that caused us to move in this direction, exasperated by endless media cycles (whether they were major networks or social media), we no longer simply disagreed with each other. We didn’t want to converse anymore.

People were either alt-right-scumbag-fascists or left-leaning-liberal-Marxist-snowflakes. But it wasn’t enough we were putting each other in these ridiculous categories, we became entrenched in our stance against them.

It wasn’t enough to yell and scream, we were now wishing death upon people. It’s frightening that in our frustration, we all got manipulated into making proclamations where we wanted to kill people (and their families) just for having an opposing view.

Friends and family members stopped talking with each other. Completely.

Why?

We can blame the government… but which level should we blame?
Municipal? Provincial? Federal?

I think all of them made absolutely poor moves during this pandemic, but I do acknowledge some of the efforts they made were quite remarkable (if someone can point me to any point in Canadian history where governments offered financial aid to people during a time of crisis, I’m all ears).

We can blame the media… but who are the ones consuming it?

Media has always had a bias. Mark Twain is even attributed as saying “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” Ryan Holiday wrote a great book about how he manipulated media to his cause, which I often reference during my teaching.

Yet, people are vehemently reacting to it now like this is something new. Hence why I didn’t link above lest someone completely miss the forest for the trees in this article by telling me I linked to a “biased” point of view.

We can blame each other… but at heart, most of us are good people with deep seated flaws. Besides, when you point a finger at a person, you’re also pointing three at yourself.

We can blame ourselves… but that would require some honesty and accountability that many of us are not ready to admit to yet (or ever). I mean, how many of us are actually informed and not just reading to confirm our own bias?

It may be a combination of all of the above, but we’ve certainly lost sight of ourselves. I’m hard pressed to believe the people protesting even know what they’re protesting anymore. In my view, they completely lost the plot (in many ways).

But honestly, where do we go from here?

Do we destroy everything and everyone that is ‘against’ us?

Do we subscribe to some Machiavelli worldview where the ends justify the means and permit terrorism in the name of a particular ideology?

Or, do we take a hard look at our society and ask, “Is this who we’ve become?”‘

I’m not sure, and I’m not sure what happened.

All I know is I want the world to move on from this pandemic… but not like this.

Perhaps this entry is a result of the typical mid-life reflections (crisis?) many have or maybe it’s the culmination of what appears to have been a lifelong existential crisis (what twelve year-old kid chooses to study mysticism?). Whatever it is, I’ve been thinking upon it for quite some time and have finally made peace with it.

There comes a time when a person has to face the finitude of their life. It’s not a shock that we all must go, but it’s certainly not something we gleefully embrace with open arms. As much as possible, we often distract ourselves from having to face that fact that our lives have an end point. We work diligently to avoid it as much as possible, as if our efforts will somehow unlock a key to immortality (which seems to be the promise of current medical and technical research).

We all know this in the back of our minds and approach it in a multidue of ways.

Some of us ignore it, completely. We treat it as something that won’t happen unless somebody tells us.

Some of us dwell on it, constantly. This has produced a wide range of fascinating philosophical, theological and sociological discourses. Technical ones as well.

But, like all things, most of us are somewhere in-between those two camps. We know it’s coming, so what do we do with it?

Well, we can rush to achieve the greatest success possible, sacrificing everything we can to (as Steve Jobs has said) make our dent in the universe. Achieve as much as possible because we only have one chance to make it happen.

The problem with this is we spend so much time trying to achieve that we forget how to live. It’s no wonder people who fall into this way of thinking suddenly find themselves having achieved everything they want and realizing, “this is it?” It leads them to the “second mountain” as defined by David Brooks. It’s perhaps for this reason you have multitude of Silicon Valley types attracted to the philosophical discourses of Naval Ravikant.

We can stress about making every moment matter and put enormous pressure on ourselves to make sure we are not “wasting” time. I put the quotes around wasting to suggest that time is not a commodity we can purchase or use. It’s a tool of measurement we have deluded ourselves into thinking we can master, forgetting that all we have is the present moment.

We can push to make the world a better place for future generations. While we should be doing this with every encounter, I think we often have a very narrow vision of how this can be accomplished every day.

We can hedge our bets in a particular religious tradition in the hope it’s right and we will be rewarded for our efforts to adhere to its tradition. As a Theology major, I have a serious concern with an adherence to dogmatic principles in the hope of a reward as opposed to an opportunity to touch the deeper meaning of an eternal universe.

Or we can recognize that, from a cosmic perspective, our lives are nothing more than a breath in history.

The universe is over thirteen billion years old and will go on for billions of more years. It probably has no semblance that we even exist, nor care that we’re here.

That idea used to bother me. Not anymore.

How amazing is it that in the grand scope of all that cosmic history, we are given a chance to experience life. We get to witness it. The universe evolved us to have consciousness to reflect on it, thereby (to paraphrase Thomas Berry) we get to be the universe reflecting on itself.

The finitude of life is what gives life meaning.

It doesn’t call us to rush from one moment to another, but to stop and appreciate them as they come.

Given the choice between running through a museum to see as much as possible for a brief second, or slowing down to spend time at just a few exhibits, which one leaves you more fulfilled?

We may never read all the books we want, see all the places we desire or finish the laundry once and for all. But wow, for a brief moment in cosmic history, we got to experience something and the chances against that happening are staggering. And although I am saddened by the departure of many loved ones, I get to experience the pain of loss and be reminded of the importance of others in my life.

I get to appreciate the moments, recognize the bigger picture and embrace the difficulties of making it through some days.

Because in the end, even the most difficult moments come to pass. They become memories.

It takes the pressure off to make things perfect, or be angry with ourselves.

It forces us to stop comparing ourselves with others, to hold ourselves up to an ideal we can never achieve.

To connect with each other. To step back. To pause.

To ignore the multitude of distractions that keep us from enjoying what’s in front of us right now. To leave here knowing we appreciated the gift we were given, regardless of how long we had to enjoy it.

It was over fifteen years ago, I sat at McDonald’s with the Rev. Dr. Ronald Wayne Young, a close friend and spiritual mentor, who commented that something must’ve happened for me to feel such existential dread at such a young age. I couldn’t pinpoint to anything in particular, but he recognized how much it weighed on me. Then, in only the way he can, he nudged me in a different direction in the hopes I would finally find peace.

I’ve found it now, Padre. I’ve found it now.

At one point, our greatest thinkers and innovators were working towards making life better for everyone. In many capacities, this is still happening, but it’s being drowned out by a complete breakdown of our collective ability to reason.

You can almost get the feeling we lost control of this world (not to say we ever really had it), only to find we are being coaxed and encouraged to keep losing ourselves in madness.

Keep watching the Twitter feed.
Keep scrolling the news.
Get riled up.
Get angry. Yell.
Keep watching as questionable decisions are made.
Get lost in the prison of your own mind.

…

We’ve lost the plot.

What we need is a spiritual revolution—a spirit of community, togetherness and the capability that is latent within each of us.

Maybe then we can get back to making the world a better place.

The days of reaching for the extra large slice of deliciousness at the end of the meal are coming to their end. The table upon which we now feast doesn’t contain one offering, but an endless array of them. We are literally being offered a world of options (even during this pandemic).

While it would be wonderful to take a large slice of every available flavour, we have physical limits with immediate and long-term reprucussions. There just isn’t enough time or capacity to take it all in.

What we can do is take a small slice when the opportunity is available.
A small slice of reading.
A small slice of learning something new,
of trying a new meal,
of just that bit of exercise
and even that extra moment to be appreciative.

Because those small slices are palatable and compound on each other. They add up and pretty soon you’ll have more than your satisfied.