People don’t lose their holiday spirit.

They don’t lose their sense of community;

their sense of belonging.

They remember that wisdom is hard earned;

and love is what makes the world go round.

That there is a life beyond themselves

and happiness is only real when it’s shared.

For whatever reason, Frederich Nietzsche has come into the timeline of my life again (having made a very brief appearance in my early twenties) and his work is sinking in.

Part of me feels I wasn’t ready for most of the thinkers I came across when I did—treating them as nothing more than intellectual fodder rather than a relationship of wisdom through my own life experience. And there’s something about his work that’s striking me now.

Specifically, the idea that we should have a love of our fate (amor fati). If we had to live our lives again, in the exact same way, with the exact same decisions and outcomes, how would we react?

How would we handle it all?

I think back to how I’ve handled life so far and the times I’ve handled things best are the times where I just let go.

When I tried too hard to have control, or felt overwhelmed, it was only when I could accept letting go that I made peace.

It was when I reminded myself about a bigger story that I could be free.

To push further, to enjoy more, to love deeply.

For years, I lamented the decisions of my younger self, spending hours in my head considering alternate timelines that could have been. But none of that is helpful, useful, or even remotely indicative of what could have been. It’s nothing more than daydreams of wish fulfillment.

Everything I could have and could want is here with me right now.

What greater joy can I find than that?

Maybe I really will learn to have a love of my own fate.

It seemed like forever ago that I had momentum for writing.

While I’m still doing a bit of work behind the scenes, the real challenge is working myself back into the groove. Life has been… well… good overall, but like all of us, just trying to make sense of our time and place right now.

It appears every time I feel a good flow happening, the rhythm of life changes once again.

This is something I’ve always had a hard time working against, which is why I’ve decided on an audacious goal for the new year.

While part of this may be attributed to nothing more than a mid-life crisis, I feel it’s been too long since I’ve really pushed myself. My modus operandi used to be working just outside my comfort zone, but that has collapsed over the last few years as I attempted to just stay afloat.

However, it’s time to get back out there.

Set new heights.

Actually make a concerted effort to push beyond boundaries I once thought were impossible.

Last year, I made a goal to write one million words in a year before the next decade of my life was done. I figure, giving myself ten years to get there would give me the time to build up stamina to make it possible. This used to be standard fare for the pulp fiction writers of the last century, so why not try for it?

Hence, next year I am making a step towards it.

I will aim to write 350,000 words from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022.

Doing the math, that word count works out to just under a thousand words per day. It takes me between half an hour to forty-five minutes to write that amount, so I have to clear half an hour in the day to make it happen. Very reasonable.

The push won’t be for the words, but the actual time and to hold me accountable, I’ll write about my progress as I go.

I consider this fun.

Maybe I should get checked out.

It’s that time of year where Wikipedia is making its pledge for people to donate and I’m here to admit something:

I’m a person that does.

Normally I donate and then broadcast a message to English teachers, generating their ire, but my slow recession from social media keeps me from doing so. While irritating the academics who can’t stand the site is a devious motivation of mine, my purpose for doing so is more than that.

The Internet was supposed to be the great democratizer of information. It was the place where nothing would be hidden and would offer free access to anybody on the globe who is able to access it. Wikipedia’s mission of providing that information as an open source concept (with a global peer review) seems to fit that mission better than any place right now.

It’s not behind a paywall.

It’s not run by algorithms that recommend articles based on malicious tracking and paid for advertizers.

It doesn’t hide articles based on browsing habits.

As an encyclopedia, it’s remarkable—worldwide collaboration and constant updates.

If you think about the encyclopedias of the past, they were great reference points. They were places you can go to get a gist of a subject and see if it sparked any further interest. It was a starting point for further curiosity and could lead you down many wonderful paths.

But they were limited in scope (you can only bind so many pages), heavy and expensive… especially if you tried to keep up with every edition.

And now we have it online, unlimited pages, for free.

That’s something I’m willing to support.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could plan for every contingency, every pathway and every possibility?

I’d like to think this is possible, but it’s only as a result of the direct experience of being reactive to situations that you can build a proactive measure. But, what if you don’t have the time for such experiences?

What if it’s go-time?
What if too much is on the line to falter that much?

Then it’s time to learn from others. This is where ancient wisdom and the people before us who have made the same pathways are our guide. This is where books come in handy, strategies from observation and direct advice from those who have been there.

It’s one thing to learn it on your own, but much better to learn from those who want to share. When you’re proactive to a fault, you won’t be prepared for everything, but very few things will be able to surprise you.

I am struck by this post from Seth Godin about the media making us out to be astronomers.

One line summary: the media leads us to believe we are passive witnesses to the world in the same way astronomers are passive witnesses to the universe.

It’s easy to see the helplessness written on our faces as we are bombarded by all the chaos of the moment, finding it easier to just hope for the best rather than take action. After all, given the scale of what’s happening, our actions may seem so minor—so insignificant.

It will take a great feat by a great person and that’s just too big of a bill to pay right now.

But… when you consider the consequences of actions are not from a great few (although they inspire and do move the needle), but from the multitude, it becomes more manageable. For instance, we often think of employee theft as one person stealing thousands of dollars, when the reality is hundreds of employees stealing a few dollars… totaling thousands.

Making change isn’t one great act, but thousands of people making thousands of little ones.

What little act can we do today?

At the suggestion of my neighbour, I watched through the entirety of a show called “The Good Place.” This is quite the feat as I don’t remember the last time I finished a TV series (aside from the thousandth repeat of Paw Patrol).

However, the series hooked me for many reasons (many of them Theological and Philosophical) and ended on a perfect note. In fact, everyone who has watched the show make the same comment about the ending.

Being the book nerd I am, I went ahead and ordered the philosophy book the writer based the show on (“What We Owe to Each Other” by T.M. Scanlon) and will gleefully dive into it, muddling through each page.

One thing I can’t help think about, though, is that very question:

What do we owe to each other?

Humans haven’t really changed much over the past hundred thousand years. Our technology has changed, the landscape is different and our knowledge base has increased by magnitudes, but we still act pretty much the same.

We still repeat the same mistakes.

People continue to be jerk face jerks.

We continuously lie to each other and ourselves.

So what do we owe? Why bother helping anybody out?

It almost feels like we shouldn’t, yet we have this desire to do so anyway. We’re wary of motives, but we want to believe in the best of each individual.

It’s the reason Canadians will jump out of their own cars and help push someone else’s car that is stuck in the snow. Or why we have collections at work when somebody has a baby… or when someone passes away.

I know the final answer won’t come after a book (although books hold the answers to so many questions), but I do know this invisible, subconscious contract we have with each other is the only reason we’re here today.

It’s easy to sit there on the couch, watching a commercial about the latest exercise gimmick and go, “I can do that. I can get in shape while watching TV, like I’m doing right now. Seems pretty easy.”

Or to watch some ridiculous feat of humanity (triathlons always seem that way to me) and tell yourself that you could probably do one.

Maybe there is some motivation and that’s what gets you to day one.

But then you realize that decision was made while sitting on the couch eating a snack, which is when the self-negotiation begins to take place. It’s usually in the form of justifications for why your goal was too ridiculous and that it’s okay to give up or settle for something else. Often, the operative word that comes up is “later” or “tomorrow.”

We do this to ourselves in many facets, creating thick layers of justification for it every step of the way until we eventually give up on it completely for “good reason.”

A decision made in our comfort zone will always be challenged the moment things get uncomfortable. The only way out is to stay in that discomfort and push it further.

Narrative is our most powerful tool at our disposal, overriding the weak memory systems we have in place. While we’d like to think our memories are vivid, many studies have proven this to be false.

In the scientific community, eyewitness account is actually the least verifiable form of evidence.

We can unwillingly, and often, create memories about our past that never happened.
We can dictate things about ourself that are blatantly not true.
Yet, we believe them.

And we need them.

A strong mind is one that can deceive itself because it builds a stronger sense of identity. If we didn’t have that in place, we’d be mired in self-pity without a way out.

Sometimes, the one thing we need is to tell a better story about ourself.

Especially if it’s a lie.

There’s some great memes floating around to show the passing of time. Here are a few of my favourites:

Basically, it’s an attempt to make my generation feel old. While there’s always been attempts to do so with previous generations, the difference is ours have the Internet to lament about it.

However, I look at a much bigger picture:

Consider how much the world has changed since the moon landing and the release of the Lion King vs. the release of the Lion King and today. While we can wax nostalgic about “back in the day,” but I wouldn’t trade any of our gains to go back to that moment.

What I’m more concerned about are the things that haven’t changed and should have over the last fifty years.

I just hope my kids will look back twenty five years from now and be much happier about the world at that time.