It was a Saturday morning like any other. The kids were up early, itching to watch some cartoons and play while we, the parents, caffeinated ourselves and prepared for the day ahead.

This morning was marked by a special occasion—a field trip.

An immersive Van Gogh exhibit we purchased tickets for months prior.

Through circumstances that were unexplained, getting the kids out the door was smooth and traffic was light all the way there. We arrived early and secured our spot as first in line.

We were let in to the four rooms of this experience, the first of which were swaths of text to give background information. Interesting to me and my wife, but hardly a concern for kids who want to run.

The second room was a darkened, cozy area, with a light display augmented with text and music. A neat foray into the artistic side of things and held the interest of my three year old for an entire two minutes, but they quickly ran off to the penultimate area.

Consider an abandoned warehouse, but overtaken by the creativity of many people who want to honour an artist who saw the beauty of nature. Upon entering the room, I was struck by its magnificence.

I stopped, mouth gaped open while feeling lost in the exhibit around me. The combination of artistic representation and music merged to create a euphoric experience that could barely be described by the mystics.

Sure, I took pictures and some video, but they pale in comparison to just being there.

It makes you stop.

I didn’t want to leave.

My kids danced as the art flowed across the walls and floor, captivated by all that was happening around them. I danced with them. We sat together and watched, then left when the experience ran its course.

I’m still thinking about it.

In our fast-paced world that changes by the minute, giving us cultural amnesia with every passing year, how often are we struck by something so beautiful that it causes us to sit with it for the day?

Perhaps it’s out there, but we are ignoring it… just like the artist on display who only sold one painting in his lifetime, but is still teaching us how to see.

We’ve learned through our history lessons that the best way to destroy a culture is to eradicate its language, all its artifacts (especially anything written) and layer a narrative on top of it.

The Spanish did a spectacular job of doing this with their encounter with the Aztecs.

They emphasized sacrifices to such an extent that by the time they wanted to wipe out remaining traces of the defeated civilization, the bloody sacrifices were almost the only thing that was retained.

And yet, don’t do we do this with people?

We reduce a person to such a narrow narrative that it’s the only thing we will accept about them, blinding ourselves to anything else. Our reductive minds just can’t resist culling away everything except what we want to see… and what we want others to see about them.

Our problem isn’t our unwillingness to know others—it’s our willingness to expand our narrative.

I always found it frustrating as a teen when someone told me “the solution is complicated” or “there is no real answer.” To me, it was a cop out from providing a straight forward response. 

Of course there’s an answer. You just have to admit it!

Unfortunately, you come to realize that all answers have consequences and those consequences create further questions—even problems. Many times, the answers we give, in an effort to provide one, create unintended consequences.

To me, this is the appeal of the philosophers who spend their days ruminating about various answers. They can provide thought experiments to show potential solutions and further issues, getting humanity slightly closer to some semblance of an answer to life’s biggest questions. 

Of course, there’s never a real answer and the problem we’re running into now is that we need one. 

We’ve hit the precipe of when technology needs moral responses to its programming. Otherwise, it will just run rampant with whatever biological bias its engineer has. It’s a massive responsibility to take on with an even greater question behind it:

Who is even equipped to provide such answers?

It used to be that you learned something and that knowledge was relevant for the rest of your life.

Not anymore.

The pace of change is so rapid that even the foremost experts at the edges of their field can’t keep up. We’re constantly in flux and constantly adapting.

The archetype of the wise sage on the mountain is now nothing more than a character in a story because knowledge is no longer stagnant. While we still turn to our elders for those life lessons that just can’t be learned by anything but experience, it’ll be our children who will teach us what we need to know.

In many ways, they’re already doing it.

I recently had a book review published in a Florida newspaper.

While I’ve had other publishing credits to my name (see the body of work on this site), this one stands out because I often hear about “right place and right time” as an attribute to breakthroughs and success.

It’s usually put forward as a one-time deal. A person just happens to be at a particular place in the universe at precisely the right moment and everything took off after that. If you’re a lottery winner—absolutely.

However, reality is way more nuanced.

I met the author/magician in that article almost fifteen years ago and have been writing, publishing and working on my craft for close to twenty years at this point. Had I met him just now, or had he wanted this review when we first met, this offer wouldn’t have happened.

While I’ve missed opportunities in the past, the key, as I’ve learned, is to keep plugging away because there are no guarantees for the future. Sometimes a right connection is made at the right moment, but that moment requires a deep history behind it.

So it’s kind of true, but you simply can’t just show up without having done the work.

And if you want to stay relevant, you have to keep putting in the work.

I have a joyous vocation that is difficult at the onset, which is convincing students of the relevance of Religion in their lives (or at least society).

As this was my thesis, it continues to be my mission and each year, a little more progress is made. I’m always humbled at the number of students who send me a note afterwards to express how much they enjoyed the class and how they’re still thinking about it.

The aim is to get them seeking and questioning, finding their path and keeping their heart open along the way. I promise no answers.

However, there’s one one issue that continues to plague me. The number of young people (in North America) in the churches are on a steep decline, and have been for quite some time. My classroom may be their only contact with Religion, which is why I treat this as a serious responsibility.

However, where do I send them afterwards?

Where can they go?

Understanding every person eventually finds their own way (hopefully), a young impressionable person can be seriously harmed if they look in the wrong place.

And right now, there are a lot of wrong places.

I’m watching my own tradition denigrate itself into a breeding ground of partisan politics, completely losing sight of what separated itself from society in the first place. Spoiler alert: it was their followers reaching out to the margins of society and helping people that everyone else ignored.

So where to next?

Right now, I just don’t know.

I hated doing the dishes. There was something about them that held a repulsive barrier to my sensibilities of cleaning up after a meal.

It got to the point where I’d leave them piled until a girl I dated would come over as she loved doing them.

Then something changed.

Doing the dishes stopped becoming a chore and become a meditative exercise. A time for prayer.

A psychological feeling of freedom: life might be chaotic and the home may be in disarray, but there’s one external thing I can control—clearing the sink.

It’s a small feeling that life can make sense.

Even for a moment.

According to Bertrand Russell, one of the biggest sources of our unhappiness is a complete focus on ourselves.

It’s the hyper-attention to our flaws, our sins and our shortcomings. It’s the endless pursuit of obsessing over these negative black holes that we spend our waking hours trying to overcome them… or numb them from our minds.

And even though he wrote this close to a hundred years ago, humans haven’t changed much. We see this focus on the self on a much grander scale today, but we also see a smaller, counter-narrative:

the many communities of people helping each other out.

It seems we’re in a weird tension of time where we’re miserable with ourselves, but quick to respond to those in need.

I suppose the big question is, which one will prevail?

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco

I purposefully plan side tangents in my lessons. When it seems to my students that I’m going off script, it’s all been planned in detail.

It needs to be done because the off moments are what stand out. They draw our attention and get us to listen closely.

They also tend to be short and simple to process, sticking with you for long periods of time.

What makes them interesting is they’re hard-earned by the giver, but feel like throwaway comments in retrospect to everything else that person knows. And yet, it’s the scraps that form us.

You’d think magicians would be the best at keeping secrets, considering it’s their life. But, offer them enough money and they would be happy to sell you what they know.

The joke among them is if you want to keep anything a secret, publish it in a book.

This adage is just as true now as when it was first said. Consider this site with my “bite-size mornings” (as a reader coined these posts… which I think I should adopt because I like it).

I average approximately 70,000 words a year on these posts,
which is the length of a book, or even two smaller ones.

While there are no big secrets I am writing about here, if I were to string these ideas together in a book, none of my words would be read. This is actually wonderful news because all these posts are independent thoughts and would be horrible as a narrative.

Each one gets to stand on its own and be given consideration as a completely isolated thought by a worldwide audience. It’s a magnificent leap forward from our mostly information deprived ancestors.

It’s also wonderful because if I wanted to write about all my secrets, a published book is still the best place to keep them.

If you don’t believe me, just ask a poet.