The three things you never talk about in polite company:

Politics, Religion and Money

This is really difficult to avoid when you’re a Religion teacher in a publicly funded Catholic Education System run by a Premier who hates you (one of his party’s many examples of gaslighting). As much as I try to keep my mouth shut and just do the work that will serve my community, people keep trying to pull me into the mud.

My dad always told me to leave work at work.

Do what you need to do, then go home and leave work where it belongs. Don’t complain about it, don’t whine to anyone and just move on with your life. After all, no one wants to hear you complain about it anyway. This is what I try to do.

And a big reason I cultivate so many other interests (aside from my creative mind craving it), is so I can avoid talking about what I do for a living and my personal study of Religion that I’ve spent over twenty five years on at this point. It’s a stupid game because I love them both.

Yet, I’ve learned, never engage.

At best, play a different game.

We’re built for novelty, but it’s the boring, mundane, every day grind that moves the needle.

This has been a hard truth for me to accept as I’m a person who loves diving into new projects, skillsets and even life decisions. For the better part of my life (so far), I’ve been all over the map with some semblance of things I want to accomplish, but letting the winds of excitement carry me everywhere.

There have been a few consistencies, but a strong home cannot be built on top of a foundation that has been haphazardly put together. A foundation takes time and is the most unappreciated and unseen part of the final product.

Without it, nothing stands.

I was thinking of this as I looked back on my magic career. Countless hours went into learning techniques that were never (well… almost never…) seen by an audience, but were the root of every magic routine performed. My ability to learn new material quickly came as a result of the hours put in at the beginning.

It’s also a necessity for building relationships.

There are ways to shortcut rapport, but that fades quickly unless that consistent, daily work strengthens it.

As this all ruminates in the mind, it calls me to shift my perspective in the morning. Instead of asking, “What exciting thing am I going to do today?”, I should really be asking:

“What boring, mundane thing can I do today that will help me build a better future?”

My son absolutely loves to interrupt my classes with his shenanigans and at this point, it’s quite entertaining.

After a year of spending days talking to icons on a screen, occasionally interspersed with someone accidentally turning their mic on to reveal the movie they’re watching or video game they’re playing, it’s good to have some relief. As a parent, I’ve joined the legions of others who have also hit a point that shrugging is the only response to give right now.

On my way to the basement yesterday morning, he wanted to share a picture:

Notice who the happy one is in that picture?

I keep it at my desk now. He also ran into the room in the middle of teaching to announce that he was going to stick his butt in my face. It was the first time my current students reacted to anything.

This morning, however, was a pleasant surprise.

He took one of my medallions to Saint Christopher and drew a coffee cup (with Sharpie) over the head of Christopher. When I asked him about it:

“Since Jesus is in your heart, and you drink a lot of coffee, your heart is full of Coffee Jesus!”

The logic is sound.

He also made a point of running into my class to loudly ask if I told my students about “Coffee Jesus.”

It was at that point I realized I’ve seen many artistic interpretations of Jesus, but never one with him having a coffee head. And right now, that seems just as valid as any other interpretation.

In fact, it might even be better than most.

My favourite website to show my students is Gapminder. It’s a brilliant display of how our biased views of the world prevent us from seeing what’s statistically happening.

As you work your way through the quizzes, it becomes clear that humanity is at its best right now. Aside from climate change and a few other UN Goals, everything has been moving in a positive direction—worldwide.

Great news, right?

Overall, yes. But we’re still dealing with the same issues, which have been constantly repeating throughout history. We’re fighting the same battles, watching the same tragedies and coping with the same hardships. We just keep dressing them up with different names.

All this in a world where anyone, at any time, can get access to the entirety of human knowledge at their fingertips. You would think that would be a game changer for society.

Nope.

Nothing has changed, but it’s never been better.

Maybe the world really belongs to the optimists and their true superpower is ignoring everyone while they do their work.

The last month has been a chaotic wrapping of my head around things as this lockdown and pandemic stretches on. It’s been difficult for me to think clearly, requiring time to step away.

And part of that stepping away was cutting back: news stories, social media and other emotional drains.

Then someone texts me a story about the remains of 215 children found buried under a former residential school.

My head is still shrieking and I haven’t been able to put it into words, but I’ll do my best.

I had no idea about the history of the native people of this country until my third year of University—and I started at twenty. I was twenty three years old before I heard about the systematic destruction of an entire culture through various means (or whatever means necessary, it seems).

Up until that point, my only experience were the slanderous jokes people told, a local news story about the killing of Dudley George and comments from adults about “freeloading,” “laziness,” and other such adjectives. The history of native people may have been briefly brushed upon (and we’re talking light strokes) during school.

To all of a sudden learn about a history of people who had their children forcibly removed from their homes and dragged vast distances to be physically, mentally and sexually abused by clergy… it didn’t sit right. How could it?

I was angry for a multitude of reasons.

How is it that I could know about the history of slavery in the US before ever knowing what happened here?

Seven generations of silence.

Then there’s the Church… and oh… I’ll save that for a later post. There’s too much that can be said and right now, it’s splintering from the fallout of indoctrinating two generations of people in partisan culture wars rather than kerygma. You reap what you sow.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve kept my eyes wide open. I’ve had the privilege of working alongside some incredible people, especially young people, in the Indigenous community. To learn their stories, their teachings and their pleas. I’ve also had the chance to see a general population slowly learning about this horrid history, as we all come to terms with how can we move forward in reconciliation.

An extensive report was put together in 2015 with ninety-four calls to action.

And yet, here we are, six years later, finding the graves of children. A gravesite so buried, it was purposefully forgotten about to hide the actual number of deaths that occurred.

Residential school survivors, in hearing about this story, are reliving the trauma from when they attended.

There’s been a huge response, which is good. However, I wonder how many of these are simply performative before people move on to the next story. This is not a tragedy that happened. These were children who were purposefully killed.

So where do we go from here?

I’ve always been a big advocate of “talk less, listen more.”

But in this case: talk less, do more.

The continued state of lockdown is certainly not an adventure I’d choose for this extended period of time, but it’s hit a point where I’ve been able to reframe it.

Sure, the house is never going to get clean (or stay clean if it gets close), we’re not able to see anyone or go anywhere and I’m certainly not winning any work-related awards for my performance this year.

However, every day has given me an opportunity to do the one thing every parent wished they could do more of: spend time with the kids.

Just playing with them.

Finding new and imaginative ways to have fun, getting them to come up with their own version of Calvinball and just being there as they grow up. We’re no longer running from one event to another, but lazily getting ourselves ready in the morning and sauntering on our walks/scooter rides outside.

Given the limited options in the house, it’s also forced us to be outside way more often and the fresh air, plus exercise, has been a healthy reprieve from the usual.

While there’s been plenty of quantity time this past year, it took some realization that all of it was quality time as well. Once that realization set in, it’s been a joy.

Don’t get me wrong, I am impatiently waiting for the moment we can see everyone again and will be sprinting to everyone the moment it’s possible. In the meantime, we have a house full of love.

And that’s something I will always enjoy.

With the slowdown to everyone’s day, especially their mornings, there’s been a surge of interest in building better morning routines.

The typical wake-up, rush out the door and commute long distances has been replaced, in many cases, with a crawl-out-of-bed and spend half the day waking up. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the people of the world needed to slow down anyway.

However, what to do with the mornings?

Sleep? Exercise? Journal? Meditate?

All good ideas as it gets your mind in the right place for the rest of the day. I’m in awe of those who are up before 5am to get a workout in. I’ve been a big proponent of journaling and meditating upon wake up… as far as my kids will allow, anyway.

However, there’s a group of people who still set the standard for what can be accomplished in a day. They are up at (or before) the crack of dawn and get more done in their morning than most do in a full workday.

Our farmers, who have the critical task of growing our food.

Something tells me they don’t gather together in drawn-out video conference meetings. Perhaps chats and sharing of ideas on efficiency and ways to produce, but it’s certainly not a staple in their day… week… or even month.

They get up, do what needs to get done and call it in at the end. There’s nothing to think about—they just get to it. And when they’re done, they’re done.

It’s a work ethic many of us forget about and perhaps, should spend more time adopting.

The time I knew it was time to leave the magic world is when it felt more like work than fun.

While there were many facts of the magician life that required juggling, each one felt like a pleasure. Even the countless hours practicing and the endless nights problem-solving a way to do a trick—none of it felt like work.

For years, it always felt like play.

From the outside, it may have looked like a lot of work, but on the inside, never.

Until it did.

At which point, I knew something had changed and it was time to leave.

Writing, reading, studying religion, solving math problems, podcasting—these are not things that feel like work me. They can be difficult, but I never dread getting to them.

This sense of elation at doing something that brings you to life is what to strive for in all the “work” you do (ironing will never be a love of mine, unfortunately, and will always feel like work).

If it stops being that way, it’s time to stop, reflect and re-evaluate.

Almost everything.

The sooner we accept it, the more at peace we’ll be.

During my graduate work at Queen’s, a fellow student told me the goal of any good school of Religion (or philosophy) is to break you down and force you to rebuild again.

I marveled at the accuracy of that statement because of its applicability to all facets of life.

Every time we need to re-invent ourselves, we need to break the myths about who we are in order to build again.

If we want a more mature understanding of something, it requires a shattering of what we think we know about it. Case in point, the first thing I do at the beginning of every Religion course is break every myth about what students think the Bible is… by tearing apart the myths in (and around) it.

As a writer, getting new words on a page and getting them out there continuously requires you to break many myths about how writing works.

Some tact is required.

Breaking a deeply held belief can shatter a person if they don’t have the proper supports to rebuild.

However, its worth doing because what you come back with is always stronger.