When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone?

As in, you sat down with some pen & paper and wrote them something that you then put in the mail?

It’s something I had to really think about because many cards have been sent out on my behalf, but no letters. Digital communication has made things incredibly easier and faster, but the personal touch of a letter speaks volumes.

Perhaps it’s just from the time I grew up in, but the handwritten word shows something a digital representation cannot.

It feels like a personal giving (and receiving) of yourself.

A sliver of your soul for someone to see.

How do you find freedom in a world that is limited in its movement?

The promises of a globalized world are faltering and we are returning back to the local community. In my province, we’ve been ordered to stay home again.

There’s only so much entertainment you can consume, social media feeds to follow and ways to self medicate before you recognize none of it is helping.

So what to do?

I am reminded of the story of Christopher Knight, who found freedom as a hermit in Marine.

While he would occasionally read a book or play a video game, most of his time was spent just sitting and thinking. He never travelled aside from the occasional walk. For him, it was complete freedom for many years.

Understanding we still have responsibilities, becoming hermits isn’t the answer. But letting go, staying local and enjoying what’s around you… it reminds me of what my grandmother once told me:

“Growing up, we had so much less, but we were much happier.”

It’s pretty clear our governments have either lost control or swung the other way to take full control. We can no longer depend on them for our freedom.

What we can depend upon is the freedom we create in our own minds and the small communities of the people around us.

In fact, there’s never been a better time to do it.

A simple fedora.
Grey.
Built with high quality materials that still make it look new despite decades of ownership.

The one thing I inherited from my grandfather.

It sits on my wall to remind me of the many lessons he taught me in life. Lessons that were passed along through his actions as he was a man of very few words.

• He served his country and protected the people he loved during the war
• Despite being captured, he always remained true to himself, never once giving in to pressure to make things easier
• He was wary of authority (disdain for it might even be a better description)
• He took a chance and moved countries, submitting to hard labour at an age where many would back away from it
• He never complained
• Didn’t speak much
• Never learned how to read
• Grew his own food, made his own wine and loved his grandchildren

His only two direct pieces of advice for me:
1. Get that toothpick out of your mouth
2. Helping with the Church is fine, but never become a priest (his experiences with them, especially as a soldier, marked him on that one)

The fedora on my wall is a reminder of what he sacrificed so I can have the what I do right now.

And it’s a reminder to keep my mouth shut, keep it simple and enjoy the moments in life.

As we pass the year mark during this pandemic, there is a sentiment thrown around that the kids will be fine.

They’re resilient.

They’ll bounce back.

Everything will be okay.

And yet, no one stopped to ask how many adults they know that are still dealing with childhood trauma.

Or how much their childhood affected so much of their life until they dealt with it.

Or how they never dealt with it directly and it manifested in other ways.

I hope the kids will be fine, but even my most optimistic viewpoint cannot change the fact that we will be dealing with a wave of issues in the upcoming years. We better get ready for it.

It’s not the person who makes the most moves that wins—just the one who makes the smartest moves.

The game teaches responsibility as every move is of your own volition and every mistake is both punishing and 100% your fault.

It requires thought, creativity and focus.

It takes discipline to learn, relearn and evolve every time you play.

Very few will become a master of it.

And the only way to know if you are any good is to actually play.

It is life’s ultimate teaching tool if we would be willing to learn the lessons the game has to offer.

Get up. Wish everyone in the household a Happy Easter. Answer the phone that is ringing off the hook from extended family who are also wishing us well. Get ready for Church. Get there super early to beat the rush. Come home. Easter lunch: 8 course meal that includes lasagna as an appetizer. Visit grandparents. Easter egg hunt. Eat treats until stomach ache ensues. Watch a movie. Head to bed.

The above is the Easter schedule of my childhood and teenage years, without fail.

It was great for its predictability and joy spread throughout the day, especially with the excitement of seeing happy family members. It also flew by in an instant, getting to the end in an exhausted state (even more so as you got older and were tasked with responsibilities rather than being on the receiving end of all the hard work).

Moving out of the house, the Easter tradition changed.

Not a bad change, just a different one.

Then with the advent of my own family, the magic of the season could be brought to my own children, which is exciting in its own way to watch.

However, this will be the second year in a row where this joyous holiday will be spent locked down and isolated. While last year was acting out of survival mode to ensure the usual parameters were in place to make the day run smoothly, this year… it’s time to reframe it completely.

The kids will get to wake up to an Easter egg hunt. We will have cinnamon buns for breakfast. I’m going to stay in my comfy clothes and not feel guilty about it. We are not going to rush to get a seat at Church, but rather bring the celebration of the Church into our home through our time together. Provided no disasters happen in the morning, I’m going to watch the Jays game in the afternoon. I will regale the story of the ’93 World Series for the 900th time while my wife searches for a heavy object to throw at me. Family will be called. Texts will be sent and returned.

Things will be simple.

The day will be celebrated.

And it will be one to remember.

It does not take any extraordinary amounts of digging into my influences to uncover that Harlan Ellison is my go-to writer. This, of course, was a change from my previous icons of C.S. Lewis, Douglas Coupland and Ursula K. Le Guin; all of whom still have a place in my heart and imprint in my words.

However, the usual tactics of reading, and re-reading, a writer, copying their prose and imitating it with your own spin, wasn’t enough to reach the flow that Ellison wrote. It finally dawned on me why many writers, myself included, will never write like him.

Yes, he is his own person and quite the character, but that’s the lead-in.

Writers are incredibly self-conscious about their work, often stopping themselves from their own potential as artists thanks to the critical voice that gnaws at their brain. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and her husband Dean speak about this extensively.

We are critical of our own work.

We are critical of ourselves.

We fear the criticism of others.

Ellison, on the other hand, had no filter. He had no critical voice because his voice was to be critical of others. Take any of his short stories and you will see a writer attempting to hold a mirror against humanity, filtered through the outrage of a writer who went to war with the world about everything.

You don’t sit in bookstore windows with your typewriter, writing stories on the spot, one draft, and then submit them for publication (many won awards) if there is any critical voice in your head.

To write like him is not so much to imitate his style, but to approach the craft uninhibited.

It’s something I now work towards every day.

The world is moving at an accelerating pace, far beyond we could ever conceive as we only get a mere glimpse into the many innovations. After all, laboratories and companies have a vested interest in protecting their proprietary research and development from preying public eyes.

To think we are only at the surface of what is to come, even with the world still shutdown in its ephemeral rage that is a global pandemic. This too, will pass into the annals of history books as a marked event—seemingly overlooked by other potential breakthroughs (or downfalls) to happen thereafter—as other events enter the scene.

However, where is all this innovation going?

I am struck by this interview on the Joe Rogan podcast with angel investor Naval Ravikant (a wonderful person to follow/listen to) about the potential to get our entire lives automated. With enough engineers, scientists and mathematicians, we can literally build a world where all the daily chores are done for us and we can focus on our passions.

Okay, but this begs a further question of the life we really desire because it seems we are really aiming for a life of simplicity.

One where our basic needs are met, our safety is in check and we can freely spend our days with people we love, doing what we love and sharing moments.

Why not create that life now?

“You need to get back on Twitter. So many amazing educators to reach out to and learn from.”

It was the beacon from a colleague several years back, urging me to re-join a platform I distanced myself from as it was nothing more than a toxic wasteland of drama. I grew up in a European household and had enough fill of gossip for three lifetimes.

(The original social media was my mother on the phone through the evening sharing “news” with her siblings)

Yet, the foolish part of my nature that felt–perhaps–this time would be different, re-joined.

It was going fine as I kept my distance and monitored my usage, but this past year has been too much.

The yelling.
The complaining.
The screaming.

All to be washed away with the next storm when millions of people worldwide logged in to find something else to scream about. The conversations I once enjoyed were being sidelined for the family get-togethers that ended in a cacophony of excessively loud voices complaining about everything and nothing.

The quiet wisdom once worth seeking is all sucked away by the many attempts of people engaging in a game of brittle popularity: here now, gone the next minute.

It’s time to log off.

Perhaps I’ll try again when the world extricates itself from its current madness.

The sad thing about advice is we are never really ready to hear it when it’s first given to us.

And while we’ve all heard that tired old axiom that it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes rather than your own, we don’t really believe it. We need to make the mistakes.

We need to be in the crud.
The chaos.
The uncertainty that can only be brought by the experience of life, which is wholly neutral, but we interpret as good or bad.

We need to hit that crossroads where all that’s left was that bit of advice we once heard, and had we only taken it then, we may not have been caught up in our current predicament. But it didn’t make sense then.

It makes sense now.

To lament the loss of time wasted to get to this serendipitous moment of clarity is to cast judgement on it, which isn’t useful.

The only thing that matters is the recognition and, most importantly, the action thereafter.

Then again, almost all advice can be cast aside because we are never ready to hear it… or it all just might be useless.