Until it comes time to take a look at everything you have.

We severely underestimate the stuff we keep and during this pandemic, where many are taking the time to declutter, they’re discovering just how much accumulates.

As someone who has moved more times than he ever wanted to in his life, I’m always dumbfounded at how much is hidden away. It seems no matter how little I desired and how much I gave away, there was always so much.

In the case of those who needed to clean out a loved one’s estate, just the thought of it is enough to cause despair. It’s gotten to the point where there are industries specifically for this purpose (affectionally called “Estate Cleaning Services.”)

And yet, if you’ve ever had to clean out someone else’s place with the commitment you never want to be the same way, it inevitably happens on a different scale. My parents did not want this for their children and have been fastidious in decluttering their home… which was mainly boxing up all the crap us kids left there and giving it back to us.

The problem is we hold on to things because of their perceived value for the future, or nostalgic elements that someone else may want.

I’m sure given enough time, we’ll be talking about digital hoarding and being a digital minimalist. After all, you can store unlimited things digitally, so go ahead and do it.

However, I’m convinced the outward expression of holding onto things is directly related to the inner things we also hold onto. The identity we tie ourselves to inevitably shapes the physical items we surround ourselves with or store for future use.

We think we’re simple people:

“I’m an open book.”
“People know who I am.”
“I know who I am and what I stand for.”
“I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

But the more you dig, the more you discover.

There are many corners of ourselves we hide, doors we’ve shut in hopes they’ll never open again and latent memories of events that triggered domino effects of behaviours.

Before we start cleaning and decluttering our homes, perhaps we should start with decluttering ourselves.

We don’t have a lot of stuff until we start looking.

How often have we seen, heard or encountered a person who does something that really gets under our skin?

Happens all the time, right?

But then you need to ask, how long does this person stay under our skin?

Sometimes, we can be bothered by them for days… weeks… years, even! They just randomly pop up and it stirs the same emotions in us from the first viewing/hearing/encounter.

It’s even worse when this person is imaginary.

The imaginary straw man you created who is the literal opposite of everything you stand for or who purposefully preys on your hot spots.

They don’t even have a face or a name. They’re just there, in your psyche, riling you up.

At some point, you’re going to have to let go of those people and that involves taking action.

Find out why you get so upset thinking about them and what tangible actions you can take to work against theirs. The call to action will inspire a new mindset in your own life, one that looks at a much bigger picture.

After all, a single person is the end result of a much bigger system. They are just a part of it.

In the case of imaginary people, I find this exercise extremely helpful:

Give them a name.

For instance, every writer has a critical voice that tells them every piece of their writing is no good. I’ve named my critic Geoffrey.

Why? Who’s afraid of a Geoffrey and are you really going to take Geoffrey’s criticism seriously? (see Get Him to the Greek for the inspiration for the name).

You might overhear the following during my writing sessions:

Thanks, Geoffrey. Go away now.
That’s nice, Geoffrey. Now go crawl in a hole and stay there.
Why don’t you do something useful like make me a tea?

It’s fun. It’s cathartic and more importantly, it gets “Geoffrey” out of my head so I can move on with my work.

Whoever is in your head—get them out.

They’re winning the war against you without ever having to be there.

I was driving along a four-lane highway during a particularly busy time. On the route home and nearing the home stretch (only a few hours left) and things were flowing smoothly.

Behind me in the left lane was a transport giving some space and up ahead in the right lane were two other transports. There were a few cars ahead of me in the left lane as well.

Everybody is being conscientious and aware… which is another way of saying nobody was being an idiot.

Then it happened.

A car came zooming up behind me on the right hand lane. With cars in front of me in both lanes, there was really nowhere for this person to go. The person ends up in my blind spot.

I have my wife in the passenger seat and the kids in the back.

There some slowdown ahead and I ease on the gas when all of a sudden, I hear the truck behind me blaring his horn.

Looking into my rear view mirror, I see him backing off pretty quickly.

It was then I realize the person beside me was coming into my lane in an effort to push me off the road.

I can’t speed up because there’s a car directly in front and the lives of my family are too valuable for me to push back or play games. I hit my brakes while honking bloody murder at the person coming in.

My first feeling of gratitude is to the driver behind me who not only warned he was cutting in, but also backed up enough for me to brake without causing a pileup.

Needless to say, the person managed to get ahead of me (with a family in the car as well), but wasn’t going anywhere. Congratulations, you got nowhere.

But then, as you may recall, there were two trucks up ahead in the right lane. One of them slowed down and the other hit his turn signal to jump over lanes.

I smiled.

I knew exactly what was going to happen.

The trucker who slowed down, did it enough to keep his pace just ahead of the car ahead of me. The other trucker edged into the left lane, allowing the cars to pass in a hurry while cutting off the dangerous culprit.

I eased up on the gas and told my wife, “Watch this.”

Both trucks slowed right down to well below highway speeds. They saw what happened and decided to teach a little lesson.

I could see the frustration on the driver of the car in front of me. He was yelling obscenities and frantically waving his arms because he had nowhere to go except the ditch.

It was one of the rare moments where I didn’t mind going slow and I took it all in to enjoy the show. My face hurt from smiling.

This went on for a while before the highway opened up to six lanes and the car sped off again.

I stuck my arm out the window, honked my horn a few times and gave the thumbs up to the truck drivers around me. They honked back.

With all the talk of automation and self-driving trucks, it’s moments like this I’m going to miss.

I’ll miss asking truck drivers for best times to travel to certain cities, which to take and which to avoid.

I’m also going to miss all the businesses that depend on long distance drivers along the highway.

My teenage self will miss my friend’s dad who used to bring me back Pepsi One whenever he made runs in the US because we couldn’t get it in Canada.

My childhood self will miss pumping my arm up and down in the window to get a trucker to honk his horn (something I taught my son recently and I couldn’t tell if he or the driver got a bigger kick out of it).

We can’t stop the technological disruption, and it’s certainly not there yet (good luck having a computer traverse the icy roads of Canada’s highways with weather that changes every minute), but there’s a lot of humanity that will be stripped away.

And that’s what we should never forget.

What does your heart say?

When it comes time to making a decision, this is the one piece of advice often given. Other variations include

“Listen to your heart.”

“Follow your heart.”

“Let your heart guide you.”

I fear this may be flawed advice.

When our heart, (or gut, or intuition) kicks in, it’s because we are unsettled. The idea we can just listen to it and come to peace knowing we did the right may not be correct.

If our heart is unsettled, we have to ask why. Why is this causing me so much strife?

After all, we want to be able to trust our own intuition which has served humanity well for tens of thousands of years.

But knowing the right path could sometimes translate into following the most comfortable one. Simply, our heart will always fear the unknown.

And in some instances, it may fight against the difficult.

You want to be able to lead your heart.

In the same way a person trains endlessly so they can make the right decisions when the event happens (e.g. paramedics), you want your heart to be prepared.

The Spartan soldiers would train so hard that war actually felt like a vacation from their training. The battlefield felt familiar and that’s what made them fearless warriors.

How often do we lead our heart every day in the same way?

It’s the most precious gift you can offer the world and just following it might lead to more disappointments than peace.

Finding peace in your heart with every decision starts with filling it with peace every day.

And see me, you’ve already formed an opinion.

You took note of how I’m dressed, how I carry myself, what I’m doing in the moment and hundreds of other details that will give bias to your opinion.

You can give me the benefit of the doubt and wait until we start speaking to each other before that opinion is solidified. I can talk endlessly and amicably, but you’re listening to my actions more than my words.

However, you’re taking a mental note of the words I’m saying because the next time you walk into a room and see me—you’re going to compare whether my actions match the first impression.

My words matter less.

Every time we meet, you’re trying to figure one thing out:

Am I the real deal?

Do my actions line up with who I say I am?
Are they consistent?

If they do, we can build a relationship of trust.

If not, I better start acting in a way that lines up with my words, or speaking in a way that actually lines up with my actions.

There was a back road where I grew up that was barely used. It could be classified as a country road and I’m sure I have the same affinity for it as John Denver, but it didn’t actually take me home.

It didn’t take you anywhere.

Really, it was the most inconvenient road to use, but it was fun to drive on.

There was something about it that led you to a place in your mind of true freedom. You were young, free and aimlessly driving.

When people talk about the carefree days of their youth, this is the road that would spark that memory for me:

Summer time, windows down and music cranked.

These memories spark a point in our own minds we want to be taken back to–a time where you wanted for nothing, cared for nothing and had an entire future ahead of you.

Moments of pure bliss without anything weighing on the mind.

It’s a comparison between the responsibilities of life now and what we wanted life to always be. Yet, it’s an illogical tension.

We’re more content now, older, wiser and possibly even happier, but those memories and the specific feelings they evoke are lost. They’re not coming back and they can’t be retrieved.

But, there’s satisfaction in knowing that you touched pure bliss.

Which is why we hunger for them, get glimpses of them and are reminded of them through random triggers. And that has to make us happy.

As Dr. Seuss so eloquently put it:

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both.

Soren Kierkegaard

Whenever someone tells me they have no regrets because everything that’s happened to them, and every decision they’ve made, made them the person they are today…

I always want to ask:

Did it ever occur to you the person you are today, sucks?

It’s not intended in a mean-spirited way to tear down a person, but a genuine feeling there may have been decisions that would’ve led you somewhere better. I get them all the time.

Yes, life often throws curves our way that are out of our control and we have no choice but to deal with it. But for the big decisions that are truly one hundred percent ours–what if?

This multiple branching decision tree we always wonder about (sometimes called the butterfly effect), is paralyzing. Sometimes, it’s depressing.

To the person who has no regrets, I feel a pang of envy because it’s obvious they’re comfortable with not knowing. In fact, it doesn’t matter.

And they would be right.

It serves no good to regret major decisions because that would assume there was a “better” decision. I’m almost certain that even if we could see the far reaching effects of our choices, it still wouldn’t change anything for us.

It also wouldn’t make those decisions any easier.

As Kierkegaard so aptly put it, you will regret any option you take. And in that regard, we should have no regrets.

I don’t.

Or rather, I don’t pay attention to it.

Let me explain.

As I explained recently, I set high standards for myself. I’m a perpetual, lifelong learner and look towards the long term for where I want to be.

There’s always something for me to work on and practice and while there are a thousand different areas to cover, I take it one piece at a time. Each time I tackle something new, I seek out the advice of a trusted person to help me along the way.

If there’s one thing I learned from being a magician, teacher and writer… somebody will always have something to criticize about you.

In the case of being a magician, it never fails that after a magic show where another magician is in the crowd, they will always offer unsolicited advice. If they don’t, they’re probably bashing you to their friends about things you did wrong (or quickly comparing notes so they can steal your material).

Same with writing.

Almost the same with teaching, but people do it to your face.

It doesn’t matter what you do, what direction you take or how good you are, there’s always somebody out there who will have something to criticize you on.

The operative colloquialism is “haters gonna hate.”

But it goes deeper than that because sometimes people lash out at you because of their own personal shit. There’s something unresolved in their own life and rather than work on it, they’d rather tear you down.

These are people who could see you walk on water and then say the only reason you’re doing that is because you don’t know how to swim.

At the end of the day, this is my craft and my art. I will defend it because it’s the best I could be at the time.

If I go completely off the rails, I have people in place to let me know.

Otherwise, I ignore it.

After all, I don’t want to spend my limited time on the planet worrying about it.

I have better things to do.

In a few weeks, I will be back in the classroom.

While I am excited to be returning and have been diligently preparing for the year ahead, there’s been some serious issues. For starters, the plan on how schools are going to look hasn’t been established…

Because what has been established is changing (and will probably change again).

There’s the potential the material I have prepared so far might not even be relevant as my schedule could change. While frustrating, it does no good for me to vent my frustrations everywhere and anywhere.

I have to look at what I can control.

One of the areas to become comfortable with is life never offers certainties. In fact, the one guarantee is uncertainty (next to death and taxes, of course) and the one area you can control is your reaction to those times.

While the best course of action is to be proactive and prepare for every possible situation, practicing them until they are programmed (much like astronauts preparing for space missions), there are times when you are just jumping in without any direction.

At that point, what you do is try and just solve the problem ahead of you. Don’t look to the multitude of other areas that you will inevitably encounter. Just the one in front of you.

You’ll eventually get to the other ones later.

Jumping in without direction is actually the best course of action I offer new writers. Just start writing because your first problem to solve is sitting your butt down and putting words on paper.

The next problem they will encounter is how to keep writing until it’s finished. Then it’s putting it out there.

Each one has its own myriad of problems that will show up as well.

While the anxiety of the upcoming year creeps up periodically, I look at it as a new challenge with new problems to solve and new ways to grow.

After all, when you solve enough problems, solutions become more evident.

I’ve been journaling for quite some time now. For a while, I was sputtering in the dark about how I should do it and what specific purpose it would serve other than a dumping ground.

I didn’t want to spend entire notebooks solely ranting, but actually find a way to serve some good in my life. I took it a different approach.

There’s just one question I ask myself before I write:

Am I better today than I was yesterday?

It doesn’t have to be by much, but I seriously examine this question. I look at my actions, my thoughts and my words for the day and see if there was something that is moving me towards being the best version of myself.

I’m not striving to be another person, or live their life. Yes, it’s good to have role models (and I stole this idea from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius), but they serve as guides, not goalposts.

There are thousands of areas in my life to look at and if there’s a day where I can’t claim to have improved in any one of them (and there have been many), I ask why.

What happened?
What can I learn from it?

Every day, I want to end it knowing I was at my best and tomorrow is going to be even better.

After all, it’s hard to regret a life where you’ve consciously given it your all.