Our days this past year have been largely reactive.

Every week is a new announcement, news story or information piece that keeps us glued to the doom scrolling of news sites and social media feeds. From my end, all we’ve ever felt like we could do is hang on and anticipate what’s going to happen next.

Except… when you look at history… this particular situation isn’t anything new.

Ryan Holiday wrote a great piece on finding stillness during these times. One section (“Zoom Out”) spoke of how all this has happened before and will happen again. All you need to do is change the names and suddenly, you are at a different point in history. It’s reassuring to know we’ve dealt with all of this before and even at this magnitude.

So what can we do now?

Take control of our days again.

Be safe and decide what you’re going to focus on and what you’re going to ignore.

Stay informed, sure, but do so in the smallest doses. Just enough to know what’s happening, but not enough to lose yourself in endless news cycles. Unless you’re a politician or viral lab researcher/technician/worker, much of what’s happening is out of your control anyway.

Keep in mind all things will cycle and we will look at this as another entry in our history books.

In any given day, there are thousands of observations to be made. Tens of thousands, really.

However, in an effort to be more efficient, our brain casually ignores those items that aren’t an immediate concern to our existence. Unless you’re a spy, we feel no reason to pay attention.

And this is why poetry is so important.

It’s the poet who picks up on the details that give life its richness. A single poem of theirs forces us to notice what often goes unnoticed… to pay attention…

to wake up.

Life is painful, hard and we’re often grinding our way through each day.

Let the beauty of language that shines through our poetic chorus help us see what often gets ignored.

You can always tell if a magician is a beginner, or if they’re just learning a new trick, based on how white their knuckles turn when they’re performing a move.

The lesson in magic is to use just enough force to grip whatever object you have and nothing more. It should be at the point where even the slightest loosening of the grip will drop whatever is in your hand.

This ensures the movements are natural and you won’t call attention to your hands.

However, the big secret to making this work is to not pay attention to the grip in your hands… but to the rest of your body.
How tense are your arms?
Shoulders?
Stomach?
Neck?
Are you even breathing?

Relax those parts and the hands will follow.

This advice is also useful for just about any other endeavour (minus plumbing—you want those pipes to be tighter than Satan’s grip on a drug cartel).

We can often approach what we do with such a heavy hand that it stifles our own movements within it. You want a grip on what you’re doing, but also the freedom to move in any direction.

Let the act of what you’re doing sing while you merely guide its movements with a gentle touch.

“The birds are singing,
The sky is bright,
The sun is shining,
I’m feeling ALRIGHT!”

Let us not waste an opportunity to appreciate the days we have in front of us and those we left behind.

The digital landscape is changing so frequently I often get a headache just thinking about what’s coming up next.

While the attraction of shiny and new has always been an alluring temptation, it’s now wearing me down. Considering over the past ten years, it’s now commonplace to see:

• Services you once relied on get bought out or shut down
• Compatibility issues with files you’ve been working on… even when it’s still in the same program/ecosystem
• Data breaches at companies that obtain personal information
• The birth of the “endless scrolling” on social media, which quickly turns into doom scrolling depending on the news cycle
• A thousand different services offering a thousand different conveniences, forcing you to remember a thousand different logins (or store them somewhere and hope where you stored them is safe)
• Programs you’re used to that suddenly change and lose the functionality you enjoyed about them
• Relying completely on cloud based services only to have your Internet service go down because a construction project near your service provider accidentally cut a main wire
• A lot of time wasted just mucking about within programs/services instead of actually doing something

All of this for the sake of making your digital life, and supposedly your real life, a little bit easier.

Yes, there are some conveniences that are hard to live without now—especially in a world that’s locked down. But for the rest of it? I’m done.

My goal now is to make my digital life a lot more inconvenient so that I’m more purposeful in what I do online. A few steps taken:

• I’ve set my browser to never remember any of my logins or passwords… or to keep me signed in anywhere—no more “quick checks”
• After Evernote lost its way, OneNote dumped its desktop version for a web based one (thereby losing all the features I liked about it), I now use plain text files for all my notes
• On that point, all my writing is now done in plain text (using markdown syntax if needed)
  • Plain text has been around forever and I never have to worry about compatibility issues with any system, nor wonder how to extract all my notes and port them elsewhere
• My phone hasn’t given me a notification in over a year (I turned them all off and it’s been quite satisfying)
• Abandoning almost all online services in lieu of just a few and replacing the rest with desktop equivalents

I’m still going, but what what’s really happening is I’m making digital life harder by making things simpler.

When you simplify your tools to the essentials, what you find is that it’s difficult to create something, but easy to tinker with it. The convenience tools are nothing more than a distraction from actually doing something worthwhile.

There’s also less to worry about because you don’t have to worry about updates, iterations, abandonments or corporate takeovers.

In fact, making a digital life harder could be key to making your personal life better.

It’s Remembrance Day, which is a time to honour all the veterans and people who served (and are serving) during times of war.

While we can speak endlessly on the tragedies, atrocities and horrors of war, there’s one particular moment that gets me every time:

A truce on Christmas.
A day to stop.
People meeting each other on the battlefield to discover… other people.

What can of world could we have if we looked towards the humanity in each other instead of the villains we’ve created in our minds?

On the frontlines of every battle are real people.

Lest we forget.

Get up,
run through your day,
wait for the weekend.

Enjoy what you can from it,
dread Monday,
start again.

If we’re ever wondering why life moves so fast, consider how many people only live for two days of their week (add a half-day for some Fridays).

That’s 104 out of 365 days.

But even that is an inflated number when you account for hours of sleep.

Perhaps it’s time to look forward to something each and every day we’re alive. Then, we really will be getting the most out of our days, savoring the moments as they come.

The list of things I was hoping to get/achieve ten years ago:

• A permanent position
• A house
  • With a study built in (and globe that opens to reveal adult beverages)
• A spouse
• A child
• A budding writing career
  • With that, a growing readership for my blogging
• Vacations outside the country
  • Including another visit to California

I’m sure there were others, but those were the main ones. What’s interesting is that I accomplished all of them (minus the study with the globe, but I feel like I’ve almost changed my mind on it anyway)… and yet, here I am, ten years later, thinking about the ten years ahead.

I’m living the life I wanted and rather than appreciate it, I’m looking towards the future.

What could be? What’s down the road?

Yes, it’s always good to set lofty goals and aim for the next level, but every so often, you need to step back and say:

“Look where I am. Can I appreciate everything that’s in front of me?”

If I can’t do that, there’s no point in looking ahead because even if I get it, I won’t appreciate it either.

Let every milestone on our paths be celebrated and may we come to the end truly appreciating everything along the way.

Remembrance Day is coming and while there have been many stresses in 2020, I’m almost certain the late 1930s and 40s has this year beat.

In spades.

Both my grandfathers were there on the front lines and at the age I’m at now, after having fought in a world war, were boarding ships to come to Canada.

They wanted a better life for themselves and their family. After the sacrifice they made for their country, they made another to leave everything behind and start anew.

I think to myself, would I be so bold as to venture completely into the unknown?
To give everything familiar up?
To have to start again in the middle of my life?

I marvel at them because they didn’t think twice. This is what they had to do and were willing to pay any price to make it happen.

There was no choice—it was here or nothing.

How comfortable have we gotten where we forget that a price was paid for us to be here?

That someone is still paying that price?

It’s a price that many of us will never know.

Many moons ago, when Facebook was just emerging as a social media superpower (2008), my good friend Thomas Jast wrote an article about it being the end of humanity.

While the site we wrote for/created was steeped in satire, this definitely edged on the social commentary side of things.

Jast is known to be a little dramatic in his outlook, but his article was largely received with commendation. A few even plagiarized it on their own Facebook accounts, which became a fun exercise for me in posting a link back to the original article. Of course, this was back when people actually cared for sources.

However, there were others who mercilessly mocked him for being an old dinosaur who can’t get with the times. Again, we both found this amusing as we were in our mid twenties. “Gramps” indeed.

Looking back at that article now (here it is on the Wayback Machine), I can’t help but think of its prophetic nature. The last paragraph of the article ends on this note:

I, as a human being, implore you to stop using Facebook. Delete your account. You’ll be surprised when no one even notices. It is one of the most evil devices ever created and it’s destroying your life. You are hopelessly addicted and it will be the end of your natural life. I guarantee if you can make it 2 weeks without it, your life will become better in every way.

Yet, here we are almost twelve years later coming to the same conclusions my “dinosaur” of a friend figured out pretty quickly. I see people being quick to share the latest documentaries about the insidious nature of data tracking and the ubiquity of doing everything on your mobile device to aid that along.

The problem has gotten worse and it’s time we collectively put a halt to it.

Let’s take back our private lives by making them private again.