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.

If I keep it all contained within this folder, then copy/paste it onto the site, I will have a backup of everything I need.

This is my typical thought process as I contemplate the nuances of keeping backups of all my work. Every story, and partial story, written, blog post, essay idea, whatever.

There’s also the culling of every single magic routine, gimmick and teaching device (DVDs, books, etc.) from my garage, while retaining those I think might be useful sometime down the road.

But then I think:

What if it all disappeared tomorrow?

What if all the backups malfunctioned, the posts on this site vanished, the stories were gone, the magic burned up, the podcast episodes disappeared and everything I built went away?

Simply put, I’d crack a beverage, sit down and get back to work.

And that’s when it became obvious I care little (if any) about the outcome and everything about the process.

I can only be broken if attached to things that do not last.

“Make sure to keep well.”

It’s a statement so overheard this year, the words have lost their meaning. Through the years, I’ve spent a lot of time building up my own support system to keep myself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy.

These are all works in progress and they have been nicely compounding for years (well… except the physical… that’s been a bit more recent).

However, with all of those in place, and committing to them, I still feel myself fall apart.

Sometimes, I just sit at my table and am unable to move.

I stare off into the abyss thinking about everything that is still on my plate, what can be accomplished, what actually matters… and I can’t move.

Meditation, exercise, eating healthy, loving family, friends, fresh air, appreciating the moment… all guards that have fallen. The cracks are forming and the shell is breaking.

Then there’s writing.

It’s the one solitary activity that still makes sense. The one place I can turn to when everything else is amok.

It’s all I got and it’s what I lean on.

Because sometimes, words aren’t enough, but they’re what we need.

“I’m sending you an anonymous survey to fill out to let me know how the course has been for you. What worked? What didn’t? I need to know.”

Those were the words accompanying my form I sent to students this year. If I were going to teach them in a new environment, with materials that were unfamiliar to us all, I needed to know how to make it better for them.

After all, students are the key stakeholders in education.

My teaching always seems to go smoother when I focus on them, ignore everyone else and pretend to tick off checkboxes that are “required.”

Sometimes, I wonder when new initiatives are pushed down through the system, who is really the stakeholder in mind? Education is ripe for political pandering, vulnerable to business ventures by for-profit companies (or people) disguising themselves as “educational” and targeted by everyone who feels entitled to elicit their uninformed opinions.

It’s also a frustrating breeding ground for stubborn egos.

As an educator, it’s necessary to take a step back and ask: who are we really trying to please?

The car was running while I waited on the yellow dot inside the reception area. Casually taking in the colours and decorations laid out for the Easter season, another parent stood to the dot beside me—both of us waiting for the staff of the daycare centre to bring us our kids for the evening.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

Without hesitation, she responds.

“You know, I’ve never had a bad day. I’ve had many tough ones, but in the grand scheme of things, I’ve never had a bad one.”

I replied with an affirmation for her outlook on life, which is not one held by many people.

“All things are a moment in time,” she said. “There were three days a few years ago where my mother died, my daughter was in the hospital and there was a health issue with me. It’s all done now and here I am picking up my granddaughter to take her shoe shopping.”

Serendipity chose that moment for the staff to bring her granddaughter out, who immediately ran into her arms. I wished her a good evening as they left, each thrilled to see each other.

Then the door opened and my own daughter, a smile beaming across her face at seeing me, ran into my arms.

Never a bad day, I thought to myself.

I can only hope that will be true for me… and even more, true for us all.