Orange

I look crappy in orange.

While I was out on the job today, I heard a thud at the next intersection. I looked up and a woman was laying in the middle of the intersection, her bicycle strewn across the road in pieces and a small, tan car hovering over her like a predator fixed on prey. I didn’t see the accident though I did see the aftermath.

An elderly man exited the car.

I ran toward the accident. Two others appeared on the scene about the same time. One man started directing traffic, I went to the woman who was, by no surprise, crying and holding her leg. The third man stood by watching… what? I don’t know. The elderly man from the car began picking up pieces of the bicycle. I’m not sure he asked the woman if she was alright.

A few minutes later, EMS people appeared from the nearby casino.

Once EMS arrived, I was no longer needed to comfort the woman. I decided to help direct traffic as I was wearing a bright orange shirt with reflective striped stuff all over it. We do what we can with what tools we have. 

The voyeurs began showing up soon after.

The whole thing made me wonder about decisions. We are the sum total of all the decisions we have made to this point in our life. It dictates our experiences and even dictates how we view those experiences. We choose to choose and in the event we choose not to choose, we have made a choice.

The only way to improve our lives (presuming we want to improve) is to make different choices.

I could have chosen to ignore the accident and continue on my merry way. I could have chosen to be the voyeur as many people in the neighbourhood had chosen. I could have chosen to berate the elderly man. There are other choices I could have made. Mine was to get involved.

I cannot improve myself by standing on the sidelines and watching humanity rumble by like an out of control freight train.

I think it’s important to make decisions that improve who I am. If those choices align with my core values, I will feel good about the decision. If I feel good about the decision, my self confidence will increase. If my self confidence increases, I am more likely to make good core value decisions again in the future.

And the cycle goes on.

The opposite is true, of course. If I make decisions that betray my core values, my self confidence, and self respect, deteriorate. Eventually I make decisions which are not only destructive to me, they become destructive to others and the relationships I have with them. The rut becomes so deep that climbing out seems like a gargantuan task.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I had only one choice when I saw the accident. That would be the choice that aligned with my core values. Help in any capacity I can. Be in the story, not in the audience. Dive into the fray with both feet… and bring compassion with you. Do the best you can with what you know.

It matters not which was the cause of the accident... the woman riding on a sidewalk or the elderly man not paying attention. Both need compassion. From what I could discern, they both made mistaken choices... one riding a bicycle on a sidewalk on the wrong side of the road and the other not paying attention while driving a two thousand pound low speed missile. The looks on both their faces spoke volumes.

I didn’t choke up until the drive home a few minutes later when I remembered the shock on the woman’s face and the vacant, mouth agape stare of the old man. Both of their fates may ride on their next choice.

And I still look like crap in orange.

Namaste.

Lessons in Beaver Hunting

I was out on the water this weekend chasing… well… nothing in particular.

I find, sometimes, the greatest outcomes occur when I simply go without expectation of any particular result. That doesn’t mean I haven’t a goal of sorts. Kayaking this weekend was to relax and reconnect with my inner homo-sapien… whatever the hell that is.

As I’m wandering up the canal pictured to the right, I saw a beaver house. There was no need for a dam here. The water was deep, which was good news for me as I could avoid crawling over a barrier of stick, mud and beaver poop.

Some days I just want to avoid the poop.

As I was returning out of the canal, I passed the grey stick and mud house again. I wondered if the beavers were home. I thought of knocking. The door was bit out of reach being under water, though. Suddenly I saw movement ahead out of the corner of my eye and there he was; Beaver. I wasn’t sure if he/ she was a Mrs. or Mr. Since he wasn’t wearing a skirt or high heeled shoes, I went with Mr for my own convenience.

He ducked under water.

With nowhere in particular to go and no-one in particular to see and no particular place to be, I decided to wait to see if he would surface. I think I should have packed a lunch or a meditation tape. Man those little dudes can hold their breath.

I was drifting closer to the stick house when he popped back to the surface. He made several trips back and forth in front of his abode as if protecting it, then finally slipping into the house after I snapped several photos. Deciding not to bother the fella any longer, I continued on my exploration of other waterways.

I was reminded of patience and perseverance after I left the beaver to his normal life.

I wondered how much patience we have in our current societal state. Everything is expected to be instant; instant cereals, instant coffee, we get frustrated in traffic jams, we expect people we know do things for us immediately, we expect instant returns of our text messages, our bosses expect instant results, our computers have to be fast, we carry our phones with us, we expect our kids to instantly be adults... We expect ourselves to be perfect human beings over night. Everything has become a blistering paced nightmare.

Patience is slowing down to a speed our brains, bodies and souls can keep up with.

At the same time, perseverance is part of patience. Beavers don’t build a dam over night. (Well, sometimes they do and we’ll ignore the “eager beavers”.) It takes time for them to build a house, construct a damn, wait for the new pond to fill, wait for the flora and fauna to show up and make a neighbourhood where they can raise their family. The goal they are working toward is specific and the task monumental.

Through all of this, they complete their task over time completely altering the landscape and providing homes for others one stick at a time.

I sometimes think if we could show a little more patience, we would all be healthier. Oh, sure, patience with others is important. What I am talking about is patience with ourselves. Small degrees of course alteration completely change the ending destination. And once that degree of variation has occurred, sticking with it one step at a time will completely change our lives… even if it’s two steps forward and one step back on a slippery, muddy slope on the way out of a bubbling, self-created cesspool.

Sometimes we have to fall off a cliff before we know we've taken the wrong road. The way out is the same way as in... small, patient, persevering steps. It took me years to get there and I expect it to resolve itself overnight? Really? 

Any destination can be reached given enough time. With everyone expecting instant “whatever”, I suspect they miss the best part of the journey… the satisfaction of attaining a goal and knowing the rocks and mountains they had to scrabble over. By slowing down, we might not see everything from a distant, bird’s eye view. Instead we see things up close where we can connect. I know for myself, when i experience the journey, I am much more satisfied when I reach the destination.

Well, me and the beavers.

Namaste

A Trail of Rocks

We are born with nothing… and everything.

Life experience has ups and downs. Whether I am a pauper or a prince, joys show up, setbacks arise and tragedy rears its head.

I like to compare life to a backpack. Imagine this… take all the things that have happened to you over the course of your life… all the traumatic events. Each one of those events is a rock. All the rocks of different sizes, textures and colours made up of all the disappointments as you grew up, all the failed relationships, all the people who died too early, all the teasing or bullying, all the money troubles, all hatred for someone who treated you wrong, all the injustices against you, all the physical impairments, all the bosses who used you, all the times you were ignored… all of it.

Close your eyes and imagine stuffing all those rocks into a backpack... nice and tight.

Now try to lift that bastard.

We all have a backpack of rocks strapped to our backs. Most of us spend our entire lives filling that backpack and carrying it around like some sort of badge of honour as if the more weight we can carry, the better person we will become. Many of us carry a gargantuan bag of rocks around our entire lives only to get to the end brutally bent, broken and disfigured from an age of trying to manage more weight than we have a right to carry. Tell me… how happy would you be to put YOUR backpack down for a day? An hour? Five minutes?

At some point, I had to make the decision whether to start dropping rocks or continue slogging along with the weight digging into my shoulders and impeding my mobility. How do I expect to negotiate my way through myriad life pylons with all this frigging weight strapped to me?

Better I get rid of the weight.

There are only two ways I know to help with the load. The first is to be grateful for all the good things in my life. Being grateful makes me stronger. It reminds me what I really value, what’s important and what I have. More importantly, I like to be grateful for the lessons the trials of life have taught. But then, I like to learn anyway so that’s kind of a no brainer for me.

Gratitude is the quickest way to deal with the load of life. You start to feel better... stronger... almost immediately.

Eventually, I realized I could only become so strong. I was still carrying the damned rocks around! What to do now? Forgiveness.

Forgiveness takes longer. It’s not as if I can make a sweeping statement like, “I forgive all those who have trespassed against me” and tomorrow all will be right with the world. Nuh uh. It takes work. One trespass at a time. Lots of meditation and kayak trips and walking in the woods and beating up stuffed animals. Sometimes the forgiving doesn’t work the first time or it’s a particular person who has a whole lotta trespasses against me. It just takes time to work through.

Journaling helped me a lot. Each day, I would write what I was grateful for that day. Then, if I had a particular rock that seemed to be digging into my back, I would spend some time trying to extricate it. Eventually, I would manage to free it up, get it out of the bag, turn it over in my minds eye and take a good look at it... then drop it to the ground.

We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we wish we hadn’t. At some point I had to understand there are people out there who have made decisions… knowingly or not… that have affected me in some negative way. Those people deserve my forgiveness (even if it’s God). More than that, I deserve to forgive them for my own peace of mind.

A couple of points…

First, most people I was carrying a rock around for weren’t even aware the incident affected me the way it did. (Yes... I was carrying it for them. It's their weight!) Or worse, often I was carrying a rock around for someone I would never see again! Does this make sense?

Second, there’s no need to confront the person. Just forgive them. Sometimes I would do a little ceremony if it was a particularly big rock. Going back to the first point, confronting them will only confuse matters or I might not be able to find them anyway.

As I look behind me now, there aren’t as many rocks along the path. There are fewer people to forgive. Most of the forgiving I do now happens quickly so I haven’t got the rock for long. It's taken quite some time to lighten the load to make it manageable.

Having said that somewhere back there on my trail is one shit-load of rocks.

Namaste

Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes

I was working in a neighbourhood today where I spent my first ten years inhabiting this wet/ dry, blue and brown spinning mineral deposit. As I wandered the once familiar streets, I began recalling events I was surprised I could remember at all; the house my father built and where I was born, the second house we lived in, the Wilson’s house with their huge cockatoo, the woman down the street who babysat us and who gave me a big hug today, both of my aunties houses, my best friends houses, the Harrisons where I watched a horror movie when I was ten and my father met me half way home in a snow storm, the lady next door who used to feed us dog biscuits as treats (they weren’t bad actually), the house I broke into when I was nine... a flood of differing experiences.

We moved from the neighbourhood when I was ten. Introducing myself to those whom I knew then was an odd experience. I am 43 years older than the last time I met them and about two and a half feet taller. They seemed mostly the same… a hugger, a somewhat cranky fellow, a police officer. Even the environs had the same optical flavour.

It then occurred to me, aside from my core values, I was not the same. My old inhibitions were gone. I have no issue approaching anyone… president or pauper. I haven’t the same fears I had then. If there was something that wasn’t working for me, I changed it, eliminated it or dated it out to be dealt with when I was ready. I had also experienced things over the past 43 years that made the old neighbourhood look a little off colour from what I remembered.

I then remembered The Wall.

In 1995, I lost everything for the first time. My then wife and I had broken our marriage, I lost my job (or gave it away… I’m not sure) and I was alone and far from home. I was pretty depressed and had all but given up on anything that might amount to a dream. One Tuesday night I received a phone call from a friend inviting me to a meeting. I had no idea what it might be about and, despite some inner doubt, the word yes spewed out of my mouth without a degree of dithering.

Out of that meeting and an initial program came The Wall… a program about finding your comfort zone and making it bigger. It’s about learning to do more than you thought you were capable of. It’s about finding out who you are… what makes you tick. It’s all about coming up against self manufactured walls of resistance and crashing through them.

A lot of changes have come about since that Tuesday night. Once I began to face my fears, I recognized they weren’t as powerful as I had imagined. Spilling one’s guts out in front of a room full of strangers tends to open your boundaries in a hurry… and restore your self confidence just as quickly.

A smart person once said to me, “You have to fall into the darkness before you can appreciate the light”.

Every decision to change comes from wanting to be better today than I was yesterday. It does not mean I’m broken. It does not mean I have to be fixed. It does not mean I am not enough. It means there are things I can do better, greater things I can learn and self confidence I can build on. It all began with one step… one response of “yes”… and deciding to get out of the rut and show up in my own life. What did I learn most? If I put out to the world that which I desire most, the person I save will ultimately be myself.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

The neighbourhood will never look the same because my lenses have permanently changed hue. By the time I return once again, the people may feel the same and I will have grown a bit more... the hue of my lenses will be a little different again…

And that’s a good thing.

Namaste

Wizard - Installment 2

FIFTEEN

As I wandered through the old house, the floors creaking a familiar melodic phrase under each step, I marveled at the collection of things. Things that would seem misplaced elsewhere appeared at home in this menagerie of gathered stuff. Collected here in this backwoods place were items from across the globe from places I could scarcely imagine. How had this old man come to acquire these things? Had he deliberately carved out time to visit foreign lands? I felt a sudden yearning to follow in his giant footsteps.

On an antique side table with elegantly bowed legs near the bedroom door lay a pile of age-worn books. I moved toward the table, noting as I drew closer they were not simply books, but journals. I picked up one tattered journal from the middle of the pile, flipped arbitrarily to an age-yellowed, hand written page and began to read.

It's a propaganda war. Somehow the vast majority of people have been led along a path of mundane feudalism to a land of unremarkable, workaday nonexistence. It's as if those who have false wealth or stand in a self-imposed, self-regulated position of authority are to be catered to without opposition. Civil obedience is the real scourge of modern society.

In the past, common men and women were forced through fear to obey the inane misgivings of those who would lead. In the past, men like Stalin or Hitler or the leaders of the industrial revolution and the dark ages and the Roman Empire and the industrialized nations used brute force to keep the sheep from wandering from the glass strewn path, citing the pain inflicted as the price of their salvation. It was those leaders who founded the idea that those who had few resources at their disposal were mere pawns in the fabric which they, the leaders, created in their own best interest, all the while dangling a carrot of false hope and enlightenment to those who followed.

Over time, the masses have become more intelligent; better read, more culturally diverse, more accepting of various viewpoints, more able to solve problems in unconventional ways, more knowledgeable of the workings of our world. Yet by and large they follow along with the self-indulgent, self-propagating rules of those who would be kings without any thought of stepping outside the imaginary electric fence. The imagined foot of self-indulgent kings pushed at the throats of the many and the many feeling the force of the foot without it existing.

He who has the hammer hits the nails.

Without thought, many follow along the well trod trail with a propaganda nose ring tugged fervently from time to time by flashes of hand selected mass media believing their only goal in life is to outlast the person next to them. My insularism from the world was a choice to remove the ring and step off the path; to watch in horror and rapt fascination as the remarkably unremarkable are tugged past by nonexistent strings. I watch as extraordinary people lead a quotidian life where the only goal, it seems, is avoiding adversity or cultural banishment and to simply survive the longest.

Civil disobedience is the antidote for the common man.

There are far too many among the throng who have cast aside their wands and given up their power for the effortless road; the road of complacency and mindlessness and ultimate uncelebrated death. Millions have been slaughtered by blind obedience in wars. Millions have died of poverty while the few look on citing the blasphemous monologue of hope if “they” would only become good citizens and play by the rules.

I have become an army of one, stepping off the path away from the herd to reclaim my identity. I have left those who would follow along blindly. I have left the deepening rut and the clogging dust of a billion dragging feet to smell the invitation offered by life. I have disentangled myself to begin a search for others who have escaped the web... who peer from the outside with abject horror and disbelief.

I have chosen to resist by no longer following blindly and to do what I know in my heart is right and just and honest. My chosen path is no path at all... to exist amongst those who choose to walk beside me for whatever time they choose... and to no longer be dragged by the nose.

I understand the enormity of my task; to whisper into the ears of those in the unending line with wistful hope a few will hear.

I set the journal more or less back where I found it. Somewhere in my mind, I knew Oz meant me to find the journals. I wouldn't be surprised if he knew the exact journal and the exact page.

Slowly, I turned and moved toward the window overlooking the front yard, the grey-graveled road leading away from, and to, this place and ultimately to the green valley beyond the road where the river followed a course carved out a thousand years before I gazed upon it. Even the river carved it's own path.

I wasn't so far removed from the path Oz described. I could still feel the gentle tug of acceptance and compliance. I recalled the story of a captive elephant who was tied to a stake with heavy chains. She tried to free herself of her bonds but to no avail. Eventually, she gave up the struggle and her owners placed lighter and lighter ropes on her ankle until, even though she could easily break the bonds, her mind told her she was trapped. The elephant lived and died within the confines of a length of cord when she could easily have broken free to choose her own way.

I unconsciously rubbed my nose as if to reassure myself the ring was no longer attached.