Ad Infinitum

At times I look at things in minute detail. Usually with a camera in my hand and that’s another story.

Other times I look at things on a scale so large the mind quagmires, smoke fritters out my ears in curly grey puffs and I mentally grind to a fiery, crumpled, synapse-overloaded heap. Bed is a great place to crumple since it doesn’t hurt quite so much as smacking my nose on the floor.

We all have experienced those days, those people or those events when everything just... umm... doesn’t seem to fit. They're not good days/ people/ events by our own account and it’s all just cess for the pool, right?

Whenever I run into a load of crap I’m not prepared for, or worse, a load of crap I probably should have been prepared for... you silly doink... I try to think in terms of universal meaning. That is, grow my thought process to such a large scale that anything that might be bothering me becomes a speck on the head of a pin seen from the perspective of an eye the size of a planet... meaningless, unrecognisable drivel.

Who cares who did what to who at the far end of the galaxy?

It’s far easier to determine how much something really matters when taken from the perspective of the entire universe.

We exist on an orb with seven billion other human souls. That alone is enough to temper any meaning behind a bad day. When I really stretch it out and start considering we are on a planet in a galaxy with trillions of planets in a universe with billions of galaxies each with trillions more planets, just how meaningful is it that I dropped and splattered a $%*&@ bottle of ketchup on the $%*&@ floor? How meaningful is it that someone said something inadvertently I took offense to? How meaningful is it that something happened to me thirty-two years, four months and six days ago (or yesterday, for that matter) when;

a) I haven’t seen him or her in thirty-two years, four months and five days and;

b) I’m not nearly the same person I was then anyway.

In the grand scheme of life altering proceedings, what happens today and currently feels larger than the entirety of existence usually becomes miniscule insignificance when viewed from the far-flung perspective of ground zero... the Big Bang. An all encompassing viewpoint from a distance of infinity makes any indiscretion I perceive to have happened to me a mere molecule of triviality.

I, like many, have held on to indiscretions others’ have loaded on my back for far too long. It matters not whether that indiscretion was intentional or not. Why should I be the schmuck carrying around their crap for the rest of my life?

Another little trick I use to figure stuff out is to ask myself a question. Is this event something that is going to change who I am? If the answer is “no”, then I get on with my life and let the cards fall where they may. If the indiscretion by someone else was unintentional, we talk it out calmly and I let him or her know why it hurts. If the indiscretion is intentional or occurs over and over, I simply stop being with them. Let them figure out why I'm not hanging around anymore. It’s no longer a rock in my packsack.

I do prefer to work things out when I can though. Just sayin’.

One note: It doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain or anger or sadness or angst. Of course I do. I may love that person who belittled me or ignored me or pushed my buttons. And... I don’t have to like them or be around them. Sometimes I know I need to just give up trying to please them and focus on pleasing me.

Of course, I could decide to become a self-loathing martyr carrying everyone else’s crap with me for the rest of my life and eventually lay on my death bed... alone... patting myself on the back for how strong I was to carry all the cess for my entire life. Hmm... that doesn't sound like much fun. 

It's my choice to carry the burden myself and wear it like a tattoo stamped unceremoniously on my forehead. All I really need remember is it is my choice to carry a badge of martyrdom or to release the indiscretion into the cosmos. A bad day will dissipate with all its meandering events and synthetic misgivings. Tomorrow is another day likely destined to become another speck in context of all millennia. Yesterday is already gone and I can do nothing to change it. So why worry about any of it?

My life is far to important to not be happy and to carry the burdens others have loaded on me... figments of my over-active imagination or not.

People will do what they do, there is little I can do to alter it and it is a lot healthier for me to stop thinking I can do anything to change them. For me, it's best I let them be who they are and continue on my merry way with a smile.

 

Now all I need do is remember where I put the frigging rags so I can clean the ketchup off the floor... and counter... and stove... before my honey sees the mess.

Namaste

Why Not?

When you are ready, the teacher will appear.

Something someone said to me a while ago tweaked a thought process and I decided to get it down in black and white. I’m not really sure why I’m writing this other than it’s occupying my mind. I have to get it out somehow and writing thoughts has always been a means of therapeutic release. Regurgitating thoughts in written form seems as fine a place as any other if you’re not averse to a little gratuitous mental drifting.

Today, I’m patiently waiting to get a job done. As sometimes happens, the conditions for completing the task aren’t right and I have to wait for things to turn. It means I have a day more or less left to my own devices, which is often perilous. I’m at the kitchen table at the moment and, with a few chores to do around here, have instead settled into a state of reflection and semi-lethargy.

I’m using reflection on the past as a tool rather than a guide or driving force, as it were.

Eighteen years ago my world turned upside down. I was separated and, for the first time in my life, truly alone and lonely. I had never lived unaccompanied up to that point and being the oldest of four, I spent a lot of time around others, hearing constant clamour around me and dealing with a multitude of personalities. Now, I was five hundred miles away from my family, living alone in a dingy basement apartment in a city I knew little about and commuting an hour and a half to work every day. Diving into the job was keeping me mentally afloat. Working was something to latch onto that was familiar.

Three months after the separation, I was downsized.

It felt like the final blow. On most levels, I had given up. It’s difficult to explain, even to myself, how I managed to muddle through. Life was no longer an adventure. Life and attempting to live was something tolerated; living day to day just to prove I could endure anything and survive. But surviving isn’t living.

In our darkest hour, a light will appear. Follow that light. The odds of it being a steaming locomotive with designs on making you train track road kill are pretty slight.

One Thursday night in March of 1995, I received a phone call from a distant acquaintance; a sister of a friend whom I had met twice. She was taking a program called The Excellence Series and asked if I would be interested in attending a free seminar. I asked a couple of rudimentary questions and agreed to go.

Why not?

At the seminar, I was impressed by what was said. It didn’t hurt I was looking for something... anything... to latch onto; anything to stabilize my leaking, thrashing boat in a stormy sea. At that time, somewhere deep down, I knew something had to change. I couldn’t accept this was all there was to living. Even now, I think there is more. After the presentation finished, I was the first to the table to sign up for the courses. Something in the back of my mind woke up and asked again... Why not?

We are nothing more than the culmination of decisions we make.

I was reminded of this story recently when I trusted myself and took a leap of faith. That friend who made the phone call those many years ago also called to find out what was happening. The caring never stops.

I came to the realisation that my decision making process changed about the time I signed up for the program. The intricacies and detail of how the program works are irrelevant. In actuality, there are many programs out there willing to open up your mind and the differences between them, in most cases, are insignificant. There are many books on the subject, most of which I have read, espousing the positives of getting to know the real you. What works for one individual might not work for another though the eventual goal may be the same.

Ultimately, the venue was unimportant. What mattered was changing how I viewed things in the first place. We each must take our own path.

I began asking myself, “why not”.

Rather than back-flipping mental gymnastics to figure out “why” I would try something and creating a multitude of reasons I shouldn’t, I began asking “why not” and finding fewer reasons for avoiding something or someone or somewhere. Since I started asking “why not”, I’ve started my own business (more than once), learned to SCUBA dive, white water kayaked class 3 rapids, climbed two mountains, body surfed in Bali, stood astride the equator, travelled to about 20 countries, written and published a book, circumnavigated the globe, reconnected with someone who means the world to me, met some incredible people along my journey and have learned to be alone without being lonely.

Mostly, I rediscovered the importance of following my heart.

Recently I realised every significant change in my life has come with a move; physical or cerebral. Every move or new activity or meeting of new people has begun with “why not” and none of those moves were negative.

As I sit here overlooking a snow-laden landscape in nothing more than a pair of pajama bottoms, the furnace propelling hot air into the house, sipping from a half consumed cup of coffee and the chores still waiting to be done, I find myself asking “why not” once again. Perhaps this is nothing more than a middle-aged fantasy and maybe it’s not. In any case, as always, what comes along will be an adventure.

Namste.

Thinking Too Much

I had an interesting weekend shovelling snow, watching more snow come down, watching hockey (yeah, I broke down) and shovelling some more snow. I didn't do too much yesterday though... except shovelling. The issue is my brain doesn’t seem to want to shut off whether I'm ensconsed in some activity or laying slug-like in a prone position on the sofa. The thoughts keeps me awake at night and usually makes me a miserable cad in the morning.

What is occupying me these days is relationships and where they go wrong. A few things have come to mind and, right, wrong or indifferent, I would like to share.

Contracts

In the beginning of a relationship, everything is rosy. We are in the honeymoon stage and nothing will ever go wrong. We adore the quirky little traits that, later, will make us mentally retarded.

It’s not the quirky stuff that makes us nuts. The quirky stuff is the primer for the big stuff. What is the big stuff? Contracts. When we enter into a relationship, there are unwritten contracts we each develop in our heads. That is, they are expectations of how the other person should behave and what they are going to do for me. The real trouble starts when the other person begins to unwittingly break the contracts. Further to this, every new and different relationship has a different set of rules, so it’s not as if you could write them down and hand your new partner a binder full of How-To’s.

By the way, your partner has a set of unwritten expectations too. 

Focus

In the beginning, focus on the other person is easy. They are everything you ever wanted (and this could very well be true). Over time, the focus can begin to shift. It moves to other things that society says is important. Work, play time, friendships, financial futures, retirement living or whatever. We need to catch up on all of those little things we neglected while entering into the relationship. Once we know the other person “enough”, we tend to turn our minds to other pressing needs believing that we have completed a task and never have to worry about it again. In extreme cases, we ignore the other person almost completely… which brings me to…

Too much too soon

We share everything early on. This isn’t inherently a negative. We need to develop common bonds in order to connect at a deeper level than pure physical attraction. What we tend to stop doing is exploring each other, physically and mentally. We seem to get to a certain point and stop because we know enough about this person to keep the strings attached…for awhile. The problem? People change and if we don’t keep up with what is going on in their lives, they will be so far away after a time we can’t even see them, never mind attempting to cross the accompanying void. 

At this point, it is done. In very rare cases, the intimacy can be brought back.

Solution?

The simple solution is communication. Make a point of blocking out 15-30 minutes of EVERY evening to catch up on each others day. Most days, the time will not be completely spent. Others, you will run into overtime and still not get to everything that happened. You might not even get a turn to share if your partner is firing on all cylinders on something bothering them.

Share everything; work, the drive home, Aunt Greta’s new false teeth... everything that is on your mind. There are times I don’t like hearing what is being said. If it’s the truth for the other person, who am I to argue? Just believe what they are saying because for them, it’s important that you understand. 

While you’re at it, when your partner is sharing, shut up! You have two ears and one mouth. You should be listening twice as much as you speak. Finally on this, as difficult as it may be, try not to formulate your answer before they are finished speaking. Focus on their words, count to three, and then answer.

One further thing I do. If I’m angry, I ask my partner for a few minutes and go somewhere else to stew. She doesn’t need to hear the crap whirling around the tornado in my head. She needs to hear the calm, collected viewpoint in a manner she can understand. Shouting just kicks on the other person’s defense mechanism and they stop hearing your viewpoint almost immediately. 

Lastly, never, ever, ever go to bed angry.

I wonder if this would work for international relations. Hmm...

Okay... time to stop leaning on the shovel and get my hiney in gear. Wonder if I can find the driveway this time. Ugh!

The Gates of Hell

Eleven years ago, my then partner and I embarked on a world tour. We literally left Toronto flying east and didn’t stop until we bumped into Toronto again. The circumnavigation of the world took nine months and more then forty-two thousand kilometres of travel.

During the trip, I saw many things that inspired awe in a forty year old heart. I‘ve had a bull elephant wander to within twenty feet of our truck in Africa, presumable checking us out as we were him. I’ve seen cheetahs take down a gazelle. I’ve had a wild boar pull a knapsack through the wall of a tent with me holding the other end… buck naked in the middle of Africa. I’ve climbed Mount Sinai in the pitch black of a moonless night only to see the most spectacular desert sunrise I have ever witnessed.

I’ve been privy to the underground capitalist economy in Viet Nam. I’ve stood in the Parthenon and felt the history of the ancients embrace me. I’ve been diving at the Poor Knight islands with the same stingrays that that ultimately brought on the untimely death of Steve Irwin. I’ve body surfed thirty foot swells off Kuda Beach in Bali.

I’ve stood in the streets of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic with a little girl in a pink dress tugging at my trousers knowing all too well that if I looked down at her again, I would scoop her up in my arms and bring her back to the safety and prosperity of my home. While all these events are etched in my mind, none are as vivid as my time in Germany. 

We went to Dachau Concentration Camp.

When I walked onto the grounds at Dachau, I was struck by the grey bleakness. It was a sunny day, yet a palpable pall hung in the air. I could see where the barracks had been. Each barrack was designed to house 250 people. There were 1600 housed in each. 32,000 people were liberated from the camp on April 29, 1945. Over 200,000 political prisoners came through Dachau during the war. Except for those liberated, none left alive.

Further on, I saw the rail lines where prisoners were shuttled in like cattle. Near the end of the war, many didn’t make it to the camps at all. They were executed in the cars or beside a nearby ditch where the dead were rolled in a bloody heaping stench.

I saw the ovens designed to cook human beings while they were still alive. At Dachau, unlike Auschwitz, the ovens were never used. Still, that anything as insidious could be conceived is beyond the realm of a sane imagination. I stood in one spot in front of the ovens; my feet anchored to the concrete floor and wept.

Later, I found that I was unable to look anyone in the eye lest they see what I had seen.

There is a plaque at Dachau which reads, “Never Again” in five languages. Yet it has happened time and again. It would seem we are not so far removed from our primordial ancestors after all.

While we are honouring those who have fought for our countries and the liberation of others, let us not forget those who needed our help. Those who have fallen simply because someone believed they were the wrong creed, colour, religion or sex need to be remembered as well. Those unidentifiable masses who were slaughtered at the whim of madmen.

When leaving Dachau, I recall being speechless. Nothing could have lessened the darkness I felt as I stumbled away from the Gates of Hell.

Lest We Forget.