There’s a lot going on in the world, these days… It sucks, because most of us would agree that we would prefer not to have these events happen in our lifetime. It reminds me of my grandfather… He fought on active front lines in Europe during World War II. Unlike many others, he wasn’t drafted, he enlisted. He left his family and his home to go fight oppression, thousands of kilometres from our Canadian shores. He was never nationally recognized, never provided with the honours he deserved but ever loved by his family.
In some ways, a lot of ways, I’m fortunate. Even with everything happening in the world, I won’t get drafted, I’ll never see war and I’ll never experience what my grandfather did. I have him to THANK for that. No one should have to live through any of that. We’ve suffered through a rough couple of years, with COVID-19 bringing the world to a halt, followed by creating a level of chaos my country has rarely seen on its own soil. Now, war rages in Europe and Asia. yes, Russia has a higher percentage of its land in Asia, though we don’t think of Russians as Asians. But I digress…
Before I delve too deeply into current world politics, my point is the image above. I’m one of the few, rare people who have actually read JRR Tolkien’s novels and have experienced the full story. The movies were fantastic but despite their length, they left out a lot of details from the book. One of my favourite is illustrated in the image above. And they do have a scene in Fellowship of the Ring that covers it. Frodo and Gandalf are resting on a landing inside Moria, when Frodo begins speaking about how he wishes the ring had never come to him and how he wishes none of it would have taken place in his lifetime. I can relate.
The scene is made memorable by Gandalf, iconically played by Sir Ian McKellen, explaining that it isn’t up to us to wish that things wouldn’t happen within our lifetime but to make the most of the time we have, regardless of what’s happening within the world. Wise words and from the least likely of sources. As I’ve often said, we most often find our destiny on the road we least thought to travel. Although it’s a weird place to find such wisdom, a fantasy book has provided it. Make the most of the time you have. Food for thought… ☯️
Everyone has a specialty… a niche, if you will… Each of us has something that we’re good at, that others may not be quite as good at. or in my case, at ALL! I’ve been watching my wife doing cross-stitch recently and I was distinctly reminded that I don’t have the skill, patience or ability to do what she does. I mean, she takes a piece of cloth and uses needle and fine thread to turn it into a piece of art. I’d have set that thing on fire, fifty ways from Sunday by now! But I digress…
I took the liberty of looking up the history behind cross-stitching, and I came to realize that it’s been a practice for most ancient civilizations, dating back as far as 500 BC. Basically, for as long as there’s been cloth to work with, cross-stitching has been a thing. In ancient China, a woman’s worth was measured by her ability to stitch, especially since she had to stitch clothing and materials for the entire family. In medieval Europe, tapestries and embroideries were all the rage and involved the same stitching skills as modern cross-stitch.
My wife’s current project! Look at all that detail!
Cross-stitching as we know it today was introduced in the late 1890’s and is far more popular than many other mainstream hobbies. In fact, when I grew up, I remember my parents had a framed cross-stitched image of giant mushrooms, which was made using thick yarn. This is a different technique, despite the most popular method being the use of linen and fine threads. It takes an amazing amount of time, patience and precision and fucking up just one stitch can mess up the entire project. Like I said earlier… I’d have destroyed the whole thing with fire long before this point.
Art is still very much alive in the world, even though the average person doesn’t recognize it on a daily basis. I’ve been gifted with an affinity for the martial arts but I know some people that would injure themselves far worse than their opponent if they tried to train. I’m in this very boat with cross-stitching. I’ve never even been able to stitch my own crests or patches on my gis or sweaters. My hat’s off to my wife. If she ever believes that she has no patience, I just have to show her the photo above to prove that she does. ☯️
Keeping yourself moving is an important aspect of life. Not only is it important for one’s health and fitness goals, it’s also important for one’s mental wellbeing as well as Diabetes control. But as much as health & fitness is important, there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. This is why we have break days when exercising, why we don’t have karate classes seven days a week and why one needs to allow one’s muscles to recover. The funny thing is, even when our fitness goals are on track, taking a break day tends to make us feel lazy.
Last weekend, our home experienced a ridiculous level of summer heat. I won’t complain about that, since I tend to bitch about the cold during the winter… That’s pretty much the definition of humanity, right there. The grass always seems greener during the other season. But the temperatures have made it somewhat difficult to take a full breath while standing outside. We made our way to an outdoor splash pad with the boys on Friday evening, which was wonderful despite the heat. But Saturday saw us running errands in air conditioned environments and retail locations.
Weekends tend to fly by for us, with the majority of our time spent trying to do something fun with our sons coupled with trying to meal plan, exercise and get some much-anticipated television binging in. It tends to make the two days I have off go past as though I were standing still. But once in a while, you need to control the flow of time and simply sit still, which is what we did last Sunday. Sunday morning saw us sleeping in until just shy after 9 am, which is pretty late in my household. My morning started like almost every other, with a cold, 473mL can of caffeine. We started by watching an episode of “The Flash” on Netflix and we had plans to go out and do our weekly groceries.
I threw together a pan of breakfast hash browns mixed with peppers and bacon crumble, seasoned with dill powder and seasoning salts. I make that sound WAY fancier than it actually was. But it’s delicious and has become a staple of our weekends. Once we finished eating and were watching television, my wife and I both agreed that neither one of us wanted to leave the house or run any errands. Given that the temperatures reached the 30’s (Celsius) before the noon hour, it was no surprise that both of us wanted to stay in the relative cool shade of our house. We watched our show for the next few hours until the toddler started showing signs that it was nape time.
We put Alexander down for a nap and provided Nathan with something to keep him busy for a couple of hours and we retired for what I can only describe as an afternoon siesta. And it. Was. Glorious. I write about the importance and benefits of napping on frequent occasions but I would be lying if I said that I get to do it, every weekend. But we indulged in about two hours of napping and I awoke at about 4:20 (insert weed jokes, here). We enjoyed a cold supper of ready-made chicken, cheese and dip. It was a wonderful day of doing next to nothing.
We all need a day like that, once in a while. I can admit that I stepped out briefly to grab milk, bread and some necessities for the week but I did nothing besides that. I originally had plans to knock out 40 or 50 kilometres on the bike but I’m not into peddling in high summer temperatures. The end result is that we got a day’s rest and got to be lazy, which is perfectly okay. Everyone needs to do that, sometimes. It was wonderful and I think I needed that. Between the heat and the fact that I once again go for eye injections tomorrow, it was a nice change of pace. Once in a while, you just gotta have a lazy day… ☯️
Despite our efforts to avoid them, we all have bad days. Typically and for the most part, we suffer through them, deal with them and let them pass after a good night’s sleep. Remember I said that; it will apply later on in the post. But most people will actively do whatever they can to avoid bad days, despite the fact that they’re essentially unavoidable and a part of life.
Last week, I experience one of the worst “bad days” that I can recall in quite some time. What exactly happened to make it a bad day is not important (and I don’t need to come off like a snowflake for my woes) so much as how I dealt with it. Given everything I’ve been through in my life, I’ve prided myself on being able to maintain healthy tools to manage my emotions, more specifically anger. Please note that I said “manage” my anger and not control or suppress it.
Suppressing or bottling up one’s anger is a little like shaking a bottle of carbonated soda (something Nathan loves to do). Although the bottle will hold the soda, pressure will continue to build and gather until eventually the cap will pop and that pressure will explode outward, saturating everyone and everything near it. Anger is very much the same; if you don’t have a healthy outlet for it, it will eventually build up enough pressure to eventually burst and affect one’s entire environment.
Unless someone is close enough to me to have been told this fact, people believe I maintain my calm because I study the Buddha Dharma when in reality, I study to Buddha Dharma to help calm me. The difference is important because like any other living person, I feel and experience the entire spectrum of emotions and they affect me very much in the same way as anyone else. But it’s how I choose to deal with these negative emotions that’s important.
Just to be clear, anger, sadness and any other emotion labeled as “negative” still has a purpose, even if we dislike them and don’t assume so. Much like feeling fear let’s us known that we are potentially in danger, anger and disappointment tell us something about ourselves and the situation we’re facing that we may not have been aware of, otherwise. It doesn’t mean it isn’t normal to dislike being on those situations or that something shouldn’t be done about them. Cue the advice…
Meditation can be a fantastic way to help alleviate the effects of negative emotions. By entering oneself and allowing oneself to calm, breathe and focus on the lighter things, anger will often seem to lose its strength. This may not always be the case and may not work for everybody. But it’s definitely a good starting point. Finding the time and space to do this can be challenging, but never impossible.
Physical fitness is also an important aspect. Pushing yourself through a rigorous workout that can include martial arts or just hitting a good ol’ fashion punching bag can go a long way towards cooling the intense heat that your anger may have created within your soul. Even something that isn’t intense, like taking a walk, getting some fresh air and being alone with your own thoughts can be quite effective.
Sometimes there just isn’t anything that can be done and you have to just ride it out. This can be tough, especially if you’re already angry and you have to be in the same environment as loved ones and that anger become clear and obvious to them. An important step is not to bottle it up and isolate yourself. Letting those loved ones know WHY you’re angry is not only important towards making sure they know it isn’t directed at them but also pursues potential means of help as they could say or do something to provide relief from that anger.
Ultimately, sometimes all one can do is call it a day, hit the sack and get a solid night’s sleep in order to recharge one’s batteries and let one’s soul reset. This is what I did. Once I recognize I simply had no life left in me to deal with the day, I kissed my wife goodnight and let my head hit the pillow. In keeping with the mood I was in, a strong thunderstorm raged through most of the night. The next day was a new day with new challenges so I was grateful for having gotten the extra rest. Anger is a normal part of life. The idea isn’t to avoid it and the important thing is how you DEAL with it; and deal with it, you must. ☯️
Opening yourself up to others can be one of the most difficult things one can do. Especially in modern times, when people tend to try and get to know each other through virtual means before even meeting in person. When I was growing up, making a connection with someone meant actually meeting them face-to-face, introducing yourself and talking to them. Friends, associates and intimate relationships were forged this way.
These days, people meet dates online, join chat rooms and see each other for the first time through the digital frontier. Where spotting someone from across the room in a coffee shop and smiling at them would have been a first steps twenty years ago is basically considered creepy today, despite the fact that you genuinely never know who you’re meeting online until you see them in person, often with disappointment. In fact, there are entire shows about that very thing that you can watch.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, because as living creatures, there’s an energy that binds us all. That energy is called “connection,” and it’s something one can only truly accomplish by being physically present in the moment with another person. As one could no doubt agree, the problem with the online world is that you can be “connected” with thousands of people but still feel completely isolated and alone.
“Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”
– Brene Brown
Being connection with someone else is more than physically being somewhere with them. There also has to be a trust, a comfort level, an ability to know that no matter what you say or do, that person won’t walk away from you or judge you. This isn’t an easy thing, especially in light of the modern world’s propensity to be overly sensitive and offended by everything. But a good baseline to know if you’ve made a solid connection with someone is to ask yourself if you would be comfortable doing something in front of them that you would usually only do alone. If the answer is yes, you can have confidence that some trust has been developed; at least to a certain degree.
Connections are important. Humans were never meant to be solitary, isolationist creatures. Even those who often claim they prefer to be alone still need others to one extent or another. And while that need is very real, making connections and building trust are integral parts of ensuring one’s wellbeing and health. Food for thought…☯️
Motivation is a funny thing and I often categorize some of my posts (this one included) as a “motivation” post, but that’s usually because I hope that it’ll motivate you. But the thing is, motivation means different things to different people, depending on their perspective, how they train and what values they attach to such things as motivation.
Some people believe that you need to be motivated to start doing something good for yourself. Okay, let’s examine that concept… Normally, motivation is defined as a general desire or willingness to do something. But how can you desire doing something if you’ve never experienced it before? In order to take that first step towards better health, better fitness and overall goals, I would argue that you need WILL. So long as you have the will to take those first steps and push yourself towards a goal, progress and success will motivate you to continue on.
That feeling of motivation comes almost as a reward for pushing through the difficult, initial steps of any goal you set for yourself. Some may argue that you need to be motivated to start. I respectfully decline. You need to have the WILL to start. Motivation comes later. And once that motivation comes, it’s important to recognize that it should be geared towards a positive outcome. If your motivations are for the defeat of others, you’ll never succeed. If your motivations are geared towards status, image or ego, you’ve failed before you started.
Have the strength of will to make a start. It may suck, it’ll likely hurt and may be difficult to accomplish. But if you can rise up and push yourself enough to take those first steps, progress will motivate you and push you further. Chicken or the egg; you can’t have one without the other. Food for thought… ☯️
The world is a pretty big place, but it’s getting smaller by the decade. With a constantly growing population and a mingling of said population, there’s never been a more prominent mixing of cultural backgrounds, beliefs and ethnicities. And that’s a beautiful thing. One of my favourite things has always been getting to know and learning about different cultures from the people I’ve met and interacted with.
Interaction and understanding is not always an easy thing. After all, with a current world population of 7.9 billion people (roughly), there’s bound to be some difficulty when it comes to everyone getting along. And that makes a lot of sense, honestly. After all, there are so many barriers to effective communication and oftentimes very little appetite to acknowledge them, interaction and understanding can seem difficult.
It’s important to recognize that some people simply CHOOSE not to understand. After all, everyone has the same rights and responsibilities when it comes to good communication. One has the right to communicate. One also has the right to be acknowledged and heard. Being understood is an entirely different story. But one has the responsibility to make an effort. one can’t simply say, “Fuck ‘em, I don’t get it.” There has to be some effort on both sides to ensure proper communication and understanding.
An important thing to bear in mind is that you can only control what you say and mean; you can’t control what the other individual may understand or how they react to it. That’s where the saying comes from. You know the one, “I can only control my words, not how your react to them?” You can say something extrememly reasonable and in no way offensive but the person you’re speaking with may still take offence.
There’s not much you can do about that besides explaining that wasn’t your intention. Unless it’s a hill you wanna die on, you could even swallow your pride and apologize, whether you meant to offend or not. It takes more maturity to acknowledge that it isn’t the comment but whether the other person feels offended that makes the difference. Although it isn’t your job to fix their problems for them, recognizing that people who get hurt and take offence at everything are having a rough go of it.
The other aspect is that you’ll never be able to please or mesh well with everyone. Some consider themselves to be “people pleasers” but realistically, with almost 8 billion people on the planet, you’ll never please everyone and it isn’t your job to do so. Learning to be okay with the fact that some may not like what you say or do is an important step towards reducing suffering within your own life and moving forward with a smile on your face as opposed to a crease in your forehead.
All of these things being said, as long as you’re a good person and do good things, everything else will sort itself out. be honest but never hurtful. Be truthful but never intentionally insulting. So long as you do those things, how the other person perceives you or your communications becomes an aspect that THEY need to work on and it isn’t your job to fix any of it. Food for thought… ☯️
Not everyone is as avid a cartoon fan as I am, so maybe I should provide some background on that title. I watch a show called American Dad and there’s an episode where the main protagonist usually sticks his family into vats filled with goo and VR attachments, rather than spend holidays with them. It’s horrible from an actual family perspective but hilarious from a cartoon one. But the actual goo I’m referring to in today’s post, refers to change. Not change in environment or job or even goals but change within oneself, which tends to be the most difficult change of all.
I found the image above somewhere online, last week. I can’t quite remember where but it doesn’t matter. It resonated deeply enough for me to save it at the time, so I thought I would share it. The statement, in and of itself, makes a lot of sense. People always tend to assume that once a caterpillar seals itself up in the cocoon, it comes out having “grown” into a butterfly. The process is actually incredibly complicated and does, in fact, require the majority of the caterpillar’s body breaking down into its constituent proteins.
Despite popular belief, it isn’t completely “goo,” there are a number of organs that stay intact. And it would have to, right? Many people go through this kind of a transformation. It’s never easy and the outside world will usually do very little to accommodate one’s transformation. But if you manage to fight your way and suffer through being reduce to your constituent parts, you’re almost guaranteed to come out more beautiful than when you started. And if you feel that you may not be, it doesn’t mean you aren’t; it may simply mean that your transformation isn’t done yet.
As the image says, if you’re a mess wrapped up in blankets, don’t just keep going. Take a moment to let yourself heal. Take a breath. Take two. Allow yourself to see the path you want to pursue before shedding your cocoon and coming out changed. And be sure to change only in the way that you choose to. Food for thought… ☯️
Canada Day is my country’s national holiday and is always observed on July 1st, every year. It stems from the Dominion of Canada being formed on July 1, 1867 and was actually called “Dominion Day” until the Canada Act came into force in 1982, at which point the holiday was renamed to what it’s known today. The holiday usually consists of parades, fireworks and of course, the singing of our national anthem.
It would be ignorant of me not to acknowledge the issues and challenges that my country has faced in recent years. I won’t get into them, as they seem pretty pale in comparison to what some other countries have to contend with. But it’s never been a harsher time for people in my county, with controversy, political and financial issues as well as matters of ethnicity, personal beliefs and even a ridiculous notion by some to rename the holiday away from “Canada Day.”
Despite all of these issues and concerns, it’s important to remember that a country is not considered the sum of its shadows. If this were true, current allied countries and territories wouldn’t be considered “allied.” If you study history in depth, you’d be hard-pressed to find ANY country that hasn’t had some dark stains in their story. Canada is no exception. But one must consider that while it’s important to remember the past in order to prevent its repetition, there really is only one direction in which one can move, when considering history: forward.
I love my country. I consider it a privilege to have been born here and live in a country as free as it is. in fact, under the right circumstances you might even catch me tearing up while singing the national anthem. I have no illusions that there aren’t issues but I feel it’s important not to let those negative issues cloud the positive. Positivity is truly the only the way to move forward. I don’t usually write about such things, as I try to keep my blog on a particular track.
Amidst all the controversy and societal issues, don’t lose sight of the fact that today is a day of celebration and should be treated as such. Take the time to acknowledge your pride and your belief in who you are and where you’re from. The entire world is rich with people who make it beautiful. Taking this one day to acknowledge that you’re one of them is an important step in living a positive life. happy Canada Day, folks! ☯️
Being a homeowner is a difficult prospect and given the shape of the world’s economy, isn’t always in the best interest of the consumer when considering the responsibilities and costs associated with home ownership. In fact, given rising home costs, people are beginning to look more and more towards rentals or alternative forms of residency.
For me, home ownership was never an option. I was raised and spent my childhood in apartment buildings of varying sizes, shapes and locations. My parents owned a home when I was born but came to realize that their mortgage payments cost more than a monthly rental fee. ounce you tack on residential taxes, utilities and the cost of repairs and upkeep, it’s pretty easy to see how my folks decided it wasn’t worth their efforts to retain ownership of an actual house.
That’s why, for the majority of my adult life, I never considered the purchase of a house and have always rented. It’s what I grew up knowing. But at some point, the scales tipped to where a mortgage payment was lower than a rental fee to the extent that I jumped on buying a house (and because I had no choice, given my current posting). I was taken aback and shocked at the amount of work and upkeep involved. It isn’t like I didn’t KNOW, per se… But once I was knee-deep in it, it hit home a bit harder (pun fully intended).
Here in Regina, my wife and I are the proud owners of an average-sized bungalow. Recent years have seen us perform major repairs and renovations, as we are the house’s second owner since its construction. It sometimes feels as though there’s always something to fix, clean or repair and given the rigours of daily life, martial arts training and having children, time is short to perform such things. They often get pushed aside for long periods of time.
Anyway, we have a large fir tree in our front yard. It’s a beast of a thing and has caused non-stop issues, with the pine needles everywhere and the tree sapping all the moisture from the front lawn, causing the grass to go without and causing bald patches that won’t grow grass as a result. It’s also been a major pain in my ass, sometimes literally, when I’m trying to trim my hedge or do general yard work in the front yard as it dominates and takes up space.
For the past couple of years, I had been toying with the idea of having the tree trimmed or removed. With everything else going on, including the demolition and renovation of our basement and the re-tiling of our roof, the tree in the front yard took a back seat on the priority bus. But I this year, I realized that ignoring the massive fir has led to its branches growing beyond the hedge lining my property and by next year, branches would likely stretch onto the neighbour’s property.
This was the wake-up call I needed to get on it. Time to move the tree to the front of the priority bus. Although I could have clipped some of the lower branches, the size and breadth of the tree made it unlikely that I would be able to properly trim it without posing a hazard to myself. So I started shopping around for local businesses that would come trim the tree for me. I was somewhat surprised at the fact that I got same general response from almost all businesses I contacted…
The cost to properly trim the tree would be almost bad much as simply removing it. To be clear, this tree obstructs all view out of our picture windows and blocks most of the natural light. This is on top of the mess it causes in the front yard. I discussed it worth my wife and ultimately came to decision to have the tree removed. The company I hired was reasonably priced, fast and efficient and had the job done within an hour or two, while I was at work.
When I got home from work, I was pleased to see a clear, unobstructed front yard. I took a quick look and realized there would be significant clean-up required to remove all the pine needles, pine cones and debris that was under the skirt of the fir. Although i was quite pleased, my wife told me that my son Nathan questioned where the tree had gone, a question he posed to me later when I was sitting in the garage.
He asked me why I had the tree removed, to which I explained all the reasons, including the fact that the tree was hindering the proper growth of the grass and I wanted the grass to be healthier and the yard to be cleaner. He hit me with his thought that I killed one living thing in order to make room for another living thing and why hadn’t I left the tree because so many birds take refuge in it.
I was a bit taken aback and I honestly couldn’t refute his logic. It made a lot of sense. I, in my “infinite” wisdom, decided to cut down and destroy a living thing that housed and protected other living things, because it was inconvenient to deal with and because I wanted my grass a little greener. Not very Buddhist of me. What’s worse is that my 7-year old son had to explain this to me, rather than have me realize it myself.
It made me wonder about the concept of doing whatever to save a few bucks and opting for the easy road instead of the one that requires a bit of effort. And that’s where the title comes in… I pride myself on having a pretty enlightened view in most respects. But to have a young child illustrate such a simple and logical concept to me that i should have already realized was important and illustrates how we can gain insight and wisdom from the most unlikely and unexpected of places. Food for thought… ☯️
The Blogging Buddhist 