A Dog in a Subway

Two nights ago, I walked into a sub shop to buy dinner for my daughter. There was a man with a dog. He was about my age and the two boys with him were likely his sons. The dog was a dog – I don’t know if it was a purebred or a mutt. I do know that it was on a leash and had a collar and a nice temperament. What it didn’t have was anything that indicated that it was a service dog or a seeing eye dog. It was clearly the family pet. In a restaurant. With food being prepared just a couple feet away, and multiple tables for customers.

I almost shook with anger.

I wrote last week about my ‘bad wolf’ and my propensity to get angry at strangers who offend my sense of right and wrong.

I was very offended by dog man. I craved confrontation. Not physical. But I wanted to call him out on offensive, inconsiderate, selfish behaviour. It’s a restaurant. For people. Not dogs.

For the last several years I’ve taken an intense interest in what’s often referred to as ‘personal growth,’ ‘self-improvement,’ or ‘wellness.’ I’ve put those terms in quotes for many reasons, including, the billion-dollar industry that lies behind them. Books and podcasts abound – thousands of them – offering philosophies, lists, and tips on how to ‘be your best self.’ The self-help industry is easily, and perhaps justly mocked. But it exists because we are all imperfect, fallible creatures with the capacity to recognize our shortcomings.

I didn’t shake with anger, but I seethed with rage. My instinct was to tell dog man his dog shouldn’t be in the restaurant and he should leave. His boys were teens, or nearly so, and clearly capable of ordering their food and paying for it. I wanted to tell dog man to take his dog outside.

I considered a passive aggressive approach. There were three employees behind the counter. I could have asked, loudly, “are dogs allowed in here?”

I didn’t say or do anything. I just stood, waiting my turn in line. Dog man went to the washroom, taking his dog with him. Weird.

I just wanted a shredded cheese, cucumber and mayo sub for my daughter. I didn’t want a confrontation. I didn’t say anything.

But my inner outrage soared. What if my daughter was with me? Ever since our dog died, she’s battled a fear of dogs. Had she been with me, and this dog approached her, she might have been terrified. Maybe she would have screamed. Maybe she would have hidden behind me in fear.

However, she wasn’t with me. That wasn’t happening. The staff didn’t seem at all bothered by the dog. Hard at work, not one of them seemed to care.

Dog man returned from the washroom. He and the dog hovered near his boys. He asked them if they’d ordered for him. They had.

The boys were quiet. Polite with the staff. Unaware of the angry middle-aged man standing behind them. The first reason I didn’t say anything to dog man was because of those boys. I did not want to embarrass dog man in front of his sons. I did not want to subject them to an uncomfortable, awkward, potentially volatile situation. Like my daughter, those boys just wanted subs for dinner. They wanted an uneventful, quiet, family night.

I recognized this as a moment to test myself. It would feel good, in the moment, in the split second, to confront dog man. To tell him he was wrong.

But was he wrong? Maybe not. I stood there and considered that maybe he wasn’t doing anything wrong at all. If this was France, no one would bat an eye. Maybe I wasn’t mad at him, but at our ever-changing world. When I was a kid people didn’t bring dogs into businesses, or restaurants. Full stop. It wasn’t a thing. At least in Ontario. But I’ve lived on Vancouver Island for close to twenty years now. I’ve seen dogs inside businesses dozens of times. People do that here. Maybe they do it everywhere now.

Maybe it wasn’t unhygienic. A plastic shield protected the food. The dog was just inches off the ground. I was way more likely to get sick from a staff member or customer coughing and sneezing.

Did it matter if he was wrong or I was wrong? This was an opportunity. An opportunity for me to pause, breathe, and not react based on my initial thoughts and feelings. A small and easy opportunity to calm my bad wolf. A small step on the road to living a life where my actions aren’t dictated by what others do and how that makes me feel.

Sometimes that is necessary. I have intervened when the actions of strangers are clearly wrong. Several years ago, my wife, daughter and I, were walking in downtown Victoria enjoying a beautiful spring day. A man sprinted out the door of a convenience store. A woman followed, yelling for him to stop. I asked what happened. She replied he’d stolen a can of soda. I followed him, yelled at him to stop, and that I was going to call the police. He stopped, turned around, put the soda on the ground, and took off again. I returned the can of Coke to its rightful owner. More recently, I was in the check-out out counter at a grocery store. My daughter was with me. An irate customer started screaming at the employee at the customer service desk. He was horrible, insulting her personally, loudly, and using vile language. A manger asked him to leave. He didn’t. I strode over, stared him down, and, very loudly, told him to leave and to “do it now.” He left.

Looking back on the soda stealer, and the man in the grocery store, I’d do the same things again. Especially grocery store guy. His words and actions were disgusting. I’m glad I intervened. I think that was my good wolf at work.

I thought about those things as dog man and his boys waited for their subs. I kept my mouth shut. My order was done before theirs. I paid my bill and walked out. I reminded myself that you never know what is going on in someone’s life. Just because dog man’s dog wasn’t a service dog doesn’t mean that the dog wasn’t providing comfort and security that I didn’t understand – comfort and security that dog man needed in his life at that moment in time.

Or maybe dog man was just a selfish, self-centered, entitled idiot who never once considered that strangers in a restaurant didn’t want to be around his dog.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. My instinct was to say or do something. I’m glad that I didn’t. One of the reasons is that the dozens of books I’ve read, and hundreds of podcasts I’ve listened to over the last few years, have encouraged self-reflection and a desire for self-improvement that was absent for much of my life. The wisdom of others has given me practical tools that, when I use them, can make a difference. I wish I’d had those tools a long time ago. I’m thankful I have them now.

… Postscript. The accompanying photo is from a walk on the beach with my daughter. While we live a long walk, and short drive from the water, we don’t get there often. I’m always thankful when we do. … Among the most influential authors and podcasters in my life are Dan Harris (10% Happier), Rich Roll (the Rich Roll Podcast), Dr. Rangan Chatterjee (Feel Better, Live More) and Eric Zimmer (the One You Feed).

The One You Feed

World War II dominates my reading life. Max Hastings’ sweeping history of the war ‘All Hell Let Loose’ is seven-hundred pages of horror. Unimaginable suffering for untold millions, brought to life by Hastings with tiny heartbreaking details. My fascination with the war deepens my gratefulness for the soldiers, sailors and airmen who sacrificed their lives for a just and noble cause. I don’t know if any of us can truly appreciate the scale of global calamity. Millions of non-combatants – fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbours – perished, their last breaths often taken in terror and agony. Those who survived the war, veterans and civilians alike, often buried their suffering deep inside themselves. The tentacles of their trauma extended deep into their post-war lives, and the generations that followed. And yet, despite so much individual suffering, collectively they built a better world.

A recent podcast on the Potsdam Conference, the meeting between Churchill, Stalin and Truman which took place in the shattered suburbs of Berlin after Germany surrendered and as Hiroshima loomed, led me to revisit David McCoullough’s incredible biography ‘Truman.’ I first read it over thirty years ago, and the abiding lesson I drew from it was that a good man could be a great man. Until a few days ago I hadn’t really considered that President Truman and the current U.S. president shared most of a surname – T. R. U. M. Harry Truman was an honourable, moral man, who made difficult decisions which shaped the post-war world. Those of us who grew up in peace and prosperity owe much to him, and his fellow Americans who, thrust into a war they did not want, emerged from it committed to playing a leading role in trying to secure a lasting peace. The current U.S. president is the antithesis of Harry S. Truman. Neither good man, nor great man, he is a stain on the legacy of the high office which he holds. Despite his vile nature and chaotic tenure, the office, not the occupant, still deserve our respect because one day it may again be occupied by a good person who is also a great person.

Being good is hard work. McCullough quotes a young Truman writing to his future wife Bess: “[I am] just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right.” One of my favourite podcasts is called, ‘The One You Feed.’ It’s premise, based on a parable, is that there are two wolves inside us all – a good wolf, and a bad wolf. A grandson asks his grandfather which wolf wins. The grandfather responds, “the one you feed.” My good wolf and bad wolf battle daily. My bad wolf screams at my daughter, when stress and frustration boil over. My bad wolf feasts on anger which lives within me, never far from the surface and all too willing to make an appearance, especially when a stranger offends my sense of right and wrong. Just over a week ago my bad wolf unleashed a verbal tirade on a cyclist riding on a sidewalk while my family walked beside me. My bad wolf chooses immediate pleasure over long term health. When unleashed, it gorges on junk food. Once I start, I’m incapable of moderation.

Reading helps feed my good wolf. David Brooks’ ‘The Road to Character,’ is beside me as I write this – each chapter an examination of the life of an imperfect person who worked to better themselves. As Brooks writes in the introduction, “I wrote this book not sure I could follow the road to character, but I wanted at least to know what the road looks like and how other people have trodden it.” I fill my journal with quotes from books laying around the house, or posts from social media – wisdom from secular Buddhists, Stoics, C.S. Lewis, and endurance athletes. I feel instinctively that every word I absorb, and then rewrite, brings me a little closer to universal truths. One of those universal truths is that my bad wolf is just as much a part of me as my good wolf. I can observe my bad wolf without judging it. Ultimately, taming my worst instincts means trying to understand my bad wolf and showing it love, compassion, and understanding.

Reading, writing and running help tame my wolf and cleanse my soul. Reading means absorbing the experiences and wisdom of others. Reading about the war puts my own problems and stresses into perspective. Reading lifts me. A beautifully written passage in any book is a work of art that becomes part of me. If reading is a process of absorbing, then writing and running are processes of expending. I’m a private person, usually reluctant to share details of my life with people I don’t know well, yet I pour inner thoughts and feelings onto the page and publish them. And it feels right. Running always feels right, even when it hurts. Sometimes especially when it hurts. Years ago, when I was going through a difficult time, I ran until it hurt, and my inner voice repeated a mantra over and over, “burn away the hurt, burn away the pain.” In those circumstances I sought pain to erase pain. But that was, and is, very rare. Running, day by day, month by month, year by year, has been like a purge valve that imperceptibly lets out noxious fumes that I might not even know are present. A little over a year ago I retired from policing after twenty-four years. I was blessed to retire with physical health and mental health. I owe much of that to running. Thousands of plodding miles where my body and brain processed what I had seen or done at work and left the poisonous byproducts behind on roads and trails.

Running. Good for the soul. Not always for the body. Every day I do an inventory of what hurts most. My right heel almost always wins, but my left heel and right knee are occasionally contenders. Somehow, my right elbow has now joined the fray. Still, I plod on with the goal of not plodding. I’ve set an aggressive but realistic time goal for this fall’s Royal Victoria Marathon. Which has meant weekly speed sessions at a track for the first time in well over a decade. Running fast for short distances sucks. Legs and lungs burn. In the hours before I leave for the track my bad wolf whispers, “take this week off. You’re busy. You’re tired. You can skip a workout.” But I’ve made it every week so far. At the track, during the sessions my bad wolf screams, “slow down! Less hard means less hurt.” I listen and try not to obey. To run hard and fast, I must force my bad wolf to run with me.

What a privilege it is to run. To read. To write. To do battle with a wolf and not an enemy soldier. To grow up in a world shaped by imperfect men and women who did their best. To draw on the examples they set about how to live good lives and shape a better world. To know that good and right can triumph over evil and injustice.

…

Postscript

Having not written in some time this piece was an exercise in returning to fundamentals. Reading. Writing. Running. A recent photograph from my phone usually accompanies each essay, as is the case today, with a photo I accidently took several nights ago. I hadn’t seen it until just now. I’m not sure what it is or how I took it. Maybe it was a fortunate mistake, with bright light shining over darkness.

Always Feels Right

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I read with a pen. I don’t remember when it started, but I’ve been doing it for years. I circle names, underline important or well written passages, and fill the margins with hyphens and asterisks to mark crucial information. I can’t see the words without my glasses. I can’t appreciate them without my pen.

It’s made reading much more expensive. No library books for me. I can’t mark up public property. Our shelves are overflowing with my books, even though dozens, if not hundreds more, have been banished to cardboard boxes in our crawl space. I almost never reread these books, and when a book is in progress, rarely do I look back at my hieroglyphics. But marking up a book, as I read it, is completely and totally necessary. It just feels right.

The feeling of something just feeling right is a precious gift.

Writing just feels right, although I’ve been doing precious little of it lately. But when I do, when I immerse myself in words, and when those words flow, there’s an unconscious beauty to it. Not that my words are beautiful, but the act itself transcends the mundane. Instead, it’s magical and the magic bends the arc of time, and an hour at the keyboard feels like only five minutes has passed.

That must be what it’s like to ride a motorcycle and feel united with the bike – man and machine, a single entity flying together down the highway. Or to play the piano brilliantly – without hesitation or thought – gentle fingertips with an intimate touch, strong hands pounding the keys – and the air around the piano vibrates with the same sounds that once filled the minds of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart.

Running never feels just right. Something always hurts. My right heel is a source of constant pain. My left heel, whether from sympathy or neglect has now joined in to make pain free walking, much less running, a distant memory. Sometimes my legs epitomize sluggishness, and I plod along feeling like I’m encased in concrete. And when my legs do feel loose and limber and I run hard, and fast and free, I can feel the lactic acid settling into my muscles, ensuring that the following morning, when I will wake up, I will limp and stumble from the bed to the couch. And yet, despite the pain, running is as meaningful and vital to me as reading and writing.

Being a dad – being a parent – is more like running than reading or writing. It’s not a smooth ride down the highway or a baroque masterpiece. Like running, parenting is hard, and sometimes painful. Like running, parenting is also precious and infinitely rewarding. Words may flow magically but parenting decisions do not.

I have come to believe, that like many things in life, there are rarely clearly ‘right’ and clearly ‘wrong’ decisions. Most of us, on most days, make thousands of decisions, small and large. We do the best we have with the information we have on hand, often weighing the possible consequences of choosing one reasonable course of action over another seemingly equally reasonable decision. As a parent those decisions are never-ending: Where should my child go to school? How much YouTube is too much for a growing brain? [Arguably, any YouTube is too much for any brain]. When do I intervene, and when do I just stand back and let things happen? Does the behaviour require discipline? Or a hug? Or both? Am I making a good decision or just an easy decision?

I’m a lucky dad with a beautiful daughter. Kind and gentle, spirited and sassy, funny and fun. Being a dad, being a parent, shouldn’t be easy. Running hurts but the hurting helps. It teaches me to listen to my body. To take a rest day because my heel needs a day off more than my spirit needs to run. That’s a reasonable decision – maybe not the right one, but maybe not the wrong one either.

So goes parenting. Maybe not the right decision, but maybe not the wrong one either. And when all is said and done, choose the hug. That always feels right.

The Thin Line of the Living

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Genealogy consumes my early morning hours. When the house is still asleep, and with a cup of coffee beside me, I pore over a blossoming family tree, searching for answers I may never find.

This near obsession started months ago, soon after reading All the Light We Cannot See, a beautiful and painful novel about a French girl, and a young German soldier whose lives intersect briefly, but intensely, near the end of the Second World War.

I thought of my mom, born in the Netherlands, in October 1944. A horrific winter of starvation and deprivation awaited the Dutch people. Thousands would die. One of the deaths was an infant – my mom’s twin sister who only survived a few weeks and lost her life on November 11^th 1944. Remembrance Day.

I imagine the grief and misery my grandparents must have endured as young parents in a war torn, Nazi occupied nation. I knew those grandparents well and spent a lot of time with them growing up. I occasionally asked them about the war, but they spoke little about it. I know almost nothing about what they endured.

The desire to know more, a lot more, led me to genealogy. My father’s family was also a mystery. The surname had changed sometime in the early 20^th century when a Polish family adopted a British sounding name. I’ve learned my dad’s grandparents moved from Poland to the United States before World War I. They had children, and then, inexplicably moved back to Poland. Somewhere in those years one son died, and another was born. The family made its way back to Canada in the 1920s. They were not wealthy. I don’t know how, or why, they emigrated to North America, returned to Europe, and then came back again.

My wife’s family is German and Scottish. Our daughter carries these bloodlines within her. My research increasingly draws me to the wars and the intersections of our families. My wife’s grandfather was wounded in the Great War. My wife’s uncle, Helmut, still a teenager when he enlisted, criss-crossed the continent during World War II, fighting on both the eastern and western fronts. He was wounded in France, just weeks after D-Day, fighting to rappel the Allies who fought to liberate the continent – liberate people like my pregnant grandmother and her soon to be born twins. Throughout the war, Helmut took photos, and he bequeathed the remarkable album he produced to my father-in-law. I’ve spent hours examining that album and followed the journey of this young German paratrooper, who both wandered the streets of occupied Paris as if he were a tourist and not a soldier, and suffered unimaginably on the frozen Russian front in March 1942, in temperatures of -35 Celsius. A year later he was transferred to the Netherlands, where he was stationed an hour’s drive away from my grandparents’ small town. They almost certainly never met, or even saw one another, yet through my daughter, they are connected.

It is easy to build a family tree given all the resources available online. It’s much harder to reconstruct a life. I find photos, and newspaper clippings, but those do not add up to a life. Gravestones tell me when a person was born, and when they died, but tell me nothing about the life they lived.

Every morning when I open my family tree, I am humbled by, and thankful for those who came before me. I am grateful to have been born in Canada, after the wars and in a time of prosperity where health care is widely available. My tree, and likely yours too, is filled with children and adults who died young, very young, throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. My great-grandmother passed away giving birth in her home, in a working-class Ontario city, in 1929. She was only 38-years old. The son she bore died that night too. I think of the legacy that those deaths must have had on that family.

My foray into genealogy has reminded me that no person or group has a monopoly on suffering. It is a part of the human condition.

Above all, delving into the past, reminds me of the importance of the present moment, and reinforces for me that nothing matters more than the love and well-being of our families and those we love.

Meaningless

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Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on the front porch on a beautiful summer’s day. I had just finished writing the piece below. My wife came out to tell me she’d received a call from her sister telling her that Donald Trump had been shot. I rushed inside and put on CNN and watched video of the former president surviving an assassination attempt. I still feel sick thinking about what I saw and what it means for our world. Politics took a back seat to humanity, the preciousness of life and the precariousness of democracy when violence supersedes debate and elections. This morning I’ve been thinking about Abraham Lincoln, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and the afternoon over 40 years ago when my dad walked into our living room to tell me that Ronald Reagan had been shot. Before I turned on CNN, I turned off the show my daughter was watching. A kids show. I felt I couldn’t shield her from reality. She would eventually hear that Trump had been shot. So, I told her, figuring it was best that she heard it from me. Eerily reminiscent of my father telling me about another attempted assassination many years ago. The piece I wrote below is about “meaning.” When it comes to meaning I have many questions and few answers. I worry about the world my daughter is growing up in. And, whatever the future holds, I pray that hope triumphs over fear, and peace wins out over violence. …

My daughter teases me about only buying her “meaningful” books with titles like Time is a Flower and I Like Myself. She’s right. She has a thick stack of thin hardcovers targeting girls written by authors trying to boost the self-confidence and resilience of their young readers.

I search for meaning constantly, and I make choices about what to do based on that search. As a teenager, I loved the Beverley Hills Cop movies. The eighteen-year-old that still lives somewhere inside me almost screamed with joy when I saw that Netflix just released the latest movie in the series, ‘Axel F.’

A few nights ago, I was alone at home at night. All I had to do was press a button and summon Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley to my TV screen. I couldn’t do it. I could not give up myself, and my time, to what would undoubtedly be two hours of laughter, gunfights, and car chases. I scrolled aimlessly for awhile, and then sought out a documentary on September 11^th. I watched firefighters walk up stairwells and people plummet from buildings. It was deeply unsettling. And I went to bed and slept well.

Meaning is comforting. It’s hard to describe how happy I felt when my two most recent book purchases arrived in the mail. Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying and James Lee Burke’s Clete. Junger writes about nearly dying from an aneurysm, and, how on the verge of death, his deceased father appeared above him, and a dark void opened below him. His heart was beating, he was conscious, and he saw these things. Junger, an atheist, narrates his own near-death experience and then explores the phenomenon, of those who have clinically died, come back, and recounted lights, tunnels, and encounters with dead relatives and friends. In My Time of Dying is full of love, mystery, purpose, and quantum physics. It leaves the reader with wonder, questions, and hope. Burke is my favourite novelist. His Dave Robicheaux novels pull you into Louisiana and immerse you into crime, tragedy, honour, friendship, and love. Burke too writes of mystery and wonder, and his words convey the way in which we live in a world where beauty and horror are everywhere all at once. Beauty and hope always win, but good people pay a price for those victories. James Lee Burke is a gift to our world. His words nourish me.

I can’t even go for a damn run without being on some kind of quest. The problem is I don’t always know what I’m searching for. When I was forty-years old I qualified for the Boston Marathon. Injury prevented me from actually running Boston. I’m 13 years older now and still haunted by the personal best time I ran over a decade ago. I believe that, despite my age, I could beat that time by training really hard, and staying injury free. However, I haven’t been injury free for over a decade. My heal constantly hurts, often joined by one or both of my knees. And the time it would take to do the type of training I’d need to do is precious time. Every three hour long run on a Sunday morning is time not spent with my family. And that’s what really matters. So, I run a bit less, and nurse my injuries along, and pursue running from entirely different angles like beauty and health. Beauty in the landscape I run through, and health is my pursuit of trying to maximize the time I have in this world with those I love. So, while almost daily I fantasize about running fast times and setting a new personal best in the marathon, reality usually entails finding meaning in dusty trails that lead to ridgelines I have yet to explore.

My daughter does acknowledge my capacity to give up the search for meaning. At Christmas I usually buy her the latest edition of the Guiness Book of World Records. Together we flip through the pages and marvel at the not so meaningful things our world has to offer like Mr. Methane, “the longest working flatulist in the world.” On my own, I would never choose to read about a world-class farter. But with my daughter beside me nothing means more.

I find meaning in writing these words. In somehow translating swirling thoughts within me to something concrete.

… I’d just finished writing that sentence when my wife walked out on the porch. And everything became meaningless.

Light Pokes Through

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November rain didn’t fall on Vancouver Island this year. At least, not as often as it usually does.

Instead, our days have been cold and clear.

The nearby trails have been icy instead of muddy.

I’ve needed sunglasses more than a rain jacket.

Those trails have been a lifeline over the last few months. Our family has experienced two significant health challenges. In both cases, the worst may be behind us, however, the stress has been significant and ever present. And it continues.

At the best of times, November darkness and gloom weighs me down. This November was not the best of times.

The sunshine couldn’t have come at a better time.

But the days are short, and the sun is low – very low – in the sky. And that has affected my runs.

I’ve been exploring near our home. Trails I have never gone down before. Heights I’ve never reached. Views I’ve never seen.

So often, over the last few weeks, I’ve turned a corner and found sunshine streaming through canopies of green. Shade surrounds me, yet the light streams through, and, behind it, the sky is as blue as the air is cold.

The light that makes it through is indescribable and special. It’s ethereal. Almost holy.

It stops me in my tracks. I breathe it in.

And I stop running, pull my beat-up old phone out of my running vest, and take photos which don’t do justice to the beauty of what I’m experiencing.

As is so often the case, I’m writing this on a Sunday morning. One floor down, my daughter plays her electronic piano and sings ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’ I’ve never heard her do that before. Her singing is more precious to me than the light streaming through the trees. More precious than anything.

The rain was late but it’s here now. An ‘atmospheric river’ hammering the island. The sun won’t be shining through the trees today.

Maybe that’s a good thing. If it happened every day, it wouldn’t be special. It wouldn’t be magical. It wouldn’t remind me that light pokes through.

The People Around Me

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Midway through the last long weekend of the summer, our neighbourhood was still and quiet. People were camping and travelling – the last flurry of activity before school started. I was also still and quiet which allowed me to hear sounds hidden in the background – birds, a neighbour tinkering, a dog barking. Nothing moved except trees and bushes swaying in a gentle breeze. The air was warm even though it was early evening. I sat on our front porch, hidden from view behind lush leaves and pink flowers. My wife sat beside me, a glass of wine in her hand.

Our home is usually a cacophony of sound – often emanating from, and around, our daughter. She is rarely still or silent and her presence envelops my wife and I in her world. But that Saturday night she stayed with her grandparents and her aunt. The timing was good. I love her more than anything in the world. Even so, she drained me that day – physically and mentally, and my dad battery ran low.

Two days have passed, and now it’s Labour Day. The unofficial last day of summer feels like the unofficial first day of fall. I’m back on the front porch. There’s no warmth in the air. Grey clouds hide blue sky. It’s not quite as quiet. Kids have returned to the park across the street. Distant traffic is louder. A pink pick-up truck I’ve never seen before just drove by our home. There’s gloominess in the day, or in me, or in both.

We all grow up returning to school in early September. It’s familiar and comforting. I live it now through my daughter’s eyes and her emotions – an amalgam of nervousness, fear and excitement. My little girl, who once weighed less than four pounds and spent her first few weeks in an incubator in an intensive care unit is about to start Grade 2. It’s a mix of emotions for me too. Gratefulness for her sheer existence. Wonder and awe as I watch this little person grow and develop and change every single day. Thankfulness that she is still young and naïve and plays with dolls and loves mermaids. Concern for her gentle soul as she grows up in a world where not everyone is fundamentally kind, or inherently decent. I remind myself that most people are good most of the time.

Many of those good people live in our neighbourhood. Kindness abounds and is often centered around our daughter. We returned from a walk this morning to find a bag of cookies on our doorstep, made for her by a thoughtful woman who is a masterful baker and gracious person. We were returning from that walk because we’d borrowed ‘Skye,’ a little terrier whose owners allow us to walk their dog, to help my daughter overcome a fear of dogs. Our living room now has a miniature dollhouse thanks to another neighbour who needed to find a home for his 98-year-old mother’s family heirloom. That this man thought of my daughter and reached out to us so she would have that dollhouse meant the world to me. Several weeks ago, our family “camped,” when a good friend parked his 40-foot motorhome in our driveway for the weekend. His generosity made for sheer joy for my girl who is desperate to camp, and saddled with parents who are not desperate to camp. Roasting marshmallows in our driveway was as special to her as a trip to Disney.

This morning I contemplated leaving our neighbourhood. After we’d walked the dog and found the cookies, I hopped in my car to drive by a house for sale. It’s not far away. Ten minutes maximum. But the home is on a steep hill, in a subdivision built on a dramatic incline. The subdivision has beautiful homes, many with ocean views. The home I drove by is newer than ours. It’s bigger. It’s near a pathway that leads to the ocean. I miss living a short walk from the ocean. I tell myself that I should “want less” and I know there is much truth and wisdom to those two words. Yet, I’d like to live in a home that’s a little bigger, with a yard that is a little smaller, and needs less care.

I wrestle with what’s the right thing to do. What’s the right thing to want – or not want. When I drive in that area, when I walk in that area, it does not feel like a neighbourhood. It feels like a collection of houses that happen to be in the same location. The steepness of the streets make it so much less walkable than where we live now. And walkability breeds contact and conversation – kindness and friendship.

There is so much value in taming our desires and being grateful for those things we have. I would miss this neighbourhood so much if we ever left it. I do feel drawn to the ocean. It has always had an almost mystical allure for me. But if we moved to be closer to the Pacific, I would leave behind the trails, hills, and mountains which are so close to me now. I can run from my home, and, in less than five minutes, be totally alone in nature. That is another gift which our neighbourhood gives me, every single day.

Yesterday, I hopped on my bike and escaped high up in the forest. I rode, and hiked, and found myself alone, and elevated, surrounded by acres of trees, with a spectacular view of mountains and the ocean. Maybe that’s all the ocean I need.

It’s still Labour Day. It’s still gloomy. And I’m still on the front porch. I hear a basketball bouncing. I see children riding their bikes. I know school lunches are being made, and backpacks being packed. And I’m thankful for where I live and the people around me.

I Did Not Run

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After a couple weeks of constant heel pain, I stopped running and vowed to take a week off.

That was last Sunday.

My heel is no better. But I might run anyway.

Strangely, I don’t miss running. At least not the act or sensation of it. I’m not pining for the trails. I’m not desperate to run long and slow, or short and fast.

But something doesn’t feel right. Inside me. I’ve felt it all day. Call it depression, melancholy, ‘the blues.’ I’m not myself. Not today.

I’m not sure why. Usually a “weighted hike” helps. So I tried that. I put a dumbbell in a backpack and set off through the forest. I ate fresh blackberries, sat beside a stream, and watched a fly land on a perfect green leaf.

A weighted hike usually does the trick. The dumbbell gets harder and harder to carry. The shoulder straps dig into my skin. I lean forward, seeking a posture where everything hurts a little bit less. At the end of a weighted hike I’m in physical pain. But I feel better. On the inside. Nature, solitude, and decompression lift me up from within.

That didn’t happen today. Today I got home and still felt blah.

I’m not sure why. It could be because there is nothing I have to do today. The lawn doesn’t need cutting. My daughter does not need to be dropped off at a birthday party. My wife and I don’t have to go shopping. No distractions to distract me from whatever I’m feeling inside.

Maybe it’s shift work. Two long days followed by two long nights. Four days of sleep deprivation and a messed up body clock. The aftereffects carry into my days off. I feel jetlagged. I feel hung over. I feel short tempered. On my first day off, I am mindful of how I speak to my wife and daughter because my fuse is short and my patience is thin.

Today is my second day off. I slept long and well. I’m weary but not exhausted. I’m well on the way to the feeling of “normal” that usually returns by my third day off.

Maybe it’s the work other people do. My job title is Watch Commander. I supervise approximately twenty-five uniformed police officers. I sit behind a desk, while they are on the street, doing the real work of policing. I hear it all over the radio. Assaults, thefts, domestic disputes, overdoses, and a seemingly endless stream of mental health calls. There are so many broken people, and the police officers I work with spend large parts of their days trying to help. They work hard, and virtually everything they do is because something bad has happened. Earlier this week a senior citizen was the victim of an unprovoked violent attack. Her injuries are life altering. The cops I work with arrested the offender and went with the victim to the hospital. It happened at 7:00 o’clock at night, in a nice part of the city, on a beautiful summer’s evening.

Maybe it’s the work I do. Like a contentious situation which I could have handled better. Or sensitive information which gets shared with me because of my position. Or decisions which I make that affect the professional lives, and personal well-being of the police officers on my shift. Men and women I’ve come to care about deeply since I started working with them earlier this year.

Or maybe it’s because I haven’t been running. I biked this week. I went to the gym. I stayed active. But I did not run.

It seems too coincidental that I would feel run down after a week of not doing something I usually do almost every day.

It’s funny, because last Sunday, when I decided to take a break, I was out on the trails in behind our home, and I wasn’t loving the run. My heel hurt, and my motivation was practically nil. I’d entertained trying a two-hour run, and knew I didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t want it. Which was unusual, because often I look forward to two-hours as the perfect amount of time to be out there on my feet – to challenge myself without overtaxing my system.

So last Sunday, when I decided to take a break from running, I felt kind of proud of myself. I felt like I was listening to my body and my mind and it was the perfect time for a break. A week for my heel to heal and my running mojo to recharge.

And now six days later, I feel the opposite. A reminder that running for me is about so much more than physical health. And it’s not just central to my identity. The blah I feel today is a reminder that running is essential to my well-being. Physical tiredness and work stress are nothing new. They are essential elements of policing. Nothing about this past week was fundamentally different than the last 23 years of my career.

Except it was one of the few weeks in which I did not run. And today I’m paying the price.

Impermanence

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My fiftieth birthday recedes daily, but it’s never far from my mind. If I live to be one hundred, then less than half my life remains.

I am impermanent, and the recognition of this impermanence colours my life.

I’m declining. Physically and mentally. Science, physics, and Arthur Brooks say so. In his book. From Strength to Strength, Brooks writes abut how our mental and physical capacities inevitably fade with time. However, Brooks, describes how the back half of our lives – the older years, can be filled with happiness and deep purpose, because the older we get, the better poised we are to serve others by mentoring and teaching, and as he writes, “to face decline – and even death – with courage and confidence.” [From Strength to Strength (arthurbrooks.com)]

Brooks writes about Buddha. Over the last year, I have become increasingly drawn to Buddhism, not as a religion, but as a system of thinking and way of being. Impermanence is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. Both Buddha and Brooks caution us to be wary of attachment to things, be they cars or careers, because all things are fleeting.

I’ve attached myself to reading, writing, and running. I’ve defined myself in those terms, whether naming this website, or describing myself on the dating app in which I met my wife.

All three are at the core of my life, yet I could lose any one of them, at any time. Accident or injury make all three tenuous. One bad fall on a steep trail could crack my skull and rob me of reading, writing, and running. I can’t imagine life without them.

Actually, I can. We’ve been travelling this last week. Eight nights in Ontario, visiting family and friends.

Over the last week, I have not been a Reader, Writer, or Runner. Instead, I have been an Eater, Drinker, and Driver.

I let go of my attachment to clean eating and gorged on fried food and ice cream. I felt ill every time I did it. And did it over and over again.

I drank more over two nights than I have in the last six months. Gin and tonic, beer and wine, rye and coke. I drank only in part because I enjoy those tastes and flavours. I drank to let go. I drank to decompress. I drank for the buzz. I drank to enjoy a night with friends. A night I didn’t want to end. An evening later, and many miles away, I drank because my wife and I played ‘Name that Tune’ in a bar along a canal in the small town where I grew up. I drank there because it was fun, and I drank there to release my inhibitions, so I would get up and dance to earn extra points for our team. I drank because, a night of drinking the night before created momentum and it was easier to say yes to drinking because I’d said yes the night before.

I drove a lot in Ontario, mostly on the busy streets of Brampton, an endless processions of red lights, and constant gridlock. Two days of driving in Brampton, contributed to more than two strong drinks in Guelph, a picturesque city just outside the orbit of Toronto area traffic. I relished the drive to Guelph, through small towns and the countryside. We stopped in Rockwood, at a gazebo beside a river. We visit this park every year because it is lovely, and water flows alongside it.

The following day, on our way to the Niagara Region, we sat in traffic for what felt like forever, when an unseen accident, or the sheer volume of cars, ground the Queen Elizabeth Way to a halt. After more than five decades of life, most of them living in Ontario, and hundreds of trips on ‘the Q.E.W,’ it was my first trip on that highway since the Queen’s death. We finally escaped bumper to bumper traffic when an exit ramp led to fried food and ice cream, and an extreme hit of salt and sugar. Junk food momentum had attained peak velocity. My stomach still hurts.

Impermanence comes in handy when it comes to eating, drinking, and driving. I know that when we get back to Vancouver Island, my meals will be fresh, my drinks will be ice water, and it will take me a month of commuting to encounter as many red lights as I did during a week in Ontario.

Impermanence will remain on my mind. One of the best sports writers in the world is Joe Posnanski. A few days ago, he did not write about baseball or athletes, and instead about his now adult daughter, and how they went to a Taylor Swift concert together, and how Swift’s music had been the soundtrack of his daughter’s life, since she was a little girl. And while he loves his adult daughter more than anything, he misses his little girl. [Taylor-Made – by Joe Posnanski – JoeBlogs (substack.com)]

Every second of this trip I was conscious of the preciousness of having a young daughter. A special seven-year-old who crammed a year’s worth of fun, adventure, and tears into a single week. She shopped at a thrift store with her grandma and bought a five-dollar porcelain doll which she immediately treasured. Two days later that doll’s head was crushed by a reclining car seat. I saw her face the moment it happened. Pure distilled sadness. An ocean of tears. Tears that halted when our good friend, who also saw it happen, entered her home, and returned with another porcelain doll. One that had belonged to her mother. A doll that was decades old – a Barbara Ann Scott figure skating doll. A family heirloom passed from our friend’s family to ours. Barbara Ann is on the plane with us now. Likely her first time flying, en route to her new home in British Columbia.

I saw a lot of tears this week. My daughter was disconsolate when she had to say goodbye to her aunt. An aunt with whom she’d camped overnight for the first time ever in a Port Colborne backyard with a campfire, marshmallows and no mom and dad.

More tears flowed at The Mandarin restaurant when a straw and some Coca Cola dislodged a loose tooth. Blood streamed from her mouth. Not a lot, but enough to scare her. Mom took care of that quickly. Then I joked with her about how blood gushed from her mouth and people fled the restaurant in terror.

A few days later, in Niagara Falls, the Maze of Mirrors, induced real terror. Mom and Dad missed the clue in the title – MAZE! We thought we were entering a fun house where mirrors would shrink us, expand us, and make us laugh. Instead, it was an almost impossible to escape building, where mirrors made it appear as if we were everywhere all at once. My daughter shrieked and cried. We latched onto another dad and his little boy who were maze veterans and we exited on their coattails.

Laughter and fun overshadowed tears. My daughter went on the Ghoster Coaster at Canada’s Wonderland. She was scared, and she did it twice. It was her first roller coaster ride ever and I was proud. She played Pac Man for the first time. She swam in the hotel pool. The three of us jumped together at a trampoline park – the closest thing I got to a workout all week long. She hugged everyone over and over. She ate almost as much ice cream as I did. She said she wanted to move to Ontario. She didn’t want to leave her family behind.

All impermanent. She’s growing up, just like Joe Posnanski’s daughter. And the laughter and tears of this past week are already in the past.

We will land in a few hours and life will return to normal. Our home, our meals, our routines. I’ll be at work in a few days and my stress will return. My wife will return to her own more than full time job – managing the operation of our home and family. Her stress will return. My daughter will resume summer vacation, which as an adult, in retrospective, seems idyllic to me, but as a dad, I know will mean more moments of stress and tears for my little girl.

Every moment with my family and friends in Ontario was special. I miss my parents, and my brother and his wife and children. I miss them desperately and I miss them year-round. I entered this trip drained after a few months of nightshifts, and the stresses of a new job.

I finish this trip with a healthier soul, infused by family and friendship.

I finish this trip knowing I will return to reading, writing, and running. Despite their impermanence.

The Broken Bridge

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We can look backwards in time.

Every time you gaze at the stars you are inside a time machine.

The light you see took years – anywhere between four and four thousand – to reach your eyes.

A star that you can see tonight may have exploded thousands of years ago, and no longer exists. It is gone. But you can see it.

Intelligent, highly educated people spend their lives studying these things. Quantum physics. String theory. If you Google, “why there is no such thing as touch,” you’ll learn (but like me, perhaps not understand) that there is no such thing. I thought I was sitting on the couch writing this. Not quite. Instead, “when you plop down into a chair or slink into your bed, the electrons within your body are repelling the electrons that make up the chair. You are hovering above it by an unfathomably small distance.”

At the subatomic level, a particle can exist in two places at the same time. A measurable thing that exists can be in more than one place at once.

Does any of it matter for any of us? Arguably not. Whether we know, or do not know these things, hardly effects our lives.

I do not think about them every day. I rarely think about them at all.

Why did I think about them today? Because I was straining for an analogy to help explain the unexplainable. There is a broken bridge near my home. Surrounding it are forests, and streams, pathways and fallen trees. This little clearing in the woods is alive with birds and bugs. I’ve never seen a bear there, but every time I go, I expect to. It feels like exactly where a bear should live. I am drawn to this place.

In a subatomic world, where I can be in two places at one time, a part of me would always be at the broken bridge. It exudes peace. Sometimes I stand on the bridge and hear the water that runs below. Sometimes, I sit on a log and just listen. I’ve meditated there. I’ve walked beyond the bridge and discovered a trail I did not know existed. The broken bridge is the place where my inner voice yells the loudest, and the broken bridge helps give me the resolve to listen to it. The broken bridge is the place that I limped to last week, when an old hip injury flared up, and I worried that, not only would I be unable to complete the Vancouver Marathon, but that weeks or months of pain loomed ahead. [I finished the marathon. And my hip still aches].

When I walked there last week – “layered” is the word that stuck in my head. The broken bridge and the world around it are layered. Vibrant greens contrasting with dull greys and browns; chirping birds interrupting pure silence; trees reaching for the sky hovering above dead ones that have yet to fall. All those things interact with each other. Infinitely.

The day after the marathon we returned home. We’d spent three days in Vancouver, in a busy downtown hotel, in a large city. We were always surrounded by people and noise. After we got home, I walked to the broken bridge. I was alone. The day before, I’d been one of thousands of runners. That morning, we woke up in a city with hundreds of thousands of people. Hours later, I had the broken bridge to myself.

The broken bridge always looks the same and is always a little different. It’s magical, like looking into the past, hovering on a couch, or being in two places at the same time. I see it. I’m immersed in the beauty. But I can never explain or fully understand exactly what I’m experiencing and how it makes me feel.