Category Archives: perspective

Don’t walk by without sticking your nose in it…

6 Comments

Too often I find myself seemingly wishing my life away.  Maybe I’m not really wishing it away but I do tend to look forward to things I have coming up instead of enjoying living in the moment.  I always comment on how quickly time seems to be marching on when, really, I have created the staccato drum beat that I am marching to and have quickened my own pace.

Years ago, my parents used to listen to a jazz singer by the name of Cleo Laine.   Although countless hours were spent listening to her sultry songs and three octave range, the only song that I can remember with total clarity is her rendition of “Stop and smell the roses”.   Even now, I can hear the song in the recesses of my memory as the words hover in a balloon above my head.  “The sweetest flowers grow, and then they bloom, but one day they die.”   I need to have that song playing on a recurring track in my head so I can realize the moments that I may be potentially throwing away, the moments that I can never get back, the moments that I missed because I was too focused on what was coming next, the moments that the roses were in bloom.

I wake up every day – I have a few cups of coffee – I go to work – I am living.  But how much living am I really doing in my life?  Am I taking the time to appreciate the things around me or am I merely going through the motions with blinders shielding my eyes and completely negating the real things in life that are happening right in front of me?

It’s time to slow down, to take life as it comes and not wish myself into the rapidly approaching future.  It will be here before I least expect it and all of those moments that I could potentially have been creating memories will have vanished.  It’s not often that I buy myself fresh flowers, but yesterday I purchased a bouquet of flowers in anticipation of the post that I would create.  Those flowers are now displayed on the island in my kitchen and each time I pass by that vase of floral poetry, I pause and take a moment to put my nose deep into those blossoms and breathe deeply.

roses

(image credit)

As I sat in my living room last night, laptop at my fingertips, dog asleep at my feet, I gazed across my still snow-covered lawn at the beautiful sunset.  The mottled pink clouds scattered across an otherwise clear sky and reminded me to pause and absorb the beauty of the moment.  Soon, that rose-colored sky would disappear and the true night sky would be speckled with a spectacular display of stars.  With a glass of wine in hand and a blanket caressing my shoulders, I took refuge in the warmth of my living room and took the time to enjoy the end of my day.

All too often those moments fade quickly and we are left reflecting on the beauty and emotion of what was, when we should embrace that beauty and those emotions as they occur.  Live in the now.  Stop and put your nose deeply into the petals of those roses and inhale the fragrance.  All too soon, those precious stems will be bare and we will be left with nothing but a memory of a flower that we once had the chance to enjoy.

 

Gazing into your own eyes isn’t weird, it’s necessary

4 Comments

For us to be ultimately happy, we need to take the time to understand the person that we truly are, blemishes and all. It is not very often that we allow ourselves that pause to face ourselves and spend a while gazing into our eyes of truth.

mirror

(image credit)

 

It takes a great deal of honesty, and some humility, to admit to ourselves the things that are important in our lives and what will make us truly content – to embrace the person that we are and to love everything about ourselves. We are each born with unique qualities and characteristics and understanding what really makes us tick is half the battle. Being able to accept those things and allow ourselves to be satisfied with those traits is the other half of that battle.

Contemplating our own thoughts and feelings is a daunting task. But to really reach into the depths of our souls and seek what is most important to us means we are required to admit to ourselves the truths that we avoid on a daily basis. Sometimes that revelation is uplifting. But sometimes realizing who we are and what we want makes us really understand the distance between our reality and our true bliss.

Before we can be honest with anyone else, we need to be honest with ourself. Mirroring someone else’s happiness will only delay our gratification. If we take the time to really delve into our psyche, to look deeply into what makes us who we are, we will come to terms with what gives us the greatest pleasure in our life. So many people spend so much of their time trying to be something they are not. They only try to present the image they feel others want to see. But they do themselves a grave injustice by not being their genuine self. Maybe our warts are what make us truly special and by ignoring those so-called inferior qualities we lose our individuality.

We are all truly unique but embracing those true parts of ourselves means we have to go face to face with nothing more than our honest perception of who we are to the core. In no realm of our reality should we give the power of that perception to anyone but ourselves. There is no single person on the planet that has the right to tell us who we are or what we can become.

Hold a mirror to your face. Look deep within yourself and be honest enough to admit who you are and what it is that is right for you.  Everyone has warts – some are visible, some are masked. Being introspective will allow you to embrace those warts and realize that the things others see as flaws make you stand apart from every other human on the planet.

Suffering the side-effects of the human condition

10 Comments

For those unfamiliar with the latest news in aviation, an Air Canada flight came down at Halifax International Airport on Sunday in what I personally refer to as a “successful crash”.  Airline media relations like to call it a “hard landing”.   I’m sure the passengers aboard would agree with my description since the pilot attempted to navigate the runway with no landing gear, no nose on the plane and short one engine.  The plane slid along the runway to a stop and passengers were able to exit the plane to safety.  There were more than two dozen sent to hospital with minor injuries but the end result was no casualties.   In lieu of what we have been watching recently about the German Airlines tragic ending, this story has a relatively positive outcome.

ac624-crashed-on-sunday

(image credit)

The crash is under investigation and veteran pilots are already pointing the finger to pilot error unless the engines were not receiving full power.  It is too early to tell anything beyond the fact that the captain and his co-pilot are currently the only people who are responsible for bringing the troubled plane to the ground and sparing the lives of their passengers and crew.

I read a disturbing story today that some passengers are already threatening to sue Air Canada.  Just days after the tragedy of the German flight being piloted straight into the side of the Alps, these passengers’ perspective seems to have crashed and burned as well.   Their plane,  although potentially mishandled, was brought down safely in high wind gusts and snow after the landing gear was sheared off because the plane hit some antennas.  The one hundred and forty-nine passengers and crew of Germanwings were not so lucky.

Yes…your flight crash landed, but you survived.  Yes……you unfortunately had to stand on the runway for an hour before being shuttled into the airport.  No, I don’t think that is acceptable and no, I wasn’t on the plane and don’t know the terror you certainly experienced.  But nobody has to make a call to your family to say you didn’t make it.  Nobody has to guide your loved ones through the pain of knowing they will never have a body, or even fragments of a body, to bury to give them a sense of peace and closure.  You are alive to tell the tale and you, unlike so many others, will live to see another day.  Your family does not have to spend countless hours wondering what happened to your flight because you did not disappear without a trace, never to be seen again.

Perhaps the thing that irritated me the most and began this tyrannical rant is that one of the passengers made a flip comment about taking “plane crash” off their bucket list. I had to close the page of the interview.  Who, in their right mind, has plane crash on their bucket list and who can be so flippant with such a crass statement shortly after 149 people tragically lost their lives only days earlier and many other missing flights loaded with passengers and crew will never be found?  The light bulb that was my hope for humanity has been alarmingly dimmed today.

Perhaps those passengers threatening to sue were still in shock and merely making a rash judgement.  I can only hope that if the lawsuits go ahead and money is awarded to the victims of the unfortunate landing in Halifax that they will look back on the events of devastation that have happened within air travel over the past few years and use that money to set up a fund to aid families who have lost loved ones.  Winning a cash reward for surviving would be such a monumental slap in the face of the families who are still grieving and to those who will never get the answer to the question of what really happened to their loved ones.

 

The portal of wants and wishes

11 Comments

I love dreaming.  I love waking up in the morning and putting together the pieces of colors and images that have splashed themselves onto the blank canvas in my sleep.  I thrive on spending time over coffee attempting to put together the jigsaw cut-outs and make sense of what they are trying to tell me.   Mornings are a constant source of recollection, collaboration and interpretation.   The maelstrom of the previous day becomes a masterpiece in my dreams that only I can put together the next day to make any sense of it.

Does that ever happen to you?  You spend so many conscious hours with something or someone at the forefront of your brain that they unwittingly seep into your nocturnal hours and wreak havoc in your dreams?  And it may not be the type of havoc that has you waking in a panic, covered in sweat, but the thought of them is left lingering in your mind to chase you around for another day.  It happens to me quite often with a myriad of things I encounter during my day.  It could be work or it could be a person I just can’t seem to shake from my thoughts.  I spend so many minutes of my day thinking about those things that I carry them into my dream world in a back pack that seems to open of its own volition and spill out into the landscape of my REM sleep.

(Image courtesy of Google)

And it is not that I go to bed with these thoughts whirling around in my head.  I have found a way to relax my brain before I drift off into that long-awaited slumber and wipe the stress and experience of the day from my mind.  But no matter what good intentions I have as I let the night pull down the shades of my eyelids, those waking thoughts transform themselves in my nightscape and travel through that mystical door of my dreams.  The invisible portal is opened and a new world of ideas and scenarios creeps into my subconscious.

And sometimes, if I wake early with the dream still lingering in the realm between awake and asleep, I long to get back to the dream.  Cherished moments, although created in another dimension of my reality, seem so real that I can live there again if I could only drift back into sleep.  My wishes wait there for me.  My desire holds firmly in its place to anticipate my safe arrival back through the portal of my dream world.

However, the invasion of my reality into those dreams is anticipated.  On occasion, work and family are now holding the seats in the front row of the performance of my dream to watch as the scene plays out for those final moments of my reanimated sleep.  The panorama that I had so carefully constructed in the previous hours of my dream world becomes interrupted with more genuine actuality than was originally anticipated.  Somehow that carefree abandon is now speckled with a plethora of reality and the dream that I truly wanted to dream about is invaded less by my unconscious and is now dominated by my conscious waking moments.  My dream is now a host to real life.

What about you?  Do your dreams take you on an adventure or do your dreams consist more of your reality?

The real reason we should celebrate

8 Comments

If this past weekend taught me anything, it is that you don’t have to see people everyday to be reassured that they will still spend a moment to think about you.  It was my birthday on Saturday and I was overwhelmed by the number of messages I received from people who I am unable to see on a regular basis or have never even met face to face.  There are still a few people in this world who may look down on social media and digital communication but the numerous birthday wishes I received through those forums meant just as much as the messages I received in person.

I took the time to read each birthday greeting and every word that each person sent meant so much to me.  It is almost effortless to ignore the constant reminders in our hand-held, digitized lives but I have realized during the many years that I, too, have been a slave to the cyber-enhanced face of reality that it takes an infinitesimal amount of time to reach out.  It is the same small fragment of time that it takes to ignore that electronic reminder and, if the recipient is anything like me, a simple string of words can have a profound effect.

At one point during the afternoon, I was overcome by gratitude.  I, admittedly, had been feeling the effects of the long winter and the very distant signs of Spring and was a bit down about the snowy, barren landscape that greeted me on the morning of my birthday.  But each notification, each acoustic announcement of an incoming message, turned that desolate panorama of my morning into a garden painted by Monet.

Monet_Corner_of_the_Garden_at_Montgeron

 (image credit)

Because of the wonderful blend of the real world and the cyber world, I got to celebrate my birthday with everyone.  I had a glass of wine with the family I work with who has become like my own family.  I was able to hear from friends near and far and I was able to have a great night with good food and lots of laughs with my brother, sister-in-law and my nephews.  What started as a day to celebrate the day I was born turned into a day of celebrating everyone who has joined me along the way.

Yes Charlie Brown, happiness really is a warm blanket

3 Comments

Our friends are like blankets.   They can be an endless string of material woven together with such strength that they completely envelope us or they can be an array of tattered old pieces of what once was a blanket, holding desperately to the strength they once had but unable to fully cover us when we really need it.  Regardless of whether the blanket is old or new, the heart of the fiber is still created from the same cloth and still retains the ability to protect a portion, if not all, of us.

 

Over time, it is inevitable that some cloth becomes distorted from its original plush appearance, but if you delve into memories of that blanket, you can hold on to the soothing feelings you once got from it and realize that it did everything in its power to keep you warm and protected.  It can evoke a feeling as strong as a childhood sense of urgency to hold on to a security blanket.

blanket

(image credit)

Some blankets are indestructible.   Although time may march over that blanket a thousand times, its resolve to stay in its original shape is overwhelming.  It is always consoling when you need to seek comfort, it is never in a place you cannot find it and it will always be big enough to cover all of you.  On very rare occasions, a blanket can be unintentionally neglected but when you rediscover that unique blend of interlaced textiles, you cherish the true strength of those fabrics and know they will never unravel.  Once you wrap yourself in that blanket again it is like coming home but after never really having been away.

 

I am thankful for all of my blankets – the old, the new and the recently rediscovered.  Every fiber of material that makes up those blankets has offered me comfort at some point in my life and I hope my blanket has done the same for them.  I can always take solace in the fact that the material they are made of is genuine and it is readily available whenever I need to feel soothed on those stormy nights.

A grudge at rest should remain at rest

5 Comments

I know I need to let it go.

It’s not even my grudge to hold on to,

not if I were completely honest.

But that doesn’t seem to stop me

from bearing the weight of its memory.

 I feel rage when the cause presents itself,

over and over,

the glaring reminder pokes the sleeping bear,

sleeping bear

the creature who surrendered in my mind,

but not in my heart.

My anger wants to lash out,

to right what is so wrong,

to make the waning memory remain present,

to rub that reflection in the face of the here and now.

But I need to let go.

What has been done,

will never be undone,

not if I had a thousand wishes

over a thousand lifetimes.

 The higher road beckons,

and I will set my foot on that path of rising above.

But taking that road will not erase the memory,

it will not eradicate the anger,

nor will it quell the yearning for vengeance.

I may not be able

to let this sleeping dog lie,

but I know it is the right thing to do.

Sleep, errant dog,

and let those moments slowly fade.

(image credit)

Eternal optimism while staring at your balls

3 Comments

There is a local golf course that is always the first one to open every season.  They even have a count down sign on the highway so driver’s passing by can share their enthusiasm for the start of golf season. It is a nice reminder, a beacon of hope that lurking under the mounds of snow lie tiny blades of grass waiting to be kissed by the warm, Spring sun.

noodle-golf-balls

(image credit)

I drove by that sign today and the magic number on the sign is 25 days to golf.  I almost drove off the road I was laughing so hard.  As I collected myself, I began to scan my surroundings.  Mounds of snow still shroud anything that may slightly resemble a golf course and the temperature on my car thermometer was -12C.

Maybe the optimism of the course owner is misguided.  Perhaps he knows something the rest of us do not.  But I’m willing to bet that the sign proudly stating golf season will start in 25 days will say the same thing 25 days from now!

Say yes to a dress, say no effing way to those shorts….

19 Comments

I was thinking I wanted to lose a few pounds, you know, shed the extra winter weight that inevitably comes from too many lethargic nights on the couch when it was -38C and the wind was whipping by my windows at 60 km/h.

It’s tough to get out of a comfortable routine, especially when you fully comprehend the new routine will require getting your arse off the couch and making it do some exercise.  I start each day with the best of intentions and then somehow the bad habits are happening before I even realize it.

Facebook has been a bit of a thorn in my side lately.  Were it not for posting my blog to it as frequently as possible, I would probably eradicate its evilness from my life.  But then I saw this in my Facebook news feed……

diet

 (image credit)

….possibly the best motivational tool for weight loss I have seen yet.  While it is highly improbable, no, completely preposterous to imagine I would even attempt to dress like that, let alone go out in public, this glaring reminder of shrinking clothing versus expanding fat cells slapped me in the face.

Next time I feel the need to snack on that late night popcorn or make that relatively innocent cream sauce for my chicken this image will gallop to the front of my cerebral cortex and blind me with its perceptual awareness.  Salad anyone?