OUT OF BOUNDS

A few days ago, I referred to myself as a man of the 80's. For that to be true (which it is, I suppose) I also need to be a child of the 60's. Some of you will vaguely recall the 60's, the rest can ask your parents and don't believe everything they tell you. One of the hallmarks of that period of time was a contempt for authority as represented by the "man" or our parents, churches and schools. We grew our hair long because parents didn't like it, we listened and danced to rock and roll because we were told it would lead to lasciviousness (we didn't know what that meant, but we knew we wanted some) and we smoked dope to improve our eyesight (ahem). Most of this anarchy seemed to have an air of innocence about it as I look in the rear view mirror of time. The whole peace, love and rock-on scene was embraced as a statement about freedom. We didn't want to hurt anyone else, quite the opposite, as we openly flirted with and sometimes embraced other cultures, religions, medicine, education, government and lifestyles. The unconventional became conventional as a certain amount of disobedience was required in order to be accepted by mainstream society. Those who rode the "straight and narrow train" were ostracized to some extent, by the "cool kids." Fast forward a generation, and we discover that we have passed this attitude on to our own children and of course, they have improved and pushed the envelope even further.
That seems to be a long way to go, in order to get to my point (what's new, you say?) but when parents throw common sense to the wind, in order to snub rules of safety and they bring their children along for the ride, the recipe can create dire consequences. Case in point, the neanderthal who took his 14 year old son skiing out of bounds. They apparently passed several warning signs that cautioned about the dangers involved and when they got into trouble, they required rescue. I don't care if the idiot parent wants to kill himself but to teach his son that the rules, the warnings, don't apply to him can only lead to more disaster. I am really thinking about this from two angles, the first of which is that they needed to be rescued, thus putting at risk a number of other people. Putting oneself in danger is one thing but this becomes an intentional endangerment of the lives of others as they were forced to go and get them. How is that different from impaired driving, a friend of mine asked on Saturday? It's not, so charge him and punish him appropriately! I see that the father, in this case, has been sent a bill to cover the costs of rescue but the addition of a stiff fine might be justified. The other area that concerns me is the lesson that he has taught his son. Most kids today think that they are living in the Age of Entitlement. Anything they want should be theirs, regardless of consequences, economics, the rights of others and common sense. So now, this parent has taught his son that disregarding a danger warning has no real consequences because there will always be someone there to rescue him. Dear old dad will pay the costs of rescue and the people who showed up to take them back to safety - oh well, they were just doing their jobs. What could possibly go wrong as we teach a whole new generation that there is no need to take responsibility for their actions.

And besides, it didn't really improve my eyesight as promised - I have to wear glasses but I Can See Clearly Now.

REMEMBER

If you remember the sixties, you weren't there. Where were you the day Kennedy died? or John Lennon, or Princess Di, or the day of the tsunami, volcano, snowstorm, and on and on and on. We tend to relate history to our own place or involvement in it. Otherwise, we tend to treat it like another school class, a little dry and one dimensional but knowing it, may explain why we have reached this particular place we stand in today, so we are told. History, as we know it in an academic sense, is rife with inaccuracies, opinions, revisionism and outright lies. Up until a couple of hundred years ago, very few people could write and there was no other form of mass communication. Most newspapers, until a few short decades ago, had only a limited local following. What history was recorded, was done quite often, long after the fact through heresay, conjecture and opinion, We have ascribed thoughts, words and deeds to kings, gods and conquerors centuries after they have passed from this mortal coil. How do we know what really happened when a very small and select group of scribes, under who knows what influence, have presented information without witness to people without access to other sources and usually many years after the event. What opinions do we hold today that are based on fictional episodes of historical conquests and discoveries? We know that in this age of communication, in this age of cellphone cameras, news networks, blogs and instant access, that information that we think we are witnessing on our television and computer screens is being manipulated, massaged, edited and politically corrected.
In our search for the truth, some of us have become too cynical (ya think?) and consequently miss what truth is sometimes staring at us and yet, there are still many who glance at the headlines, listen with half an ear to news radio in the car and glance at the TV news during dinner and can still offer an opinion on daily events. Presidential candidates are judged on hair do's, 15 second sound bites, whether or not they inhaled (yes I did), their squeeky-clean past and their ability to say much while offending no one. The point this morning is a little elusive as I had hoped to focus on the importance of sharing our own history with the significant people in our lives. That was the original idea but no, I couldn't leave well enough alone, I just had to rant on about the shortcomings of the rest of the world instead of my own. Oh well, stay tuned and I will reveal all, eventually.

FOLLOW THE LEADER

I just have to get this off my chest. As a firmly entrenched man of the 80's, there are some things a guy just doesn't do. Things like admit fault, watch Dr. Phil, ask for directions, say "Let's just talk," tear up during The Notebook or walk into a lingerie store by himself(it's underwear isn't it?). I had lunch yesterday with a friend who informed me that he had recently had a pedicure. He went on to extol the virtues of soaking, scraping, buffing, clipping, lavender scent and everything else "ped" related. I couldn't help myself - after this clearly hetero buddy whom I have hiked, joked, golfed, lunched, laughed and bitched with for years, told me about his pedicurial afternoon and how much he had enjoyed the experience, the only question screaming in my mind was, "What colour polish did you get?" I think the "guys" at the next table had had enough by that time and may never return to that restaurant.

I have this theory (yet another one you say, surprise, surprise) that there are three types of people in the world - leaders, followers and I-don't-know's. In the last case, the residents of that particular village rarely, if ever, read anything and would be hard pressed to name a significant event of any type that has occurred in the last week. They may check a left over newspaper at the coffee shop, if they have absolutely nothing else to do, for scores of the previous night's sporting events, but generally they wander through life waiting for something to happen. They spend most of their lives on hold, in expectation of bad news.
Followers, on the other hand, bring great value to society by knowing that they are "in the game" and that if they follow the rules, they can and will create a life for themselves and their families. They are a little jealous of those people in charge, especially business owners and political leaders because they know, if given the chance, they could do the job better themselves! They are usually a little in awe of those other people in society who have had all the breaks, have been born into wealth, who were given the title of CEO or president and who set the rules that followers must live by.
Leaders know one secret - there are no rules. Life is simply made up in whatever manner we please. Where there is a vacuum, they step in and create what is needed to fill the space. They don't wait for someone else to level the playing field, identify the pros and cons and determine the best course of action. They make up the course of action, decide the rules and step forward into the unknown and take the risk of being wrong. The world could do with a few more leaders, don't you think?

And to my pedoital buddy, you are obviously a leader my friend, but I fear that I cannot follow.

DREAMIN'

People are talking. So, what's with the grocery store, they ask. Standing in the checkout line last night, I had time to look around at the other customers as well as the employees. Once again, old rock playing over the sound system and slightly louder than I recall other stores playing it. The common denominator between customers and workers seemed to be the smiles and the jaunty attitude as they cruised around the aisles - or I am the only one who noticed it? Tonite, I think I'll check out another grocery store and see what their music is like. Actually, while standing in the lineup last night, I began day dreaming about the possibility of the store adding a latte bar in one corner, perhaps a customer-use kitchen with counter and stools in the other and would it be too much to ask them to lower the lights, add a disco ball at the entrance....

When I was a young lad, someone very important in my life, accused me of being a dreamer. It wasn't meant as a compliment. It came with the advice to straighten up and fly right, put your nose to the grindstone, work hard and make something of yourself! Now, I didn't take advice then, any better than I do now. The whole idea of dreaming as a virtue may have been the typical teenage reaction to authoratative instruction, but all of a sudden I began to notice how many people were dreaming. Everyone from the Everley Brothers to Martin Luther King had a dream. We dreamed about everything from unfulfilled love to changing the world. Somebody has to be a planner and an organiser, someone has to lay out on paper how we move from one objective to the next. Blessings to the accountants, researchers and engineers, but long before any of that can happen, somebody has to dream, somebody has to hold the vision for what is possible. I'm always amazed at how many people are tremendously successful, especially in business, with nothing more than a dream in their briefcase. We all know examples of the high school dropouts who went on to found hugely successful business empires and who now employs all the accountants, engineers and MBA's. Totally lacking a business plan, the dream was so strong and the vision shone so brightly that despite naysayers and conventional wisdom, the dream had no choice but to become reality.

The size of the dream is only limited by the size of the dreamer.

Here's to the dreamers of this world, it is a better place for your being here.

Now, if I could just find that old, white, polyester suit, head back to the grocery store.......Get down tonight!

ME TO WE, part 1

No sixty year old blonde-by-the-bananas last night but I did see an attractive fifty-something moovin' and groovin' to the grocery store tunes. While winding her way through the aisles, she couldn't help herself from singing along with the rock and roll oldies emitting from the ceiling speakers. Is this the death knell for musak? There is a God!
Faithful readers will remember my mentioning a book that my daughter gave me for Christmas, written by the two young brothers, Craig and Marc Kielburger, called Me to We. After being awakened by the wind howling through the trees, chimes and fence gates at 4 AM this morning, I would normally have climbed on the computer (not the treadmill!) to start reviewing emails. Halfway to the computer I use at home, and still out of sight of the treadmill, I realized that I had taken the CPU in for cleaning/wiping/erasing or whatever it's called, of the hard drive. I made a pot of coffee and settled in to finish Me to We. Some readers insist on the 30 second version of a book before deciding to read it, so this morning's post is dedicated to a very quick overview of the Me to We philosophy. It is heavily paraphrased by your faithful interpreter and therefore, mistakes and apologies are mine.
Simply said, each of us has been given a gift. Regardless of our childhood experiences, regardless of economic or health circumstances, regardless of physical or mental constraints, each of us has received gifts. When we create an "action" word with these gifts, they become "passions." Each of us is passionate about at least one thing, but more probably, more than one. One of the major life purposes that we all share is to search for our passion. Here's a hint, most passions end in "-ing" as in an action word like running, writing, dancing, photographing, reading, riding, cooking, speaking......and for some, working. We receive this gift/passion without asking for it. It is ours to use as both a gift and a responsibility from the God that is our source. Here's the catch, whether we search and find our gifts, or find and don't use them doesn't matter - there is still a price to pay for them. They are not free. If we choose to ignore or not seek our passions, we pay the price in things like depression, stress and anxiety which always lead to sickness, disease and worse. This is the result of the frustration from not being in our "right" place or sometimes referred to as, not fulfilling our destiny. If, on the other hand, we have spent the time to discover our passions, we must still pay a price. The price we pay is to share our passions with someone else. We use our gifts to help, inspire, teach, raise money, motivate, feed, create joy or whatever we know is necessary, to bring light into the world. No matter the size of our help, a smile, some volunteer time, a cheque, a piece of clothing, seeds, a pat on the back, our responsibility for the receipt of our gifts is to pay for them, one way or the other. The bigger the gift, the bigger the price, but it always starts with one small step. What step can we take today to begin paying for the abundance we share. If this makes any sense to you, start by buying a copy of Me to We and reading it, before passing it on to someone you know. I will put up a link to the Me to We website soon.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

Picture the government office scene from the movie, The Full Monty and you will get some idea of my recent trip to the local grocery store. The background music playing over the loudspeakers was disco and without realizing it, I found myself tapping my grocery list on the cart handle and kind of bouncing through the vegetables. I swear that if they had turned the volume up a bit more, the sixty year old lady with the tight jeans and high heels and I would have been forced to boogie beside the bananas. Alliteration aside, it was almost the same thing yesterday when they were playing old rock anthems, but no disco in sight - there is no room in rock and roll classics for disco!
Travel is on my mind a lot lately and I keep remembering the huge contingent of uniformed Homeland Security personnel we encountered in Hawaii last spring. I wonder what the budget is for that department (must be billions) as the U.S. attempts to protect itself from the other members of the human race. When I take a bigger, or more long term view of our time on this planet, it seems a little bit like the internal squabbling that occurs in most families. Members can be vicious and hurtful to each other but when an outside threat shows up, they turn their focus and become a cohesive and powerful unit totally dedicated to each other's survival. I wonder if that is what it will take to bring the various factions on our little planet together. I also wonder if that threat is already here and we are too politically motivated, intransigent and fragmented to recognize the threat. Unlike the movies about space aliens and big rocks threatening our survival, both of which might well be possible, we have a few issues closer to home that we might want to look at, in a cooperative sense, rather than a competitive one. Some of the big charitable and environmental groups seem to spend more time and money finding someone to blame than finding some solution to the problem. How is all this connected you ask? How about if we took all of the political, religious and special interest group leaders into a big room, locked the door, threw away their clothes and turned on disco music at about 6 on the volume scale. How long do you suppose it would take to find real solutions to real problems if we didn't feed them or allow them out until the job was done?

EVOLUTION

Surely, you must be noxious, or nauseous (take your choice, you might have an odour problem), from my sachrinistic blogging of the past two days. Where's the acerbic wit, where's the bluster, where's the bombast, where's the passion (alive & well, regardless of the topic), where's the promised irreverence, where should we point the pencil today?
Since no one cut me off on the way home last night, I can't title this column "Neanderthals with Hummers." But, sooner or later, I will.
Today kids, I'm thinking about evolution. I know that certain sections of the populace refuse to accept the inevitability of evolution but they will catch up sooner or later. I suspect that our physical bodies are evolving as evidenced by the fact that we are now able to survive quite nicely without certain organs like the gall bladder and how many have had their appendix removed? Mother nature ain't no fool - if these were critical to survival today, we wouldn't be able to continue without them. They were critical at some stage, or they would never have existed.
I'm thinking that the next step in evolution will manifest in our ability to use more of our minds. You would probably agree with the old saying that we only use about 10% of our brain's ability. You would probably also agree that there are those among us who seem to have insights, intuition, instinct and intelligence that rise a little beyond the norm. I've chosen words with the prefix "in" because I simply think that we will move inwards to find the next level of growth or evolution. We joke about having "spidey senses" but who hasn't noticed something amiss, had a "feeling," watched a sports hero operate on "instinct," or heard the stories of people who decided not to get on a certain airplane, take the usual route home, and on and on. As newborns, we operate purely on these instincts and feelings and then the parents, teachers and other well-meaning caregivers grind it out of us as they dismiss our ability to sense things. I know more and more parents who are now honouring their child's ability to "see" things that don't have hard evidence attached. By the way, animals have been doing that forever but they don't have parents who demand "proof." It might be interesting today if we were aware of when we operate out of instinct and when we deny that instinct. Perhaps we could all imagine these little antennae sticking out of our heads like "My Favorite Martian" and tune up our own evolutionary sensors. Where do we see it operating in our children and grandchildren? Has anyone else ever "sensed" a radar trap and been right?