Category Archives: Lifestyle

Riding the tiger

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Photo courtesy of jinterwas on Flickr

“The one who rides the tiger can never get off.” —Chinese proverb

What does that ancient wisdom mean to you? After I stumbled upon the proverb recently I found different interpretations.

1.Once you decide to tackle a powerful challenge, you can never give up.

Very few people choose to “ride the tiger,” or take on powerful challenges. Why would they, when a comfy life without peril is an option? Most people choose paths with multiple outlets,  and contingency plans. Safe, but not very interesting. Those who do step up to the fierce and noble animal must do so knowing that they are in for a wild ride that they must see through to the end.

2. If you connect yourself with something dangerous, it will attack you if you decide to disengage.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” Michael Corleone says in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. We need to choose our companions carefully, because the dangerous ones don’t want us to stop the wild ride. Wrong associations, drugs, bad business deals, and many other choices entrap us. They are a tiger that allows petting at first but once mounted shows its fangs.

3. Once you set yourself on the path of enlightenment, you will not be able to stop. 

“One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr wrote. He wasn’t referring to spiritual growth but it applies, because once a person opens up to enlightening ideas, they can never go back to the way life was before.

4. People often set off on paths that lead them to get trapped by their own wants, desires or prejudices.

Life can eat us alive. The title, position, status, or persona we have built may choke us, but we refuse to relinquish it.We may take on more and more until we are overloaded and incapacitated. We refuse to stop or escape, making us a prisoner of our own keeping.

5. Society is addicted to technologies and science.

We rely on our fume-spewing automobiles. Could we imagine life without our power-depended gadgets? Each scientific advancement brings the need for more science to solve a new problems born out of the new technology, in an endless quest for utopia.

That’s a wide variety of interpretations for sure, and all apt in their own way. What does riding the tiger mean to you?

 

Roundhouse: Servicing and light repairs

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Roundhouse Park

Roundhouse Park

When I attended the Canadian Writers Summit in Toronto, Canada this summer, the daily walk from my hotel to the conference site at the Harbourfront Centre took me through Roundhouse Park. When I walked there my steps slowed, and I had to stop to contemplate the metal tracks and the mighty engines on display. I could not walk through the park apace. Something about the circular shape and the radiating rail lines gave the site a sacred feel. In slowing down, in breathing in the spirit of the place, I felt reinvigorated.

In the early days of rail travel, steam locomotives could only travel forwards. Toronto-bound locomotives arrived at the John Street roundhouse for servicing and light repairs. The turntable allowed the locomotives to be turned around for the return journey.

According to the Toronto Railway Historical Association, the locomotives serviced there were “so attractively maintained that their appearance became known among railroaders as the ‘John Street polish’.”

Today, Roundhouse Park no longer services locomotives, but it still provide servicing and light repairs. Like a forward-moving locomotive, I arrived in Toronto this summer and the John Street roundhouse gave my creative soul a “John Street polish” of a different sort.

We all need a little servicing and light repairs from time to time. Where is your “roundhouse?”

Roundhouse Park

Roundhouse Park

Failure to communicate: A lesson for our galaxy from Sesame Street Martians

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As a child I giggled out loud every time the Sesame Street Martians encountered another Earth object and tried without success to understand it or communicate with it. The ringing phone? Still cracks me up all these decades later.

But these days, when I despair about the harmful actions people are taking in the name of hate-driven agendas, I think those Sesame Street aliens illustrate part of the problem. Groups of people from the same galaxy but different neighbourhoods can’t figure each other out. Research in books leads to wrong or incomplete conclusions. Even if two groups stumble across a common word or phrase, the true meaning of what that sound communicates is misunderstood.

Sometimes the misunderstanding and miscommunication leads to a distrust so profound that people murder each other because of it, without remorse and sometimes with glee. 

Sesame Street doesn’t provide the solution, and guaranteed there is no fast and simple one. But if the Martians spent a little more time on the ground with the Earth objects, instead of just descending now and then in their spaceship, they would figure out what a cow, a cat and a chicken really look like.

Perhaps the modern transportation and communications system of our big galaxy will allow people from different neighbourhoods more time to just be together. Then, perhaps, in time, understanding will grow and everyone will learn that a ringing telephone needs to be answered.

Take time for time

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Exactly three years ago, on July 12, 2013, I posted a piece called “No time for time.” Perhaps mid-July fosters impatience in me, because lately incomplete projects irritate me. I have no time for time! I repeat the silent mantra, “I want it done now!” 

The long-term writing project I’ve been working on? I want it done now!

My overdue house cleaning and decluttering? I want it done now!

Incomplete renovation work? I want it done now!

Any change in plans, setbacks or unexpected obstacles set my teeth on edge. On Saturday, for example, I drove home from my work at a local library with the firm intention of spending the afternoon performing a white wizard cleaning job on my house. I arrived there to discover we had no power; the passing winds of a thunderstorm had knocked a huge tree onto power lines nearby. I didn’t realize how dark our house is during the daylight hours of a stormy day. I could not see well enough to do an effective cleaning job. The cleaning had to wait. Grrr . . . I had no time for time. I wanted the cleaning done now!

I grumped and muttered and stomped around for the afternoon (my family dutifully staying well away from me) while I worked at allowing time for time and accepting what “was” in place of what I thought “should be.”

My thoughts turned to “coconut time” and the piece I had written about it before. Here it is again, in case you have any projects in the works that need time to ripen.

_____________________________________

No time for time

When my son was 10 years old, his first zit appeared on his chin. Offended by the mar to his perfection, he pointed at it with a jabbing finger. “What is that?” he demanded.

“Well, now, I’d say that’s a zit.”

“How do you get rid of them?”

“Time,” I told him.

“Time!” He was alarmed. “I don’t have time for time.”

We live in a hurry-up, I-want-it-now world. We want to control what happens when, and manipulate the world to our convenience. We have no time for time—except when we have no choice.

Polynesian countries know the wisdom of “coconut time.” We can’t rush a coconut to ripen; it happens in “coconut time.” What’s more, we don’t need to pick coconuts; they fall when the time is right.

We can’t grow old before our time. We can’t rush a coconut to ripen. And zits, they just take some time.

time

The biology of story: Pick up, listen, restore

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I spent the weekend in Toronto, Canada at the Canadian Writers’ Summit. Hundreds of writers from across the country gathered at the Harbourfront Centre to share ideas, learn from each other and evolve as writers.

Are you surprised I chose to attend a session entitled “The Biology of Story”? 

At the session, Amnon Buchbinder, associate professor of screenwriting at York University, talked about the “interactive documentary” he created to explore the idea of stories as living things.

Buchbinder’s documentary, found at www.biologyofstory.com, outlines three principles.

1. A story is a living thing

“A story will choose to be with you, but you have to choose to pick up the story.” —Nigaan James Sinclair

If you want to drive a writer crazy, ask them, “Where do you get your ideas?” You might hear something like “Out of the clear blue sky.” Perhaps it’s a matter of writers choosing to pick up the stories—those living beings—that come to them.

Watch: Stories are living beings. Period

2. Living is a story thing.

“Listen and you will see your own story will speak to you.” —Jean Pierre Makosso

Do you drift aimlessly from one event to another in your life? Are you listening for what your story—living being that it is—has to tell you?

Watch: Listen and your story will speak to you.

3. Not all narratives are stories.

“A real story is the possibility of restoring the world.” —Deena Metzger

Buchbinder writes: “We live in a world crowded with narratives. Many of them lack key properties of story. This accounts for the lifeless and/or destructive forms that some narratives take.”

Watch: Stories are about wholeness

Buchbinder’s documentary encourages us to pick up the stories that come to us, to listen for what our own stories have to say, and to work with those stories to restore the world.

I just sent you a story. Pick it up, listen, restore. 

This Sane Idea: Cocked guns

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“This Sane Idea”
by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master, as translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Let your
Intelligence begin to rule
Whenever you sit with others

Using this sane idea:

Leave all your cocked guns in the field
Far from us,

One of those damn things
Might go

Off.

A weeping yogi

       A weeping yogi

“The yogi weeps because the world is profoundly sad, they say, and someone has to always be weeping for its sorrows, so that you can be joyful. Hand-carved in Bali, these yogis take your pain so that you can enjoy life. Known for their gentle, joyful spirit, the Balinese believe that sharing your sorrows lessens the load and sharing your joys helps you grow: so share your sadness with the yogi and share your joys with those you love. Holding his head in his hands, the yogi seems to be saying, ‘If it’s too much for you, please share it with me. It’s why I’m here. It’s what I do.’ Some feel that the yogi has either just moved into his pose of sadness and sorrow, or is about to stand up in happiness and joy.”