What Matters

My mother just returned from visiting her sister last weekend. In her bag were two carefully-packed tea mugs that belonged to my grandmother - one each for my sister and me. On her sojourns to visit her eldest daughter, my grandmother kept her own special cups from which an endless well of tea was consumed. The cups are simple: an ivory colour with a navy blue rim at the very top. No words, nothing fancy. Just simple tea cups for life that was full of upheaval, but simply lived.

I think a lot about what matters and how much lately. It must be the middle age in me, that delicate precipice where we’re halfway through the book and the plot continues to thicken. When I was younger everything mattered the whole world. I would upturn my life for things I barely remember now. My career has been defined by deadlines. While those must be met, how we get there has really been a lesson in mattering. I often advise my teams to “panic about the right things.” Everything simply doesn’t matter all the time. I’ve tried to adopt this in parenting, though that’s easier said than done - after all, decent human beings a hard to raise and that’s the bare minimum standard at the moment.

How much something matters to me is now becoming an exercise in proportion. With finite energy and time, we simply don’t have the capacity to care as deeply for the forgettable as we do for the things that will last. What is the composite of rituals, conversations, kinship and action that bring a life into colour? How does the value of a human life, a community figure in our own consciousness? These are the things I think about often.

I’m trying to be mindful these days of the shape and nature of my days. I’m trying not to hurry through a daycare drop off because I know my days of holding hands with a small human are numbered. I’m trying to say yes to one more book at bedtime. One more lunch break that isn’t at my desk so I can ask my spouse about his day.

The small blue-rimmed cup is safely tucked away in the back of the mug cabinet. I’m too scared to drink from it right now - it’s one of the few things I possess that belonged to my grandmother. It must have touched my grandmother’s lips hundreds of times. She didn’t change the world in some big way. She quietly raised a generation of children who raised another decent generation and who are now raising their own. Her legacy isn’t a name on a building. It lives in quiet memories of days where care and mattering went hand-in-hand. It is a gentle reminder that none of us outlast mortality and that much of what matters is in the small moments that we gather in our days and how we tend our own corner of the universe. One mug of tea at a time.

Shift

We’re all emerging from various illnesses (I say emerging, but what I really mean is poking our heads out for a rattling cough before more germs bury us in for the rest of the season.) The holiday season was anything but in so many ways. Going into the new year has meant just sort of cracking on regardless. Back to the meal plans and school drop offs and 7 AM meetings (the toughest of all things) and overdue library books and getting your steps in. It goes on and on relentlessly.

Was this how it’s always been?

I listened to a very good podcast this week, where the author talked about how your life has chapters. My interpretations is that some chapters are solely dedicated to character development and others are when the plot moves forward. I feel like we’re deep in character development at the moment. But I don’t want to be one of those books where everything culminates right at the very end before the last page and you think, well I could have done with far less exposition.

That’s why this year’s word is Shift.

It doesn’t feel like the type of year to make significant changes (I’m tired!). But it does feel rife for little rethinks. What would we need to shift in order for other things to be true, or to make space for what’s new. What character development could we slot into another chapter so this one becomes a little bit more plot and we’re not left feeling a bit ripped off right at the end?

I don’t have the answer. But I feel like it’s ripe for a change.

The world has felt different lately. And I think when you have too much of the same, you eventually reach enough pressure in the system where the release valve becomes important before the entire system shuts right now. It is about finding that release valve just in time and then staying on it.

What are the release valves in your life? What would have to be true to help you shift? Stay tuned - I’m trying to find mine.

A few things to think about:
Motherland: a fun BBC show to help you get through a pile of laundry
Holding life consciously from On Being with Krista Tippett
The companion essay to the podcast above by Anne Helen Peterson

Closing

The sky has now turned a hazy gray, a backdrop against firey trees that are slowly shedding their red leaves. The mornings are now cool and the sun is setting sooner (if we can see it at all). the Muskoka chairs we so lovingly put together this summer are soaked with lashings of autumn rain.

The seasons are changing. To say it’s been an eventful year would be an epic understatement if there ever was one. A year so full of momentum, and joy and heat and the requisite anxiety. Lots of moments of excitement scattered with a few moments of panic.

Perhaps it’s age, but I’ve started to turn a new leaf on the winter as a season of rest. I’ve disliked the winter all my life - the biting cold, the lack of songbird, the immobility that comes from being frozen in place (in my case because the roads are icy). The layer upon layer of clothing, the inability to shake of the bone chilling cold of the wet Boreal winter time (though on any day, I’ll take the rain over the snow). Not even as a child did I think that this season was particularly magical so much as it was loud and bright.

This year feels different. On the first day that it was reasonably cold enough to make a big pot of soup, I decided to treat the next few months as a season of rest.

The wintertime brings with it a certain urgency that comes with the year slipping away. We have a penchant to seize every moment - shall we get together? And when? It seems the four days over the winter holidays are a rather endless expanse of time in which to see everyone and everything. Not recognizing of course, that it would deplete before we even set foot into a new year. And perhaps that’s a good way to fill one’s cup at times. There are no wrong answers for joy.

While there are certainly many moments of gathering over the next few months, it’s the quiet reflection of dark mornings and warm evenings spent in the home that I’m craving this year. There is something ultimately comforting about tending to both your inner life and your home and surroundings at the same time in the season. It’s a moment to replenish, take stock and gather in a way that is meaningful. And while I’m a big fan of shedding things, I find that the more we turn toward the things that rejuvenate, the more we turn away from the things that don’t - in the most natural form of shedding that there is. This year this feels more necessary than ever.

As we dip our cold toes into the season, I’m setting the intention for quiet repose and for closing out the year rather than rushing through to it. Right now I’m being buoyed by the thought of a warm cup of tea, of woolly socks and of many quiet nights in (and always of bread and butter), of good books and brisk walks.

How are you treating the next season?

A few little things to read:
Katherine May’s “Wintering” and her interview on the On Being Podcast
Nigel Slater’s “A Thousand Feasts”
Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair

Kin

A few weeks ago, I was walking my son to daycare in the morning. He’s typically happy to go and we talk about every car that we see along the way (make and model), say hello to the birds and lament leaving our umbrellas at home. This day was no different. As soon as we got to the centre, however, quiet tears started falling from his eyes and he fell into my arms, sobbing. In the midst of comforting him, I tried to do the mental exercise of figuring out what went wrong (the answer is nothing; he’s a preschooler). We’re all allowed to have our bad days, and my usually happy-go-lucky kid decided today was his day.

As I took him into the classroom, something rather wonderful happened. All his classmates who were there suddenly ran over to him to ask him what’s wrong, to distract him with their toys and to give him a tissue. They all accompanied him to the window as he wiped his tears and waved goodbye to me.

A moment of community and kinship.

We don’t teach this outwardly. Perhaps innately we know we belong with others; we form groups all through life and we weave a net into which others can fall. Groups keep us safe.

I’ve been hearing for many years now about civility, and how nobody is civil with the other. Why don’t we all just get along anymore. What’s happened to society to create the kind of divisiveness that exists now. Why are people so polarized and why is there so much hurt. I have some theories (mostly to do with power, oppression, politics and money). But my other theory really is around kinship. We’ve perhaps stopped feeling a sense of responsibility toward one another. This exists in microcosms like libraries and places of worship, like political protests and soup kitchens. By and large however, we’ve stopped seeing others (and the world) as part of our collective responsibility. We’ve decided it’s much easier to send off a hurtful missive over text than it is to sit in our own discomfort for a minute. We’ve decided somewhat that diffuse action (or inaction in many cases) doesn’t amount to collective harm. I’m not vouching for harmful involvement - some people truly aren’t good for us at the time we’re in and distance is necessary for safety. Yes, absolutely.

However, we are all responsible for each other, the world, and our collective futures.

As I enter another year circling around the sun, our country is headed to the voting booths. The next few years will be determined by one party or another. And everyone is wondering how to vote strategically and in their own interest. I’ll be so bold as to say that we’re also voting with others in mind, and I would hope that we take responsibility for one another as we make that decision, no matter how much we may disagree on bits and pieces. I want your elders to have care, your children to have nice teeth and for your family to not have to pick between rent and food on any given month. We are only as good as how we take care of our most vulnerable. That’s what it means to be be human.

Every birthday for me is a question around what I want and how I want to be in this world. I want to continue to show up for my community. I want to be in song with it. I want to build new ways of being in kinship. Humanity is capable of such goodness; I want us to exploit our highest conscience in service of that. Don’t you?

A lovely poem from Debbie Millman (on The Marginalian)

TWENTY WAYS TO MATTER

Excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth —
the deeper you go, the simpler it gets:
the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss —
all of it part of the same fabric,
all just a story
emerging from the quantum foam.

Move through the world
knowing that everyone around you
is doing the best they can,
that humanity is capable
of the Moonlight Sonata
and the concentration camp,
that you are a piece
of the same puzzle.

If you are longing for
the world to be more perfect
do something about it:
become a kind of translator
between reality and possibility,
cast a light on a parallel world,
that little speck in the distance —
it is the hope, it is the struggle, it is the reward.

Let go of the future
but hold on to the beautiful things
that, like music, exist outside of time —
the sense of wonder and love and light.

When the chord changes on you
what if you harmonized it?

The black hole of your devastation
is a wild strange expansive place.
We are really good at coming up
with reasons to not go there.
Go there.
You will find the seeds
that become galaxies of growth.
You will find
what the soul and the spirit and the heart
need to know.

Be on the inside of your heart,
make a home inside yourself,
for to keep other people happy
is distraction from the real work of being
in which there is no final test
for how to be human —
only the open question
of how to be yourself
which you must answer daily
with all the strength and kindness
that you’ve got.

And remember
that life is an extraordinary creative collaboration,
that if we keep shining a light
on the things that mean and matter the most
the light overcomes the darkness,
that love is the oldest light in the universe
and when you live and work and listen
with open-hearted love
everything
     everything
          everything
is possible
for your life.

Regenerate

Today I went out for a run - it is likely the last of the temperate winter sun before a cold snap plunges us back into the blue winter. It took all of my energy to get outside today because it feels like we’re only slipping into the year and it’s already getting away from us entirely.

I usually use my runs to tune out the world if I can and perhaps to noodle on some little issue or another or perhaps to sticky-note my own brain (remember, remember, remember). As I rounded the corner past the panoramic park on the edge of a hill, I noticed a low tree that was starting to sprout small fuzzy buds. And of course, the relief that spring is around the corner is always mixed with the kind of eco-dread that’s become prevalent in my mind the last few years. Climate change forcing new springs.

Yet I can’t help but be heartened by nature’s capacity to regenerate itself. It bends around, over, under, inside and out of the unnatural, folding our small tinkerbox creations into its vast and mossy arms. While we sit here fretting about missed deadlines and lists and Outlook (heaven help us), nature goes full gusto on yet another fabulous season.

Somedays it’s hard to be hopefully. Sometimes the moral arc (or whichever sort of arc you might want to call upon) seems to not bend, and perhaps even to retract when we feel like we’ve moved forward. But then I remember, that nature leans into stasis - a sense of equilibrium, always, always. And our ability to regenerate is a reflection of that nature.

Any big idea is a long game. In our small lifetimes we have created a lot of noise, the results of which we won’t fully see for many generations. But always there is the capacity to regenerate when things have fallen down - to create differently, maybe better, to take our communities along, and to draw from the deep well of nature’s ever proliferating fuzzy buds.

Things I’m reading/thinking about right now.

This is Love, a podcast hosted by Phoebe Judge

Becoming Wise, written by Krista Tippett (I’m pacing myself)

The Six Grounding Virtues, to think about early in this year

Create

This is a first draft. I’ve been away for too long - the “break” wasn’t a planned one. 2024 became so much about managing, keeping my head above the water. We had plans, checklists, calendars, work-back timelines. So much coordination, logistics, parenting (both of children and worse, adults). I simply had no time in between just checkboxes. I love a good list and the inherent joy that comes from a job-well-done.

The gap last year - and the thing that I missed the most - was messy creation. I stopped making things. I didn’t spend time writing anything but work (and even that was minimal). I didn’t make music. I mostly held crayons to draw all manner of rudimentary vehicle (how does one draw a motorcycle anyway?). I felt mostly like I was ingesting and spitting outputs.

Sometimes the season we’re in necessitates that we focus our energies on particular things. I have always been proud of my ability to manage a lot of things and people, but it doesn’t fill my bucket in the same way as cringey drawings and bad poetry did when I was younger. Which is why, this year, my Word is Create.

I’m taking my cue from nature - she creates everything every year in the spring. She’s intentional about it. She doesn’t worry about perfection or opinion. She simply does her thing and lets us enjoy the fruits (literal and metaphorical). No judgment.

I’m not expecting perfection (we’re working on that), but I want more presence. I might be here more often this year. Or I might not. In between all of the spreadsheets and the calendaring, there needs to be room to create. So much of it is just showing up and seeing what shows up with you. So, 2025 and I will show up together.

Care

It has taken me a few days/weeks to come around to my Word of the Year for 2024. To be honest, the last year, and the preceding ones have been difficult to process in so many ways. 2023 was the first year I spent as a working parent (or a parenting worker) - and let me tell you, it was a rough go. I managed it all by surviving (because I do it so well) and then crashed at the end of the year (there were many tears). There was a fatigue so deep, it was cellular and spiritual and there was no amount of self-care that would help me come out of it in a couple of days.

All the while, I was thinking about how I care about things. I cared a bit too much about things that didn’t need it (an email I forgot to send, internet rage) and not enough about the things that mattered (date nights, proper rest, walks with my small human). This compounded with the world that we live in - wars, climate change, interest rates, the neverending pandemic, oppressive systems - overwhelmed me (continuous headaches, insomnia, a body system that was blaring red signals). I had to bring it to a halt.

Care is structurally and spiritually vital. But there’s so much of it to go around and so many questions it surfaces. How far does our care extend beyond ourselves? To our families? Our communities? The world? And how much is in your bucket to care about all these things? How much of it is left for you? Maintaining your humanity is important - giving a shit is important. Being aware is important, but showing up is even more so than all those things combined. So then if you have a finite bucket of energy, how do you show up meaningfully as an extension of your care? And who or what are you having to sacrifice to do that?

There are no wrong answers here. All of us, in whatever humanity we have, care about something.

The things we care about are like the dials on a soundboard. We are constantly dialing up our levels of care on certain things, and dialing down on other things. This happens to be a negotiation daily on the micro- and macro- levels. We make a million decisions every day that help us define the sound that is the contours of that care.

In the last five years, I had forgotten to balance the dials. Some that had been turned up for decades were still on without serving a purpose. blaring in continuous noise - no sense of balance or harmony. And then I added to the mess by dialing up new ones. Perhaps I thought turning things all the way up would be a good way to measure the level of care I have for everything (more care is good, right?). Only it comes at a major cost on my own care. And if we’re all being honest, doing none of it well, and taking me away from myself.

So at the end of the year, I muted all the buttons except for the ones that were necessary (keeping myself alive). I focused on rest (naps daily), movement (walks), filling my bucket (reading) and reconnecting with the people who bring joy, energy and strength to me.

In 2024, I’m spending my year redefining how I show up in the world and how much care I put into the things that matter, that align with my values and that hopefully leave the world a better place, no matter how small that betterment might be.

I’ll say it again: Caring is important. It binds us together as one common humanity (albeit with a trillion differences). How you care impacts how you present in the world. And not all things deserve to be cared about in the same way at the same time - and especially not if they’re costing you deeply (and resulting in your caring less overall). The world needs us to care, but we must be methodical and thoughtful about it so we can have the impact we want.

That’s my focus this year. Getting the dials right.

A few things to read/listen to:
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagosky

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

James Bridle “The Intelligence Singing All Around us” on the On Being Podcast

More Light

I drink my coffee is relative darkness in the morning. The sun is hardly up when I’m up, and, if I’m unlucky enough, it’s pitch black outside many months. I love the light, but moving at the pace of the sun at that time seems more in line with where I’d like to me. After all, the brain is still a fog and the sparks are only starting to take.

My toddler, however has a different idea these days. He is close on my tail after I wake up and is ready to start the day within minutes of my last sip of coffee. Lately he walks around the house, fingers on both hands coming together in a little bow shape - the signal for “more” in baby sign language (that he picked up entirely on his own). “More…light,” he says, making me switch on the kitchen track lights. “More light” in the dining room. “More light” the second lamp in the living room. In a few seconds the entire open floor of our house is luminescent.

I’m not sure where this sudden need for light, the request for it, the demand for it has come from recently. Perhaps he’s testing the bounds of his communication, perhaps he’s testing his boundaries, or perhaps he just wants to see his toys better. In any case, he seems a whole lot happier with every lamp in the house lit - while I nervously wring my hands at the electricity bill.

I’ve always thought about light as the overarching concept that we all strive for (enlightenment, anyone?). From its origins in myth and religion (my favourite verse of the Quran has to do with light) to how it permeates our daily language (“after this week, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel'“ and “he is a luminary in his field”). It is entrenched deep in our poetry and literature, in our music and in our sports (the Olympic flame).

Light all on its own is a destructive force, however. Something we quickly realize when fires rage, volcanic ash lights up the night sky or we experience eternal sun. There are times when dark is necessary, meditative and even healing. The dark is cyclically part of illumination and to have one only is a disservice and a detriment.

The thing about light is that it can necessarily change our perception of the thing that we’re illuminating. Where once the contours of something might have been an object of the mind, only by some sense, bringing it to light shows us those contours, highlights the crags, the surfaces - whether we like it or not. It changes how we might interact with that object permanently. The dark is sometimes a richer sensory experience.

All this to say is that we can yield both light and dark judiciously. We can alter what we present and how it’s perceived. And perhaps that’s just what makes up the basis of power in this world. So if light holds such power (as does dark), it’s maybe our collective responsibility to enable light in others - to show a better way.

My son might not know it, but his request for light in the morning is a signal to me that a whole day of hope, learning, chance, breath or rest waits for us. He’s saying “light up, we have things to do.” And whether that means doing the alphabet puzzle or just watching the morning through the window, we can see the world starting to move. And perhaps it’s also a sign that we all need more light to change things.

A couple of things I’ve been reading/listening to:
How Dark the Beginning by Maggie Smith

The Light that Bridges the Dark Expanse between Lonelinesses by Maria Popova

A Village

I recently decided on a whim to take some time off from social media - namely, Instagram. With the business of work, life, raising Alligator and a ludicrous news cycle, I found myself at the edge of meltdown. I had lost my sense of self and centredness. I decided, on a whim, that one month was absolutely the right amount of time I needed away.

After letting the impulse jitters subside, I realized that tranquility and loneliness are closely tied. While I had the time and space to read or even just to go about the business of my day uninterrupted, I missed the relationships that I’ve fostered over the last however many years it’s been. I missed ex-colleagues that I share inside jokes with; old friends - a few from other social media sites - who I share so much history with; new friends who I have had the absolute pleasure of getting to know recently; and so many parents who are all in the same boat of raising their kids in a complicated world.

I didn’t realize that the small glimpses we have into each others’ lives are sometimes the breath I need in the middle of the day. A chuckle at a ridiculous meme my sister sent me or a really interesting article or a gorgeous poem. These are the things that buoy us, pulsing through the (frankly) daily struggle that some days can be. They are the way in which we say, “Hi, this made me think of you, which means I thought about you during the course of my day.” Though it’s a silly joke, someone cared enough to think, “I know the exact person who will appreciate this.”

They say it takes a village to raise a child. While it’s not the village of my grandmother, where you could leave your kids with the neighbour and come back to find them fed and playing in the garden, our online communities are a makeshift village. They enable and catalyze that most basic of human drives: the need for connection. And in these cataclysmic (it seems) days, I think an awful lot about collective responsibility - how we owe it to each other to keep each other safe and human. Certainly that’s not what we have seen in recent years in the news cycle, but we’ve seen it in a myriad of miraculous pockets of humanity. How we come through in countless big and small ways for each other. If we are not for each other, then what are we for?

There is a loneliness epidemic for so many people in all walks of life and at all stages. We also receive the messages that social media can be too much, and that it can exacerbate this loneliness. And we also see how it can serve as a community to uplift. All of those things can be true (I’ve learned that part of being a grownup is holding space for multiple seemingly contradictory truths and I don’t like it one bit). But like anything in this world, everything has two sides and it’s up to us to determine what the balance of the two looks like in our lives.

I think breaks are good - it’s nice to look up once in a while at the wide world. I also think I’m in the process of renegotiating my relationship with all things social - perhaps fewer junk news cycles and more rich connections. One thing I do know is that I missed my village. While we might not be neighbours and while I might not see some of them for years likely (I hope not, but it’s realistic), I know their presence is a deeply embedded part of who I am. They make me who I am and reflect it back to me in countless ways. There’s value and care in that.

Reconnect

It’s new year’s eve and as usual, nothing has gone as we hoped it would. We’ve all been hit by a wave of illnesses that has swept us off our feet. And so we’re sitting here, in pajamas, after having some takeout. And truth be told, I’ll likely be asleep in a couple of hours as my body continues to heal after three years of not having had anything to deal with.

But very much as usual, I’ve also been thinking about my word of the year. 2022 felt…gelatinous. I felt like trying to wade through the mire I couldn’t see clearly through. My motions felt slow, but I felt out of breath at the same time. Sitting down made me dizzy in any case.

In the perpetual motion of the year, life became very cyclical. Our son continues to grow and do things that both delight and frustrate us (truly how many crackers can one person throw on the ground). Life is a never-ending cycle of bedtimes, snacktimes, work, miscommunications, hurried dinners and Jeopardy before bed. It was only when I revisited an old picture recently that I realized that something had changed. The woman staring back at me reflected light; she was smiling through whatever might be her own personal problems. She carried herself different. Something had changed, perhaps something been lost. Me.

In this season of life I’m an instagram bio: Wife, mother, daughter, sister, leader. I’m many things to many people. My proverbial plate is full. And my greatest desire right now is to be myself. This year has required an identity overhaul that has necessitated that I fit into the fulfil these roles. And somewhere in there, the joy and deep well of knowing, the signal that brings me back to myself has been muffled.

So I’m dedicating this year to reconnecting - both with myself and with my community. I’m committing to do one thing for myself a week that isn’t about anyone else, no matter how small. This isn’t a resolution so much as a calling in to myself again. I want to go back to this year many years for now and see myself again - with that deep sense of knowing that I knew before now.

I think a part of calling myself back is also reconnecting with the wonderful people in whose orbit I’m so lucky to be. While I’ve got an army of new mom friends, I’ve got an equally powerful contingent of friends who have been with me for a long time - parent or not. And part of connecting with them is that they remind me who I am. As an introvert, I love spending time by myself - I’m my own richest source of connect. But a bell doesn’t ring itself. I’ve been lucky to make so many new friends this year from other experiences and I’m looking forward to letting some of my latent connections regrow this year.

We sometimes need to contract a little bit until we figure a few things out before we expand again. Things require effort and energy and often, we don’t have infinite amounts of either. But well-placed and well-intentioned, that effort reaps rewards for everyone involved. So it is with gratitude for this contraction that I enter into the next phase of this season.

I hope 2023 gives you the space you need to reconnect with what you’d like.