Fascination

The beach!  It’s a superb symbol of relaxation…sunbathing, margaritas, the smell of suntan lotion (well, sunscreen these days)…etc, etc..  But the beach is something else as well:  as the meeting point of land and water, it’s a strange and fascinating borderland. I grew up by water (lakefront and then oceanfront) and my mother always told me we were “water-people”, which made it sound like its own ethnicity.  I’m not sure whether this predisposed me to like water more than the next person, but it certainly did give me license to be particularly geekily fascinated by the lakes, oceans and seas.  And - to confess – it’s a fascination that just doesn’t get old, and which, re-experienced makes me think about the role of fascination in feeling alive and having a great life.

We’ve just been in Florida, on the wide and turquoise Gulf Coast.  We had pitch-perfect weather and spent every morning at the beach.  The water was warm enough for swimming, and varied between surf just right for bodysurfing en famille, to easy, sparkly tranquility.  The water was teeming with life:  sandpipers zipped up and down with the surf, their long bills poised to dig up clams;  pelicans cruised over the water, hunting fish;  millions of little clams washed up with each roll of the waves, then hastily tried to bury themselves out of site;  muscular dolphins even disported themselves further out.  It was hard to tell whether they were fishing or playing, but they sure seemed to be having a good time.  And all the life we did see conjured the feeling of all the life that was out of sight, deeper in the Gulf.  It was an awesome feeling.  I’ve always loved swimming out into deep water just for that feeling of being one more creature among many in the water.  It’s a dizzy sort of a sensation, to have the bottom of the ocean far beneath one, and unseen life all around one.

In Florida, all that life, all that strange life, was captivating.  My own sense of engagement with the world quickened, and I loved watching my children get absorbed by everything that was going on around them.  I couldn’t keep up with their questions:  Why does the surf keep coming like that?  Are all these different looking shells different species? Do sand dollars have different “pictures” on them or are they always flowers?

Besides making us all want to move to the Gulf (notwithstanding the small issue of hurricane season), the whole experience made me reflect on the nature of fascination itself.  To be fascinated is a distinct form of pleasure.  Usually we’re fascinated by things that are new to us.  We want to explore them, learn about them, see different aspects of them.  We can feel fascinated by people (especially when we’re falling in love!), by circumstances (how did that happen?) and by things (how does that work?).  The natural world is endlessly fascinating because there’s always more to experience and learn.  Whether or not you’re a “water-person”, there’s a lot out there to enchant….  For example, there’s a reason that the heavens have inspired some of the greatest minds in the world, from philosophers to poets to scientists.

The marvelous thing about fascination is that it leads us to be open.  It’s the opposite of cynicism or constraining self-awareness.  When we’re fascinated, we tend to forget ourselves. We turn outwards to the world instead of inward to our own thoughts and feelings.  Fascination connects us to things, because it makes us reach out to learn.  And fascination can make us lose our sense of time…the whole world boils down to the subject that holds our attention.

Unfortunately, I don’t know that I necessarily spend a lot of time being fascinated in day to day life.  Most of the time, I’m too busy doing what I need to do in the world that I know.  And culturally, we sneer a bit at fascination, probably because it implies a willingness to expose a deep interest in something, and to reveal a not-knowing, when we’re somehow always supposed to be clever and to know things.

But I vote for embracing fascination, because it’s fun and it opens one up to the world.  And if I feel too mired in the workaday world to be fascinated, well, maybe it’s something I can cultivate. That sounds a little strange, a bit like tryingto fall in love.  But why not?  Maybe it’s just a question of fanning the fires of an interest, whether it’s the Dark Ages in Europe, the discovery of new planets, or life in Iceland.  Come to think of it, Sarah Moss’s new account of her year in Iceland is coming out soon, and it's bound to be brilliant….

Is Happiness the Goal?

Well, someone’s got to ask it. We are in the midst of an explosion of interest in happiness.  The UK and Canada, among other countries, are now measuring their citizens' well-being as earnestly as they do GDP.  Books about how to get and stay happy sit contentedly on best-seller lists.  Happiness think tanks are springing up like mushrooms, like the Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics.  The introductory statement on their website says, "People want to be happy.  But do we know what makes us h appy, or how society is best organised to promote happiness?"  They take it as axiomatic that happiness is the goal:  the only question is how.

Even if one is supremely disinterested in this movement, it’s coming for you. The other morning, I received a new magazine called “What Makes You Happy” inserted into my Globe & Mail newspaper.  I’m professionally immersed in this subject, and even I was amazed at the breadth of happiness articles:  happiness at work, raising your children to be happy, global happiness averages, etc, etc.

On the face of it, questioning whether we really want to be happy seems absurd.  Look at it the other way:  “Do you want to be unhappy?” Of course not!  And yet, as the get-happy steamroller bears down on us, it’s worth digging in our heels a little, at least long enough to ask an important question:

What exactly do we mean by happiness?

This is where it all gets a bit woolly.  In some respects, happiness is one of those things that we’re just supposed to “get” because everyone has experienced happiness and unhappiness at some time.  This is presumably why the LSE can so boldly state that all people want to be happy, and also why there really isn’t any social pushback or qualification to the happiness trend.

But look a little more closely, and one sees that there are a lot of hidden assumptions at work in all this happiness business.  First, everyone seems to be running with Aristotle’s argument that, no matter what goal we believe ourselves to be striving for, like financial success or building a family, we’re really doing it because we believe that it will make us happy.  Thus, happiness is the real goal.  While more than a little hesitant to take on Aristotle, I’m not actually 100% convinced of that.

But whatever the case, based on my recollections from my undergraduate years and a quick refresher at the website of The Pursuit of Happiness, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting human happiness, Aristotle also said that we don’t really know we’ve achieved happiness until the end-game, when we’ve lived our whole life and can look back on it.  It’s not a temporary state of happy-happy-joy-joy at all, it’s a life goal.

My sense is that the majority of the merrily bubbling happiness literature doesn’t look at it this way at all…mostly it seems to be promoting happiness right here, right now.  And this is where I begin to get a little uncomfortable.  In this vision, it seems like it’s too easy for happiness to devolve into the ultimate individualist, consumerist quest.  It’s all about me!  And we elevate our feelings to the level of obsession, using fleeting moments of what we perceive to be happiness as sort of a litmus test for the worth of an activity or commitment.  There’s a fair argument to be made that this is just plain narcissistic.  But more than that, I’m not sure it’s making any us feel better.  It may even be perpetuating the problem.

So what else can we develop that elevates the discussion beyond individual happiness?  This is where the idea of an excellent life, a rich life, comes in.  To me, this implies something beyond an individual’s feelings, because, as I see it anyway, a rich life is one defined by interconnection.  You can also assess it in a much more clear-cut way than happiness…is your life rich with people, work, community engagement, purpose, ideas, activity, connection to place and so on?

To be fair, a few of the well-being indices do some version of this.  For example, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, based at the University of Waterloo, measures factors such as living standards, community vitality, health, environment, time use, democratic engagement, leisure and culture and environment.  This is a step in the right direction.  But I’d love to see us take the idea of interconnectedness head on, and measure the worth of activities and pursuits by how much they connect us to things.

Because I think this is the goal.  Yes, as individuals we’re mired in our own feelings and experiences, and we’ll all do our final reckoning about our lives at the end.  But in the meantime, we can passionately seek connection…to others, to this beautiful world of ours, to creative expression, to all the things that can elevate our humanity, and that really are worth striving for.

When the Dog Bites

Where do parking tickets fit in the whole idea of being switched-on?  Sprained ankles on the first day of holiday?  Being horrendously late for your child’s school performance? These are all things that have happened to me recently…the normal stuff of life, I dare say (OK, maybe more organized parents wouldn’t have screwed up their daughter’s school performance time).  They’re not difficulties compared to serious illness or real loss, but they’re the kind of thing that can shade a day into grey and make one feel more irritated or guilty than alive and engaged.

I’ve been thinking about this issue on and off for a while, and it came up for me yesterday when I accidentally smashed a beautiful antique plate that belongs to a friend.  I felt sick about it.  You can tell me that people are more important than things and I would agree with you wholeheartedly…but it was still awful.  It seems to me that our actions are portrayals of our feelings, so to break the plate signals indifference and carelessness when in fact I feel anything but.  But accidents happen.

So where does the idea of the beauty of feeling alive fit here?  Is the goal to feel switched-on most of the time, but accept that there will be times when we just feel crummy?  Or do we try to get through the crummy stuff by intentionally doing things that will restore us to feeling alive and uplifted?

The answer is probably both.  One thing I know for sure though is that our “cultural scripts” for moving through hardship tend not to be very useful.  Traditionally, we are encouraged either to be stoic (“suck it up”) or to try to rise above it all by a sheer act of will (“let it go”).  This is the kind of Nietzchean claptrap debunked in All Things Shining.  It’s pervasive though, so much a part of our culture that its heavy hand is invisible.  Think of the lyrics of the song from which I’ve stolen this title, “I simply remember my favourite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.”  It’s a nice idea, and brown paper packages tied up with string are delightful, but you get the underlying message:  you ought to be able to think your way out of anything.

Here’s a different idea: try experiencing your way out of negative feelings.  Yesterday, I was in a funk about having let down my friend by breaking her plate all morning.  Then, around lunchtime, I happened to hear an exquisite piece of music on the radio:  a new recording of Bach’s St. John Passion produced jointly by Les Voix Baroques and the Arion Baroque Orchestra.  It was so beautiful, and somehow so unexpected, that I pulled over by a park and just listened to it.  I didn’t have to will myself to get some perspective, it gave me perspective.

A plate is just a plate, even when it’s antique and beautiful.  My friend will still love me;  I will still love my friend.  I will try to have it fixed, or to find something as elegant and lovely to replace it.  I gain nothing by wallowing in guilt.  Living is something else.  And living is the goal.

Of course, you also have to be able to forgive yourself…for doing something stupid, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for doing whatever you perceive your transgression to be.  I am extremely gifted at punishing myself, and I recently caught myself trying to instill exactly the same trait in my children.  Now, children need to learn feel remorse (we don’t want to raise little sociopaths) and we all need to be able to express it.  But by the same token, there’s remorse, there’s atonement, and then there’s remembering to live.  Pain and guilt might make you feel alive, in a way, but they’re never uplifting and they’re never gifts to others.  Some experiences pain us, some heal us.  So when the dog bites, don’t just think of your favourite things, go live them.

Hearts in the Highlands

I was up late last night, slogging over a PowerPoint presentation.  You know the feeling:  the deadline is looming, you can’t find just the right image, and the PowerPoint software suddenly reveals itself to be embedded with evil gremlins intent on keeping you up all night.  I’ve had some deadlines that were so intense I have literally worked through a tornado. But I have to confess that this particular assignment has actually been rather more fun than the average corporate presentation:  I have been preparing for a presentation to my son’s kindergarten class on Robbie Burns and Scotland.  The images I was searching for included bagpipes, Edinburgh Castle and the Loch Ness monster (which my son’s teachers assure me won’t be too scary.  You can rest assured that I’m leaving out Culloden, Glencoe and poor decapitated Mary, Queen of Scots, although I will tell all those tales with as many gruesome flourishes as possible, should I ever be invited to speak to my daughter’s grade 2 class).

As I squinted at clan maps and nearly indistinguishable tartan designs last night, I realized that I was having a ball.  OK, some of it was stemming from all sorts of fantasies about celebrating Hogmanay at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh , riding the Royal Scotsman, and returning to the Western Highlands.  (My husband and I went camping there in 2001.  It rained every day, and our tent nearly got blown away when we set it up on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  Years later, when I opined that we’d never had a beach holiday, my husband retorted indignantly, “What do you mean?  We had Scotland!”)

Daydreams aside, though, there’s something really quite fun about diving into the lore of one’s family background.  I was raised as distinctly “British-Canadian”, and I seem to recall a heavy emphasis on the Scottish part of our identity.  My mother’s father wore a dress kilt when he married my grandmother.  My grandmother regularly referred to a red and tattered copy of “The Highlander’s Cookbook” (I’m telling you, if you think haggis is the only gruesome thing the Scots have invented, look up Blawn Whiting).  My grandparents just couldn’t get over left-hand drive cars, so they imported right-hand drive cars from the UK.  My uncle owned bagpipe music (which he would blast at top volume to get us out of bed when we were indolent teens).   We have a family dirk.  Even though three out of my four grandparents were actually first-generation Canadian, we felt a shared sense of pride in the role of Scots in helping to build Canada.

When I actually went to Scotland on the aforementioned camping trip, I was surprised to find a real sense of recognition, something I hadn’t felt the many years I’d lived in England.  Highland Scots are a people shaped by water, wind and mountains, and who comfort themselves in this environment with lush gardens and cosy homes;  it was no wonder that so many of them settled in wild British Columbia, and set about recreating the same colourful and warm domestic environments with which I'd grown up.

Previously, I’d never felt a particular urge to trace my family roots, but when I was actually in Scotland, I realized that it felt special to have deep history with a place.  I’m not Scottish, but Scotland and Scottish culture had nonetheless shaped my upbringing and thus my sense of self.  In an era in which we’re all about self-invention, all about lifestyle, it’s actually sweet relief to acknowledge that we have histories.  I try to imagine my Grandmother, she of the right-hand-drive Mini, responding to a question about her "lifestyle".  She no doubt would have fixed me with those blue eyes of hers and said, "Lifestyle?  Really, girl, this is simply who we are."

And so I raise my wee dram to Robbie Burns Day, to Scotland, to my family and to all our homes and homelands.

But Wait...There's More!

I’m delighted to say that the lovely and inspirational people at The Family Dinner are posting The Joy of Raclette on their website along with a recipe for Raclette!  Please check it out and investigate the rest of their site…it’s full of wonderful ideas for eating and connecting, not to mention great information on the health, sustainability and safety of our food. Bon appetit!

The Joy of Raclette

It’s like a double decker bus - that you can cook on.  Yes, I’m talking about a Raclette grill.  I gave one to my husband, Stefan, for Christmas, and due to various logistical reasons (including not wanting to lug it all the way to Berlin, where we spent Christmas), he only opened it this past Saturday night.  He introduced me to Raclette years ago, and is a bit of a devotee himself, so I thought he’d be pleased when he saw the gift.  He was, but the children, who knew nothing of this thing called “Raclette” were indifferent, preferring instead to focus on popping the bubble wrap it came in. But that indifference melted away (like a slice of yummy cheese) as soon as they started to see the principle of Raclette.  All the typical stuff of dinner – in this case vegetables and potatoes – but topped by bubbling melted cheese!  And they could choose just to which degree they wanted to melt their cheese…bubbly, sticky or almost crispy.  Mira was so overcome, she threw her hands up in the air, yelled, “Yummy Raclette!” and then proceeded to faux fall off her chair and on to the floor.

Now, in terms of ingredients, this was a pretty humble dinner.  We had the Raclette cheese, of course, but we ate it only with boiled potatoes and grilled zucchini and orange peppers.  And yet somehow it was incredibly delicious and fun.  I loved the food, but honestly, a lot of my fun came from how much Mira was enjoying it.  Not only was she in ecstasies from the food in front of her, the approach to cooking  food and “topping” it with something sparked some incredible latent creativity in her.  After dinner, she lay right down on the kitchen floor and started creating a list of all the things she’d like us to try cooking.  Here are a few of her ideas:  fry eggs and peppers, and melt Monterey overtop;  grill shrimp and top with melted butter seasoned with chili and lime; make crepes and top with melted chocolate, whipped cream and raspberries; grill bananas and top with melted chocolate and rum (OK, the rum was my idea).  Not bad for a seven year old!

As a parent, it was fascinating to see how much more engaged the children were in dinner when they got to participate in cooking it themselves.  They often help in the kitchen, so it wasn’t just the power of lending a hand, I think it was the fact that we were all in it together, and we could all share and discuss our micro-choices and approaches like how gooey or toasty we wanted our cheese, or whether the cheese went better with potatoes or zucchini.  The Raclette gave us a central focus, and literally gathered us towards its warmth and fragrance.  We all loved being a part of it, and I think that intense inclusion – expressed in delicious food, of course - is what Mira is trying to replicate with her flurry of creative recipes.

We also found it conducive to telling stories.  Of course, I had to tell the children how I’d never heard of Raclette before I met their father, but also how we used to joke that, if the world ever got too much for us, we thought we’d just go off to some college town somewhere and open a Raclette restaurant. What could be nicer than that?  Mira, entranced, pressed her recipe ideas into my hands.  “Here you go, Mama,” she said, “Recipes if you ever do it.”

Food, togetherness, stories, creativity, dreams:  I think we might be eating a lot of Raclette this winter.

Pirates, Adventure and the Treasures of Childhood

Guest Post by Emily Frank “I see the Pirate flag, Daddy, I see the flag. That must be where the Pirates took Mama. I’m swimming to shore, I’m going to save her!!!!” And quick as a wink my eight year-old son dives off the decrepit family sail boat into the St. Lawrence and dogpaddles to shore with a plastic dagger clasped artfully in his mouth. I am carefully concealed behind some shrubbery where I have ‘tied’ my hands behind my back with an old bandana. I’ve put patches of mud on my legs and the pirate skull I’ve drawn on my arm will become the ‘tattoo’ that the pirates have given me to leave behind their ominous warning.

I can watch his progress to shore although he cannot see me. This is my favorite part, watching him fully embrace the moment, suspend his sound common sense, and allow himself to believe that his mother has been captured by pirates for the third year in a row, right on his birthday. I observe as he scrambles to shore, bare-chested and dripping. He scans the shoreline, looking for some sort of clue as to where I might be hidden while shouting my name. His eyes are gleaming, his entire body quaking with excitement. Finally, he starts up what he thinks is the likely path and I shout, “Nicky, I’m here, oh thank goodness you’ve found me, come save me.” He arrives at the top of the hill triumphant. He quickly unties me, shouts to his father and his brother who are busy anchoring the boat and then says ‘Now what do you think those pirates did with my presents this year?” He then begins frantically to explore the surrounding area for more ‘clues’ that will reveal where his birthday presents have been hidden.

This all started out innocently enough when my youngest son turned four. We found ourselves fairly recently arrived in a new neighborhood, with limited funds and no extended family or friends in the area. My husband and I were trying to figure out how we could enhance the birthday experience without all the usual trappings that go into the four year old birthday party (lots of friends, games, relatives, etc.). We started with two basic ingredients: some knowledge about our son’s passions - maps and pirates - and a mid-July birthday which meant the weather would likely be perfect for an outdoor adventure.  So, that first birthday, we took him outside, presented him with map and told him that he’d be responsible for finding his birthday presents. When he asked why his birthday presents were hidden, we told him pirates had stolen and hidden them, then left us a map. Little did we know a tradition had been born!

Every year we need to up the ante a bit to keep the experience fresh. Staging my own kidnapping and rescue have been part of the experience for the last three years. Commandeering the family sail boat, with Daddy as captain, and then following a course across the St. Lawrence to a small deserted island were new additions this year. I have absolutely no idea what we are going to do next year. But I know it’s going to be great. And I will have just as much fun planning it as my son (and his brother and father) will have playing their respective roles, coming to my rescue and unearthing the cache of birthday presents. It takes the average hum-drum birthday experience and turns it into something spectacular for all of us.

My intention here is not to denigrate the traditional family style birthday parties. Those can be fabulous. And taking time out to connect with family and friends over birthday cake can be priceless in our over scheduled world. But this year, after my son told me that he could not wait until the Pirates kidnapped me again for his birthday, I began to contemplate what made this type of experience so much fun, for him and for the rest of us. After all, we live in an area where extravagant childhood birthdays are the norm. Parents diligently send out dozens of birthday invitations, have professionals organize games, bring in animals from the zoo, have giant bouncy castles, space museum tours, or countless other birthday events where ‘the fun’ has been carefully calibrated and measured into a pre-set time slot. But these events, while offering diversion and amusement, do not have the long-term resonance that our own Family Pirate birthdays do.

Why? I’ve decided its three interrelated features that make everyone in the family eagerly anticipate the annual Pirate Birthday party. The first is that it calls for full participation from everyone in the family. We are all fully physically and mentally engaged.  Whether hiding presents, swimming in the icy waters, or carefully planning out the scenario, every single one of us has a part in the planning and enactment of the event. Even hapless neighbors who have shown up at our house at the wrong moment have been dragged into the Pirate Tale, forced to deliver ransom notes and listen attentively as my son explains with urgency that his mother has been kidnapped and he must rescue her yet again! (All with a knowing gleam in his eye).

Second, the Pirate Birthdays are about us. We are masters of our own story in these adventures and can build in the features that most excite us, and that bring us closer together. For my family that means water, outdoors, and physical activity are a must. But I could easily imagine for other families it might be music, popular culture, arts, or a carefully crafted sense of luxury.

Third, there is a sense of adventure and discovery in each and every year. And to fully participate, all of us must delve into a role, suspend a bit of our everyday selves and go with events as they unfold.  When we stop running out of unique ways to celebrate the Pirate Birthday they may well lose their luster and we’ll have to come up with a new theme. It's the annual process of re-creation, and re-invention that keep us all so hooked. We relive every moment of the ‘adventure’ long after its over.

It’s true these birthday parties take a little more energy in planning. It is sort of a logistical nightmare, getting me out to the kidnap spot and then my husband back in time to be there when my son arrives and ‘discovers’ that the kidnapping has occurred. It all takes a little staging, and a bit of suspension of our adult selves. But the end results make the extra effort all the more fun.

Teaser: Pirate Adventure Coming Soon!

Who doesn’t love pirates?  (Not the real, Gulf of Aden kind, that is, but the fun, Johnny Depp/Jolly Roger kind.)  On Monday, I will be posting a guest blog from anthropologist Emily Frank in which she shares the exciting birthday pirate-kidnap-rescue adventure her family created for their youngest son’s eighth birthday.  It’s a beautiful – and rather exciting - story that shows the power we have to switch-on others, and the rich fun we can have when we invest time in creating adventures tailored to who we really are as people and families. I’ve included a teaser below…see you Monday!

“I see the Pirate flag, Daddy, I see the flag. That must be where the Pirates took Mama. I am swimming to shore, I’m going to save her!!!!” And quick as a wink my eight year-old son dives off the decrepit family sail boat into the St. Lawrence and dog paddles his way to shore, with a plastic dagger clasped artfully in his mouth. I am carefully concealed behind some shrubbery where I have ‘tied’ my hands behind my back with an old bandana. I’ve put patches of mud on my legs and the pirate skull I’ve drawn on my arm will become the ‘tattoo’ that the pirates have given me to leave behind their ominous warning....

A Toast to Long-Standing Friendships

The doorbell rang and I ran down the two flights of stairs in our old North Oxford student house to let in Alan, the last arrival to our dinner party.  His cheeks were pink from the walk through the cool fall night, he’d donned a decent jacket, and he held a bottle of Single Malt Scotch in one hand and a bottle of Bailey’s in the other.  Whisky!  Bailey’s!  This was a luxury of almost unbelievable proportions:  to say that we were broke would be an understatement.  Alan’s gift created quite a stir among the six of us gathered for dinner, not because we were short of alcohol (we had plenty of bottles of £6 wine), or because we wanted to get soused.  The magic in it was this:  we were just at the start of the year, all students just getting to know each other.  Alan’s gesture told us in a flash that he had an extravagant and spontaneous spirit, and that he was both willing and happy to reveal this to us.  His openness called forth something reciprocal in the rest of us, and, no doubt helped along by that cheap wine and fine whisky, the evening fizzed with laughter and possibility. Which led to mischief.  We ate salads and humous, swapped stories about our home countries (South Africa, Canada, the UK, Malaysia), and were consumed by intensifying fits of the giggles.  Eventually, the little bedroom in which we were all crammed to eat was too small to contain our spirits and someone (there’s even a possibility it was me) suggested that we go play Frisbee.  In the dark.  And cold.  We grabbed our coats, the Frisbee and those magnificent, talismanic bottles of whisky and Bailey’s, and off we went.

Now, something about Oxford:  it has splendid sprawling parks and college grounds, but all of them are private and locked up like secrets at night.  Still learning the town, we want from likely spot to likely spot, only to find them closed for play.  Once we realized this was a pattern, we decided that high walls and locked gates were no deterrent and simply hopped over the wall of a particularly lovely looking playing field.  Unknown to us innocents, we had actually broken into the grounds of an extremely posh British public school.  Tradition.  Respectability.  Rules.  Groundskeepers.

But the dark grass underfoot was luxurious and tempting.  The field had a sense of depth and expansiveness.  Our strapping South African friend threw the Frisbee deep into the darkness of the field and we pursued it pell-mell.  There was little attempt actually to catch it – the fun was in just finding the damn thing.  We hollered.  We ran.  We had a blast.  I have one vivid flash photo of the night, with a friend from Malaysia laughing in the foreground, an English friend on the lawn, clutching the Bailey’s, and a South African friend hanging from the field’s goal posts.  I don’t think we were ever drunk (although my friends might correct me), but we didn’t need to be.

Then, right in the midst of a spectacular tackle to get the Frisbee, we heard another voice.  A very, very angry one.  It was the Groundskeeper!  Clearly he’d heard us, and he was coming for us, armed with a great advantage, a flashlight (and in my memory, a pitchfork, but I suspect I’m getting a bit carried away there).  We ran for our lives, visions of expulsion and disgrace in our heads.  One, two, three, four, five, six…we all just made it over the gate, and then raced away down the narrow English lanes, until, safe, we finally caught our breath.  We could haven’t felt naughtier if we’d broken into one of the local churches and started playing Bach on the organ, or stolen a punt and tried to head for London.  We were delighted with ourselves.

Our crazy Frisbee game took place sixteen years ago, and though I’ve lost touch with most of the people at the dinner party, I’m still friends with Alan, and have become friends with his beautiful and talented wife too.  I think, after all this time, they qualify as old friends.

Tonight is a night to remember old friends:  if New Year’s Eve isn’t enough to prompt you naturally, Robbie Burns calls us to it with Auld Lang Syne.  Old friends are perhaps one of the greatest delights of life.  My friends and I can reduce each other to tears of mirth in about ten minutes flat just by recalling our adventures (and misadventures) along life’s path.  Shared experiences are a big part of friends’ appeal, of course.  But I think old friends are special because they really know us.  One of the things that I found early on in this research project is that people find it incredibly uplifting to be known in a context of love and trust.  We love being teased for our foibles, admired for our strengths, and forgiven for our weaknesses.  As we get older and take on more official “roles”, especially the serious ones like parent or employee/employer, it feels like we’re increasingly required to highlight certain characteristics and minimize others.  The television show Modern Family touched on this last season when the mother, Claire, didn’t want to admit to her daughter that she’d occasionally been a “bad” girl in her youth.  But of course, her old friends would have known all about it and loved her for it.  They would know her full potential for caring and for mischief, and remind Claire of the same.

And, of course, it’s wonderful to know others.  We remember the times our friends have been especially witty, or scandalous, or looked glamorous, or been gentle and kind.  We remember the time they made an extravagant gesture with bottles of whisky and Bailey’s.  We know them to be extravagant, kind, spontaneous, playful, smart and more, not just because of what they said last night, but because of our deep history with them. We see the full person in them and love them for it.

So take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.  If you’re lucky, Alan’s brought the whisky.

“Celebrate Convenience” : Seriously?

I was out for a run early Sunday morning, savoring the quiet streets and letting my thoughts dwell on the pleasure of movement, the fun music I was listening to, and – above all – Advent and Christmas.  This is by far my favorite time of year.  I love the weak winter sun that shines through the bare trees, the early dark in the evenings and the comfort of the fire to get us through it, the anticipation of seeing or at least talking to family, my children’s Christmas performances, Christmas morning service…you get the picture.  Given that my husband is German, our family has the double enjoyment of keeping two Christmas traditions.  One of the German traditions I’ve come to love is lighting the Advent wreath.  Every Sunday afternoon in Advent, we gather at the table and light a new candle on the wreath, until, just before Christmas, all four blaze.  We eat the German Lebkucken and Stollen that my mother-in-law sends from Germany every year, and if the children aren’t too wriggly, we read a Christmas story they like, such as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Given that it was Sunday, I was thinking particularly about lighting the next Advent candle as I ran, both keenly looking forward to it and wondering if the children would fight over the cookies or if we’d pull the whole thing off calmly.  With my thoughts thus pleasantly occupied, I ran on to Broadview Street, whereupon I was stopped in my tracks by an advertisement hanging in the window of the Toronto Dominion Bank.  “This season, celebrate convenience!” the ad said brightly;  beneath these words, a relaxed woman beamed joy and contentment.

This was the most depressing rendering of the seasonal spirit that I had ever seen.  Poof went all my happy Christmas thoughts, replaced with something akin to outrage.

I took a deep breath and started running again, leaving the sign behind me.  As I jogged past the quiet shops with their merry window displays, I tried to figure out why “celebrate convenience” bothered me so much.  After all, convenience is sort of the TD bank’s “thing”, the way they distinguish their big-Canadian-bank-brand from all the other big Canadian banks.  And convenience is nice, no doubt about that.  It makes life easy and…convenient.

As I rounded towards home, it dawned on me that my irritation went beyond the fact that the ad trivialized and commercialized the season.  We’re all used to that.  Rather, my reaction centered on the bank’s use of the word “celebrate”.  Celebrate is a big word, an important word.  In my understanding of it, it doesn’t just mean “be mildly happy about”, it means marking something with rites and ceremonies, to praise it publicly, to honour it.  Celebrations are profound parts of human existence:  they tell us what matters to us personally and communally.  The philosopher Albert Borgmann has argued that to live human lives rich with depth and meaning, we need to understand celebration as “centered on some concrete thing…a joyful engagement with the physical presence and radiance of that thing”, be it a space, a gathering of people, an event, an Advent wreath, or some other thing that is powerful enough to collect us with its presence.  Celebration by its nature requires engagement.

Whereas…convenience?  Seriously?  If convenience matters to us in more than a fleeting way, we’re in pretty bad shape as a society.  Is this what really matters to us?  While you could try to make a case that convenience is important precisely because it frees us to focus on more important things than our banking, you just can’t get all the way to “celebrating” it.  Convenience doesn’t collect us together in an enriching common life, in fact, it arguably does the opposite.  It permits us to be passive, disengaged, focused on ease.  At a macro-level a culture that worships convenience can even be poison to feeling engaged and alive, because it facilitates consumption without connection that's emotionally and spiritually enriching.  Thus, in an important respect, convenience is antithetical to celebrating the Christmas season.  Christmas calls on us to be engaged, connected, mindful, generous and willing to work on things that matter.  It’s a time to feel alive to the world and its spiritual, moral and material possibilities.

Here’s another thing that happened over the weekend.  I was just a couple of blocks from home when one of my front tires gave out and the car lurched sickeningly to the right with a horrible crunch.  I coaxed the car into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store and got out to inspect the damage.  Flat as a pancake.  I don’t have a mobile phone, so I went into the store to ask if someone could help me call the Automobile Association.  Instead, the manager of the store came out to help me.  He took a good look at the tire, opened the trunk to confirm there was a spare, shooed me and my children inside where it was warm and changed the tire himself in fifteen minutes flat.  To thank him, I bought him a bottle of wine and a box of biscuits – small tokens of appreciation, not just for his help, but for the fact that he was willing to help in the first place.  Not only did his generosity delight me, it has delighted everyone I’ve told this story to.

Getting the flat tire was inconvenient – it scuppered our day’s plans.  But through that inconvenience, some delightful things happened.  A generous act.  A gift of thanks.  A story.  This is hardly a Christmas miracle the likes of the divine intervention of It’s a Wonderful Life, but it illustrates the potential of human kindness, which, as reflected in the season, is worth celebrating.  Let’s hold those things dear, and keep convenience in its place.

Practice Gratitude, Not Pepper Spray

She’d gone to bed fully prepared:  coffee maker programmed for 4:45, purse and coat neatly by the door, alarm set for 5:00.  She doubted that she’d need it, but it was always best to be sure.  After all, it would be a disaster if she slept in.  As she lay waiting to fall asleep, she ran through her plan one more time:  put the coffee in the coffee mug, drive to Walmart, line up.  Once she finally got inside, it would be first things first.  The Sony Xbox was the priority, then the memory cards, the Christmas decorations and the photo-quality printer paper.  Her heart fluttered in her chest.  She’d need to be fast if she was going to get her share before things ran out.  Or –she swallowed, mouth dry in the darkness – or if things got really desperate, she could use the pepper spray.  It was in her purse:  she’d carried it ever since that fright from the man in the parking lot in 2009.  She didn’t want to use it, but she needed the Xbox.  She deserved it.  She’d missed out last year because some rough man with a red face had pushed her out of the way, and she’d watched him triumphantly carry off the last one as she picked herself up off the floor.  She’d been lucky she hadn’t been trampled!  And the year before, she’d missed out on a flat screen TV when a whole family had surrounded the shelf, loading up on them and stopping anyone else from getting near.  She wasn’t stupid.  She wasn’t going to let that happen again.  This time she was ready for whatever came her way. OK.  The above is the stuff of Sunday-afternoon fantasy.  But how is one to make sense of the fact that an as-yet-unidentified woman pepper sprayed other shoppers at a Walmart in Los Angeles this week while trying to take advantage of the “Black Friday” sales?  It’s possible, I suppose, that she crowds simply made her panic, and she loosed the pepper spray to get some breathing room…and then just happened to use the opening to spirit away an Xbox.  But violence at the sales elsewhere in the States suggests that, though extreme, the pepper spray incident was part and parcel of an “anything it takes” attitude towards securing one’s deals.

For a self-confessed non-shopper of a Canadian who spent Friday working, driving my children back and forth to school and making tomato soup, the Black Friday mayhem is all a bit of a mystery.  After hearing about it on the news, I first wondered if the mob scenes were representative of a sort of odd collective effervescence, but, although people can be heard to be laughing in some of the video footage available online, they do not seem to be acting with a collective mind.  It’s actually kind of the opposite:  it’s highly individualist, with just a whole lot of people desperately trying to do their own thing, and to grab their own deal.

While I’m not proud of it, my first reaction was a sort of smug, “Tut, tut…look how greedy and foolish those people are.”  But if you look at the shoppers’ faces, they’re just ordinary people, not some caricature specimens of homo greedus.  They have a day off.  They want to prepare for Christmas.  It’s fun –usually - to participate in a shared event.  It feels fabulous to score a deal.

In fact, if you think about it, the shoppers are acting in a perfectly rational way considering the world in which we live.  It’s one in which an extraordinary amount of human creativity is devoted to fetishizing desire in the form of marketing.  In which wanting and buying are hailed as civic virtues.  In which shopping is billed as “fun”.  In which the over-riding message is that it’s what you have rather than what you do that makes life worth living.

The poignant thing for me, and I dare say many other observers, is that Black Friday is part of American Thanksgiving.  My perception of American Thanksgiving is that it’s the most widely-shared holiday, a time to gather, feast, perform family rituals…and yes, to give thanks.   Giving thanks for what you have seems far away from pepper spraying or trampling people to get more stuff, even if you intend to gift that stuff onwards.  This is not said in a spirit of sanctimoniousness;  it’s just an observation on the irony of it all.

After the euphoria of the deal…what next?  I suppose the delight of seeing a happy face as someone unwraps their X-box on Christmas morning, and knowing that you earned that delight through your Black Friday efforts.  But I can’t help wondering whether the pepper spray would be likelier to stay in the purse if we valorized gratitude to the same degree we did acquisition, and if we put our creativity and passion to use, not to whip up desire, but for thanks.

I was thinking how this could play out.  What if the Friday after Thanksgiving was used for a different kind of thanksgiving, where you thought of something in your life that made it special, and devoted your thanks to it?  It could be music.  It could be the beating heart in your child’s chest.  It could be your little garden.  It could be your library.  What if you gave thanks by giving that thing time and attention, or helped others to have something of the same?  What feelings would that create?  How long would that last?  How could you make it a gift?

The Young(ish) and the Restless

Is restlessness a theme of our age?  From Sydney to Stockholm, Toronto to London:  it seems that there are a whole lot of us wondering if we’re doing the right thing, or if we really ought to be doing something else to be happy and living a good life.  I’ve heard this theme from friends and colleagues in dozens of permutations:  the big-city parents who ponder moving to a smaller town so they can live at a saner pace;  the mid-career academics who are contemplating moves to the private sector because they’re frustrated with today’s university system; people in great corporate careers who yearn to start their own business or work for an NGO so their work has more meaning;  and deeply rooted families who still have an eye to the big move to New York or London for that big career jump.  I’ve got friends who have fully checked out the schooling system in Singapore, just in case; friends who’s filled out immigration forms for countries they’re not even sure about moving to;  and friends whose conversations revolve around, “What if?”, “What next?”.  Few seem truly settled on what we’re doing, or where we’re living;  rather, we think that if we just made the right move, we could find a life that has more meaning, or more success, or more happiness.  The objects of our envy aren’t necessarily those who richer or more famous:  they’re those who appear to be totally sure that they’re doing the right thing and living in the right place. Human restlessness isn’t anything new:  we’re relentless travelers and explorers and our deep history has been all about migration and adaptation.  We’ve moved from one thing or place to another because we’ve been forced to, because we’ve thought better opportunities lay elsewhere, because we’ve run from boredom, or because our spirit was simply called to it.  And restlessness, which one can think of as simply a nagging dissatisfaction with the status quo, is no doubt behind some of the great achievements in human history.  Asking ourselves, “What if?” can be the first step to experimentation and innovation.

But there’s another side to restlessness too, and I think this is what many of us live with today.  It seems best summed up as a lack of excitement and commitment to some of the key planks in our lives, like where we live and the work we do.  This is not to accuse us all of some feckless Generation X indifference:  quite the contrary, in fact.  I think that most of us passionately want to be gunning wholeheartedly for something, something that’s going to be good for us personally and good for the world.  But, and here’s the trouble, we’re beset with the nagging suspicion that we’re never really on it, that the road to personal and professional satisfaction lies in some choice that we’ve either overlooked or not yet found.

But is this a problem?  In our lives right here, right now, does restlessness get in the way of happiness and satisfaction, or is it the engine that drives us?

It's probably both, and I'm learning to make peace with that.  I think about the times I don’t feel restless, when, in fact, I feel it's opposite, contentment:  when I’m reading to my children, when I’m outside, stomping through fall leaves, when I’m deeply immersed work, when I’m engrossed in a conversation with friends or colleagues, when I’m cooking….   These moments make me feel alive and like each day counts, rather than just being a precursor for something else.  But I can live with the idea that I’ll also be restless…and that maybe we all need to be.  Not just because so many of us are spoiled for choice, but because it’s more important than ever to be asking ourselves, “What if?”

That Flame in the Darkness

There is what appears to be a large rat and a disembodied hand on our neighbour’s porch, and a disarticulated (how I love that word!) skeleton on ours.  I am writing this in full bat regalia.  Yes!  It’s Halloween. Whether you’ve got a soft spot for ghouls or not, Halloween has a whole bunch of elements in it that are all about switching-on.  I would have thought that Halloween is such uncontested fun that its merit would be self-evident, but news that some Ontario schools banned costumes from their premises today suggest that the day needs a little defending.  So here I am, riding in on my headless horse with just a few thoughts.

First, while we don’t think of Halloween as the most “traditional” of holidays, it comes with its own rituals.  Celebrating them is meaningful – especially if we pause for even just a moment to think about what Halloween means to us, personally, as families or even culturally.  For a night, we dare to mock death – and right at the outset of winter too.  And we give a nod of recognition, whether we believe it or not, to the forces out there in the world beyond our ken…which are sometimes close.

Second, being scared – especially when we know deep down that everything is OK - is fun. There is a reason that we gobble up Stephen King novels and go to horror movies and ride roller coasters.  There are probably all sorts of psychological reasons why this is true (and the infamous Capilano Suspension Bridge study explains one), but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that being scared makes us feel alive.

Third, Halloween subverts the normal social order of things:  whether it’s appearing to venerate the dark side, children getting to gorge on sweets, good people doing mischief, people dressing as animals or spirits or monsters or whatever, for this one night we say “to hell with the rules!”  Every culture needs these outlets:  they can unleash creativity, help to blow off steam and even remind us why the normal rules might not always be a bad idea in the first place.

Fourth, holidays like Halloween remind us that there’s a different, more ancient calendar that runs deep beneath our efficient, organized and Blackberry-ified lives.  This calendar created space for different kinds of thinking and practices in a way we don’t seem to now.  For example,  Halloween in part evolved from the pagan Samhain, the Gaelic festival that my ancestors no doubt celebrated with bonfires and God knows what shenanigans on the Scottish Highlands.  According to Wikipedia, one of the features of Samhain was that villagers would light a central bonfire, then extinguish all other fires.  Each family would then relight its hearth from this one central flame, bonding them together at the outset of the dark, cold winter.  Where now do we so solemnly mark our common needs and our interdependence?

So make a little room for Halloween, notwithstanding its commercialization and the anti-fun brigade that wants to ban costumes.  Light a fire.  Get ready for the dark.  It’s coming – but we’ll be ready, and we’ll be together.

Ten Reasons Adults Are Less Switched-On than Children – and How to Get Past Them

It’s a reasonable thing to shudder when one hears folk songs encouraging us to learn from children.  My children do things like giving themselves rug burns sliding down the stairs on their stomachs and trying to stick their fingers up my nose:  not behaviour I’m keen on emulating.  Nonetheless, when I was at the playground with my children last weekend, I couldn’t help noticing that all the children are seemed to be having a terrific time, while most of the adults sat huddled over their take-out coffee like disengaged lumps. Hmm.  If you’ve read the great book Influencer, you will have heard the value of looking for positive deviance, that is, studying the behaviours of those who seem to have managed to solve a problem that the rest of us are grappling with.  If we can nail what these successful people are doing that we’re not, then we can mimic that specific behaviour and hopefully solve the problem for ourselves too.  I don’t particularly romanticize childhood, but I think it’s reasonable to say that most kids are exquisitely alive, with enviable amounts of curiosity, energy and creativity.  Therefore, I sat down and came up with an ad hoc list of where we adults tend to go wrong, and where children’s positive deviances (deviations?) could set us on a different, more switched-on, path:

1. Adults confuse pleasure with fun.  Pleasure’s lovely (you’re not going to hear me disparage the pleasures of a hot bath or a Barolo), and children surely like it too (look at the rapture of a child eating a Häagn-Dazs bar), but fun both demands and gives more to us.  Children are more willing to commit to fun:  they’ll plan it, anticipate it, invent it…in an odd sort of way they work at it.  I think we can learn from their commitment.
2. Adults focus more on other peoples’ fun.  This seems to be an odd, and historically quite new, phenomenon.  The psychoanalyst and writer Martha Wolfenstein proclaimed the rise of a “fun morality” as early as the 1950s:  one of its features, she said, was that parents were supposed to make things fun for their children, and to demonstrate at every possible turn that life was enjoyable.  I think it’s actually pretty nice to foster fun for other people, but we have to find our own too.  If you’ve ever watched children negotiate the rules of an invented or make-believe game, you’ll notice that they’re skilled at figuring out what will work for everyone (probably because if not, tantrums ensue).  This seems to be a pretty smart strategy, certainly a lot better than perpetual self-sacrifice.
3. Adults stop moving.  Humans are meant to move, something we know from pretty much every scientific study ever conducted on the subject and from the feeling of well-being that it generates in our own bodies.  But there’s no doubt that adults just don’t move that much.  Children are a marvel to watch:  they move constantly.
4. Adults become suspicious of fun.  Too many adults view fun as something that’s going to distract them from more noble pursuits, like work or any one of the gazillions of ways we strive for self-improvement.  Unless we adults mess up our kids, children don’t strive for self-improvement per se, they just trust they’ll learn as they grow.  This means they take fun at face-value, and enthusiastically embrace it.
5. Adults eat the apple of self-consciousness.  Switching-on and having fun takes risks…we have to move out of our comfort zones and this means that we might look silly, or God forbid, incompetent.  Some children do fret about this, but most plunge into things with little worry about how things will “look”.  This gives them an enormous freedom to experiment and just be.
6. Adults think we need to have things to have fun.  OK, in our materialistic world, so do a shocking number of children, but they’re likelier to get over it faster.  It’s like the old line, “I gave my kid a $150 mega-present and all she wanted to do is play with the box.”  Children have an extraordinary capacity to invent and create with what they’ve got:  they don’t sit around constructing barriers between themselves and fun by saying, “Well, if I could afford skis and a chalet, I’d have a lot of fun skiing,” or “If I had a sports car, I’d have a blast.”  Not a bit of it.  They figure out how to have fun with what they’ve got because they have to.
7. Adults perceive ourselves to be too busy to have fun.  Sorry, but I think this time is another false barrier to fun and switching-on, and this comes from someone who gets what seventy hour workweeks are like.  Children definitely get more discreet playtime than we do, but the positive deviance isn’t in those divinely long stretches where they’re engaged in involved play:  it’s in the way that they find mini-pockets of fun or play throughout the day.  Kids can play getting ready to get out the door, putting their clothes away and brushing their teeth.  Of course, this is exactly the behaviour that drives many a well-meaning parent crazy, but the truth is that we could learn from their example.  Confession:  I’m terrible at this.  It doesn’t come naturally to me at all, as much because I don’t feel I have the “bandwidth” as much as the time.  And yet, that times that I’ve seized moments in the midst of routine have not only created uplifting joy – they’ve provided lasting memories.  For example, one of my favourite memories from when Mira was small is when – for some reason I now don’t recall – I decided I had to introduce her to Split Enz at 7:45 on a Thursday morning.  She and I danced to I See Red and Six Months in a Leaky Boat, among other terrific songs, until we were breathless.  She had no idea why we’d varied our routine, and truth to tell, neither had I.  But those fifteen minutes of fun were exquisite and memorable.
8. We don’t explore enough.  Most adults like capital “E” exploring, like visiting new cities or checking out open houses and such, but we’re not so great at small “e” exploring, such as looking for interesting things in our own backyards, neighbourhoods and other familiar spots like local libraries.  Unless we’re committed fantasy readers, we also don’t really think about exploring different “realms”, from Middle Earth to ancient Greece to Hogwarts.  But children love exploring both intimately familiar and wildly imaginative new realms, and watching them, one sees how it fires their imagination.
9. We don’t play enough.  Kids are great at play:  adults are frankly terrible at it.  But organizations like the National Institute for Play, the Institute of Play and The Strong Institute for the study and exploration of play are doing cutting-edge research and on-the-ground work that indicates that adults need play just as much as children do, and for all the same reasons:  it facilitates learning and creativity; it literally seems to keep the brain flexible and adaptive; it helps to build social bonds and so on.  Play is also (usually) a big source of fun.
10. We don’t go outside enough.  Children are naturally drawn to being outside, and most schools or parents still make children go outside every day, or at least close to it.  Barring the occasional tears when it’s just too hot/cold/waspy, children inevitably come in with shining eyes, flushed cheeks and a happier, more focused energy.  Adults, on the other hand, can easily have whole weeks when we’re only outside walking from house to car.  That’s pretty say.  Go outside:  switch-on.

Accept Gifts

Every long weekend is good, and spectacular weather is great, but the two put together are a gift. We just celebrated Thanksgiving here in Canada.  Those of us lucky enough to live in Toronto had three days of brilliant sunshine and highs of 25˚ Celsius.  On the holiday Monday, my family and I took one of the tiny ferries to Ward Island in Lake Ontario.  The Toronto Islands are only a ten minute ride from downtown Toronto, but they feel a world apart.  There are paths all along the water, playgrounds, playing fields, picnic sites and parks.  Moored yachts glow in anticipation of future sails.  There are virtually no cars allowed on the islands, so we ambled contentedly in a Venice-like quiet, half-dazed by the good fortune of warm weather, time and such a lovely place to enjoy them both.  Strangers smiled at us and we smiled back.

We ate a picnic on the boardwalk, "feasting" (Jamie's word) on walnuts and new season Macintosh apples.  Then we went to the beach itself, where brave hearts were actually swimming.  In October!  We rolled up our trousers and waded in.  We collected rocks for Jamie’s growing collection.  We did a terrible job of trying to teach our Mira how to long- jump in the sand, laughing at our own ineptitude and relishing what would undoubtedly be the last feel of warm sand under our feet for the season.

The day was a gift and I was grateful for it.  This gratitude would no doubt win the approval of a growing coterie of thinkers and writers who tell us that we ought to “practice gratitude” as part of creating a happy and meaningful life.  (In the not so very distant past, of course, this practice was more or less built into culture through organized religion and community rituals, like Thanksgiving itself.  Now, it seems, we’re left to our own devices to figure it out.)  And yet, while these writers’ hearts might be in the right place, in fact I think much of the writing about gratitude is banal.  It conceptualizes gratitude as a sort of generalized thankfulness for stuff and fails to spell out what it actually demands of us.

But gratitude does demand something of us, and it’s in meeting those demands that its power to uplift and create meaning is fulfilled.

First, gratitude asks that we see the special – even sacred - moments of existence as gifts, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly discuss in All Things Shining.  In other words, our extra day, warm weather, and access to the Toronto Islands weren’t just nice little bonuses, they were specific gifts for which to be grateful.  Sure they were products of calendars, meteorological phenomena and public policy, but they added up to something rare and special, and they created a memory for us to keep.

Gratitude also demands that we recognize and accept gifts when they come to us.  After all, we perceive a person who overlooks a gift we give them, or who returns it for something else as at least a little ungrateful.  Friends made comic hay out of this with Ross’s devastation upon learning (at Thanksgiving no less) that Rachel has exchanged a gift he gave her for store credit, leading to this exchange:

Rachel: Ross, could you pass me the yams? Ross: Sure. Oh, and Joey's got the mashed potatoes if you want to exchange them.

Rachel’s behaviour is so funny because we all get how obnoxious it is to give a gift and have someone not appreciate it.  But how many times do we overlook subtle gifts that present themselves?  The sunny day, the storm of autumn leaves fluttering down, the found hour to read, the cake that’s risen perfectly, the person who lets you in when traffic is heavy, the good sleep, the perfect cup of coffee, the written letter from a friend:  do we accept these as gifts, or barely note them in passing?  Theoretically, recognizing and accepting gifts would ask that we all slow down a bit, but that’s not exactly realistic for me, and I doubt it is for anyone else out there.  But we all can cultivate a kind of attentiveness and readiness to action that means that we accept them when they come.

And here’s a thornier part of gratitude:  gratitude implies that we are grateful to someone or something.  Gifts come from somewhere.  So where does one direct that gratitude?  When someone writes you a letter, it’s straightforward:  you direct gratitude at the sender.  However, when the gift is a sunny day, it gets a bit trickier.  Some will say they direct their gratitude to “the universe”, but I frankly have no way of conceptualizing the universe that makes it realistic for me to thank it for a warm autumn day.  Those of us who have a system of faith have a readymade answer:  God, or perhaps the gods.  But if you do not have faith in a divinity that gives gifts, it may be enough simply to acknowledge that a gift has come from somewhere.  Conceding, even celebrating, that there might be an agent of origin outside of ourselves, even if it simply lies in the nature of the thing itself, deepens our relationship with the gift.  We are blessed, not just lucky.

And this is ultimately the point.  People give gifts for three reasons:  to establish and deepen relationships, to create webs of obligation and to mark occasions.  It’s through these dimensions, not just “feeling grateful”, that our gratitude for the gifts we receive adds meaning and fulfilment to our lives.  Gratitude helps us to deepen our relationship to the giver and even to the gift itself, to feel a sense of obligation in return for receiving the gift, and to recognize and mark a special moment in time that stands out from the rush of everyday life.

So accept gifts.  See them when they’re offered, enjoy them, celebrate their nature and their role in your life, and think about what they bind you to.

In Praise of My Cocktail Shaker (Part Two)

Do the things around you shape your life?  Switch you on?  Make you you? My little cocktail shaker is silver-plated, and was probably once quite elegant.  I suspect it’s from the 1920s or 30s.  It’s been knocked about over the years:  the silver is worn off in places, it has a couple of hefty dents and it’s rather wobbly.  Whenever I make a Martini or Gimlet, and my hands trace the dents on the side of the shaker, I can’t help wondering how it acquired them.  It might have been something utterly prosaic, like getting dropped when someone was moving house.  But, knowing my family’s history, it’s just as possible it slipped out of shaky hands at some dramatic moment.  Perhaps when my twenty-one year old grandmother announced to her parents that she was leaving my grandfather, despite the scandal it would cause; or in 1939, when, while they were supposedly safe in Singapore, they heard that the UK was once again at war with Germany; or when my great-grandparents, grandmother and mother, who happened to be in Canada in early 1942 to settle my great-grandparents into their retirement, heard that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese.  Or, despite the fact she rarely drank, perhaps my grandmother dropped it in relief when she heard that her new love, my adoptive grandfather, had survived the fall of Singapore, though now was a prisoner in the infamous Changi camp.  Of course it’s even nicer to imagine that it was used at happier moments: like when my family was reunited after the war, or when my mother was admitted to university at sixteen, or perhaps even when one of the grandchildren, maybe even yours truly, was born.

Every time I use it, this past, real or imagined is with me.  Of course, so is my own past use of it.  One snowy day right before Christmas, after dragging home our Christmas tree, we made martinis with friends to toast the season and their forthcoming wedding.  I made myself a martini shortly after my daughter was born, relishing my first taste of gin in months and marvelling how my life had change.  And, just the other night, I made myself that little Gimlet, and paused to write about importance of taking a moment simply to live.

We live in an era that asks us to look inward to explain who we are.  It seems that every day brings some new book on how genetics or the wiring in our brain shapes us.  But my cocktail shaker stands as a (dented) rebuke to such thinking, and makes a silent argument that we should also look outward to see who we are.  The things that surround us tell a story about what we think is important and how we want to live, and they invite towards – or distance us from – certain ways of living.  In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton writes that our buildings and possessions “tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants.  While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people.  They speak of visions of happiness.”

But this is more than a question of aesthetics and design.  The archaeologist Michael Shanks says that time doesn’t flow, it percolates all around us in a way that is visible – should we care to see it – in our cultural, natural and geological landscapes.  My cocktail shaker is one little bubble from the past, one that carries with it a connection to my family and their stories.  Whenever I use it, it invites me to connect with that past, however fleetingly, just as it invites me to pause and live in the moment.  It also stands a reminder that there will always be some things worth keeping, nurturing and using.

The things we have represent who we are, and they also influence our behaviour, thoughts and actions.  They do this through their beauty (or lack thereof), history and the connections to people, places and times that they extend to us.  Given that we live in a culture of globalized commerce, commodification, forced obsolescence and disposability, it’s worth asking ourselves what “we” the things around us foster.  Personally, I want a life in which people and things are not interchangeable or disposable, in which there are moments that we slow down and connect, and in which there’s fun and positive energy.  My dented little cocktail shaker sums that all up very nicely.

Is the Wrong Kind of Fun Making You Fat?

A terrific and provocative piece in the New York Times yesterday:  food columnist Mark Bittman demolished the sacred cow that junk food is cheaper than healthy food, a belief that is often invoked to explain why so many Americans eat it and thus are fat.  First he shows that reasonably economical home-cooking is cheaper than even McDonalds.  Next he demonstrates that home-cooked meals can be as or more calorie dense than fast food, even presuming that is what one is seeking in a world where we consume too many calories.  Third, while he acknowledges that there are “food deserts” in low-income neighbourhoods, he suggests that 93% of low-income dwellers therein have at least access to a vehicle, so could get to a supermarket to buy food.  Finally, he even takes apart the idea that we don’t have time to cook, stating that the average American watches 90 minutes of television a day, regardless of their income, some of which could easily be redirected towards cooking. Bittman suggests that the real barrier to cooking healthy food at home is that we perceive it as work, and that, by comparison, fast food is “a pleasure and a crutch”.   There is a physical pleasure to fast food, one which scientists and critics have warned is quite literally addictive, but there is also the fact that fast-food companies have created and attached a “carnival” of pleasure to their food by making it ubiquitous, instantaneous, mobile and playful.  In other words, fast-food is perfect expression of our technological age, all wrapped up in a big bow of accessibility and fun.

Bittman argues that “real cultural changes are needed to turn this around”, but that the “smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.”  The tricky bit is how.  Bittman says that we need political change, but the rest lies with us.  We should “cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.”

Those of us who cook do tend to find it fun:  no doubt that’s part of the reason we do it.  But it’s worth asking if there are ways that we can increase the fun, not only for our own pleasure, but to be the kind of models for which Bittman is calling.  It’s not just about competing with fast-food, it’s about celebrating a core part of our existence.  Ironically, given that we consume our food, cooking and eating are modes of engagement that can lie outside of the ruthless production/consumption model that characterizes so much of the rest of our lives.  Cooking and eating are about creativity, connection to the natural world, experimentation, bonding with other people, thanksgiving and pure sensual delight.  And frankly, I’ve never been one to think that it only “counts” if you’re eating with others.  When I lived alone, I was always very happy cooking for myself, investigating new ingredients, trying new things, filling my apartment with good smells and actually enjoying the fact that I was taking care of myself.

So what are the ways that we can reengage with the joy of cooking?  Here are five ideas:

1. Embrace the sensuality of cooking.  Come on, this is good.  Really look at the deep purple skins of eggplant, the rich coral of salmon, or the pink piping on borlotti beans.  Inhale the scents of turmeric, lime, wild mushrooms or melting chocolate.  Feel the springy resilience of kale, the slipperiness of fresh scallops, the soft flesh of a peach.  You get the picture, but if you need inspiration, watch Like Water for Chocolate or Babette’s Feast.
2. Screw being a master chef.  Cooking is one of those things that some people invest a lot of time in, not just because they like it, but because it becomes part of their identity.  Notwithstanding Iron Chef or whatever the show is, cooking is not a competitive sport.  It’s life.  Embrace peasant food.  Embrace the possibility of the failure that can come with experimentation (my personal nadir was artichoke soup that cost a fortune, took hours, and was basically unsalvageable despite buckets of wine and cream.  My favourite memory of that though, is my dear friend Lori still insisting it was good.  I love her still for that).  Embrace being really great at a couple of things, and having fun with a whole lot more.
3. Have rituals.  I know, eventually an anthropologist was going to talk about rituals, but rituals are a way of marking special time, and transforming routine into something more profound.  They’re deeply human.  Rituals of thanksgiving, be they grace, or having each person at the table say something to honour the food, remind us of what our food connects us too.  But even the simple ritual of lighting candles at the start of the meal makes the time special.
4. Play.  No, this doesn’t mean playing with your food.  This means experimenting with new ingredients or cuisines, making wacky substitutions if so inclined, lovingly following your favourite cookbook authors (I have a thing for both Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater), collecting period cookbooks…whatever works for you.  And it means using the sacred time and space of the table to engage playfully with others.  Laurie David has some great ideas in The Family Dinner and it’s also worth asking your parents and grandparents what traditions they might have had that you can try again.
5. Mix things up.  There is little in life as fun as establishing rules and then breaking them.  Look at the perennial fun of Mardi Gras or cross-dressing!  Figure out which cooking and table “rules” you need to maintain, and which you might enjoy breaking now and then.  Eat dessert first.  Pick one favourite ingredient and base an entire menu around it (I wouldn’t suggest goose though, at least, it didn’t work out so well for me).  Eat breakfast for dinner.  Have everyone come to the table in their pyjamas, or evening clothes, or in costume.  I do believe that one should always be respectful of one’s food, but beyond that, it’s fun to play self-consciously with the rules that govern all the “should” and “oughts” of our existence.

These are but a few ideas, based on what we know generates fun and pleasure.  Let’s do it.  Let’s reinvent the joy of cooking.  We’ll all be happier, healthier and skinnier as a result.

In Praise of My Cocktail Shaker, or “What Would Noël Coward do?” (Part One)

The proverbial cocktail hour draws nearer, and I find my thoughts turning with affection to my cocktail shaker.  Tonight:  a Gimlet.  There are two good reasons for this choice.   The first is that we are somehow out of vermouth (an alarming situation that I think is the result of my newfound devotion to using it in cooking), which means that a Martini is out of the question.  The second is that there is just something inherently fun about Gimlets.  The name is irresistible for a start:  say it out loud and see if it doesn’t make you smile.  They are also fun to make.  I will get out my battered but beloved cocktail shaker, uncork the gin (I have a thing for Hendricks at the moment, thus the cork), pour in a trace of Rose’s Lime Cordial, crack the ice cube tray and shake, shake, shake, all the while feeling the cocktail shaker grow almost unbearably cold in my hands.  My children find the process hilarious:  I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps there’s a sort of theatre to it, or perhaps I just look a bit silly manhandling the shaker until it’s done its work.  Whatever the case at the end of it all, voila!  The Gimlet.  A pale green, silvery sweet-sharp delicious little delight to ease in the dinner hour.

It’s actually fascinating that there is so much fun to be had making things, in this case a before dinner drink, yet in our convenience culture, we habitually value not having to make things.  Having things ready-made suggests a freedom to enjoy the thing itself independent of any burdensome process of creation, and also being free to move on to the next “thing” more quickly, whatever that may be.  And, of course, sometimes convenience feels like necessity:  it’s hard to get excited about creating dinner - let alone cocktails - when one walks in the door at 6:30 and has to conjure dinner out of thin air for a hungry family, help with homework, manoeuvre kids up to the bath, etc..  This is of course what legions of marketers tell us daily:  why waste our precious time cooking, when they can so solicitously provide for us, leaving us free to…well, what exactly?  The original promise of technology suggested that labour-saving devices (which we’ll extend to convenience food and drinks here) would free up time so time for mind and soul-enriching leisure;  the reality though, is that most of us use all that extra time to work, or rather, we have to work, so we’re grateful that all those labour-saving devices help us keep it all going.  The problem though, is that in practice, it all adds up to less fun rather than more, because fun is in the process, not simply the endpoint.

But back to the humble Gimlet.  It takes less than five minutes to make;  not so long really, but I wonder if the true effort involved here isn’t really the time, but rather the mental discipline to step out of my get-dinner-on-the-table-for-the-kids mode.  That takes a sometimes Herculean act of will, a sense that life is right now and is about fun as much as it is rolling efficiently through my routine.  But if I let myself ask, “What would Noël Coward do?”, then I’m cheerfully liberated to take the shaker down off the shelf.

This actually isn’t a facetious comment.  It’s not just that Coward always made time for cocktails (although I suspect maybe he did), it’s that he stands for a life in which someone can be staggeringly productive and involved with serious real-world issues, in his case the British war effort, and still live with an apparent lightness and pleasure.  It’s the epitome of a switched-on life.  You have fun living, rather than pushing some idea of fun into the corners of life, something to be got to when all the daily demands are done.  In the process, you actually wind up more engaged, creative and alive.

Now this is the point where I should tell you my recipe for Gimlets, but the reality is that I’m such a drink dilettante, I don’t even have one.  So here’s what I do:  load the cocktail shaker up with ice, pour in the teensiest splash of Rose’s Lime Cordial, pour in a rather heftier measure of gin, shake for dear life.  I drink mine out of teeny little martini glasses, of which more in Part Two.  Evidently, one can also make Gimlets with real lime juice and a bit of syrup, which I’m sure would also be tasty.  Some recipes call for an appalling amount of lime cordial.  This might work if you like sweet drinks, but alas not for my alarming palate.

Take five minutes to let a bit of lime in your life:  once, so the legend goes, they used it ward off scurvy;  let’s use it now to switch-on.

10 Reasons to Love Farmer's Markets

Delighted to say that I’m doing another guest blog today on Laurie David and Kirstin Uhrenholdt’s site The Family Dinner.  I hope you come over to read it, and I hope you find yourself enjoying a fresh peach or apple at a farmers' market near you soon!

Big Weather

Who doesn’t feel a frisson of excitement and aliveness when a great clap of thunder cracks right overhead? An incredible storm struck Georgian Bay just hours before we were supposed to leave the cottage.  It started with the low rumble of distant thunder and an ominous mass of cloud in the west.  Still, I watched the clouds bank without concern:  they were far enough away that I figured I still had plenty of time to pack and go for a swim before anything happened.  Then I went outside to shake sand out of a towel and my jaw dropped when I saw the tower of black clouds right overhead, and stretching as far into the south as I could see.  So much for an early departure:  the storm had its own agenda.

I scurried inside and shut the south-facing windows.  As I did so, the mass of clouds passed in front of the sun and in seconds it was so dark it might as well have been night time.  There was a gentle growl from the heavens, and then BOOM, thunder cracked so loudly it made the house shake.  We happily gave in to the storm, pulling the heavy dining table chairs over to windows to get a front row seat as the storm rolled through the small bay.  Next the rain let loose, and the horizon disappeared into a blur of grey lake and sky.  The rain fell so heavily that it bounced off the water, creating a sense that the lake itself was alive.

This was no one hit wonder:  cell after cell rolled over us.  Finally, there was a bit of a break in the thunder, and I realized that if I had any chance of a swim, this was it.  I looked at the sky;  I looked at the lake.  I wanted that lake like you wouldn’t believe:  the last swim of summer!  But I didn’t fancy getting electrocuted.  Not a good example of smart-thinking to leave behind for my children, plus…I’d be dead.   I hurriedly got into my bathing suit, then stepped outside into the still pouring rain and tried to hear if there was hint of thunder.  I didn’t hear anything, but then it was hard to hear anything over the rain.

Had to chance it.  Heart racing, I made my way over the wet rock and down to the beach.  I thought the water might feel warm compared to the cold rain, but not a chance:  it was freezing.  I started laughing to myself.  It was so great!  I dove in and sliced through the cold water, feeling totally alive.  I came up, exhilarated, and was peppered by rain.  I felt like I could stay in forever, but knew that I ought to get out before the next cell hit in earnest.  Rolling over in the water, I figured I’d swim to the dock, which was a decent, but not self-indulgent, distance.

I was halfway there when I heard thunder again.  It sounded pretty far away, but it was clearly not the time to be in the water after all.  I’d come too far to go back, so swam on as fast as I could.  I reached the ladder safely, inhaled the smell of the wet cedar, and hauled myself out with no small amount of regret.

Watching the storm, and even briefly tasting it with my rainy swim, made me feel totally alive.  An hour later, when the sun was out and the only remains of the storm were a few puddles in the smooth rocks, it felt like the whole thing had been a dream, yet that current of excitement and life lasted in me for hours.

Afterwards, I was thinking why storms are such an assured way of creating this feeling.  After all, they can be a complete pain too.  I’ve been snowed into places and snowed out of places;  I’ve had umpteen flights cancelled or delayed leaving me longing for home while stuck on tarmacs, in lounges or in crummy airport hotels;  I’ve had terrifying drives where visibility was so bad I could only follow the taillights of the person in front of me and hope for the best; I’ve lost power for hours and sweltered in awful heat; and, when I was General Manager for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton, we even had to cancel a show due to a tornado!  And of course these really just amount to inconveniences:  storms can be truly devastating and even fatal, as we’ve seen so brutally around the globe in the last several years and even just this week.

And yet the storms themselves are exciting.  The mindset most of us live with is framed by a technological paradigm in which we expect to predict and control most of the things that happen to us:  if I flick this switch, I will get electric light; if I take this pill, my blood cholesterol will be lowered; if I press these buttons, my food will be hot.  Storms unsettle all that certainty.  We can see them coming, even predict their routes, but other than that, there’s not much we can do about them save run away or ride them out.  We are dramatically, even violently, reminded that prediction and control take us only so far.  And it’s thrilling to see the power on the other side of it.

In fact, it’s more than thrilling:  it might just be a key to happiness.  In his wonderful and witty book Stumbling Upon Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that our feelings about uncertainty are paradoxical:  “Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it.  In fact, the opposite is generally the case.  [In two separate studies], students chose certainty and clarity over mystery – despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness.”  In this case, Gilbert is referring specifically to our craving for explanations.  However, I think it’s reasonable to speculate that we also crave a degree of uncertainty in the flow of daily life, some variation or possibility of the extraordinary that lies utterly beyond our control.  This quality of uncertainty is usually painfully dulled by the reality of, as Albert Borgmann puts it, the character of technology in contemporary life, but storms briefly and beautifully illuminate it.

At the same time, storms also make us feel a part of nature, wherever we are, and whether we want to or not.  They are city/country agnostic, roaring in with the elements with equal ferocity whether we’re in Georgian Bay or downtown Toronto, or as we’ve seen this week, even Manhattan.  At the same time, they’re absolutely specific to the place and season:  a monsoonal storm in Bangkok is a distinct event that grounds you there, in that season, just as a blizzard is a core part of the Canadian winter experience.  We might do our best to create cities and interiors that replicate sameness, but the weather grounds us – sometimes forcefully - in season, time and place.