A Good Honest Shuffle

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom , Nelson Mandela wrote, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” Walking around Laurier’s campus as a full-blown adult was more than a little surreal. Finding a parking spot was certainly more challenging than when I attended in the mid-‘90s, but as soon as I entered the doors, it was like a younger version of myself was the one meandering the halls. Across the tiled floors, past the solarium, down the stairs and into the concourse. The Williams I would frequent was now a Starbucks, and there were laptops open on just about every table—non-existent in my university days—but the vibe was very much the same and I felt simultaneously at home and in another world. When I arrived at the student services office, I took a number and dropped myself into a chair to wait. My name was called and I stepped up to the desk where a young woman who couldn’t have been much more tha...

I have a recurring dream where I show up for a wedding, only to discover that I was supposed to be officiating the ceremony. The problem is, I haven’t prepared, not a word of it, and the rest of the dream is me scrambling unsuccessfully to scrape something together at the last minute… -  -  -  -  - One of the many things I’ve learned in my work with First Nations communities in western Canada is that even though the content of our personal development experience is the same every month, each new group of participants comes together to create a unique experience for everyone involved. Last week was no exception—especially Thursday night. 5:00pm Our afternoon session had just wrapped up when I overheard someone say that a couple of the participants wanted to get married.  Well that’s a first.  John and Alexia had been engaged for some time, and earlier in the day, Alexia mentioned to a friend that she wanted to have her wedding right there at Ness Lake. “But ...

Tonight, our youngest child will walk across a stage and receive his high school diploma, entering a new season of life for himself while simultaneously bringing to an end yet another season of life for his apparently aging parents. Neither of these is officially true, as despite having checked off the requirements for graduation, Jude will be returning to high school, like his sister before him, for a “victory lap” next fall. But the fact that his exit from this stage of life may not be official doesn’t take away from the significance of tonight’s ceremony for either our son or his parents. I’ve been thinking about the word ‘commencement,’ which, according to the tickets tucked in an envelope by our front door, is what this ceremony is called. The word means a start, or a beginning, and I suppose that makes sense as the graduates are being symbolically launched into a new stage of their lives. But then again, I’m not sure you can ever pinpoint a beginning with that kind of accuracy. ...

I have no illusions that the photo is going to take home any awards—even an amateur photographer like myself knows I can do better than this. Heck, a four year old with an iPhone could do better. But it’s the photo I took, and while the truth is that I’m tempted to drive around the corner and redeem myself with a Pulitzer-worthy shot, there’s actually something about the photo’s completely uninteresting composition that captures the heart of what compelled me to pull over in the misty rain on my way home from the gym this afternoon. I first heard about the plans for this property a few years ago when a rumour started swirling that the long-standing church located on a corner lot at a busy intersection in our neighbourhood would be torn down and replaced by stacked townhouses. The plan was for a new church/community centre to be constructed on the opposite end of the property. It’s no secret that Canadian churches are struggling to stay open—that story has been told time and time again—...

We’re selling ourselves short. That's what I’ve been reflecting on as we wade deeper into the waters of this year’s holiday season. Or maybe “deeper into the snow” would be more appropriate given the time of year, at least here in the frigid northern region I call home. But whether it’s water or it’s snow that we’re wading into, in the days to come, many of us will be entering familiar territory that has the potential to be something other than familiar if we only give it a chance. “I’m not sure what to say, except it’s Christmas and we’re all in misery.”  That’s how the character of Ellen Griswold responds to her teenage daughter who is aghast at the expectation that she would share a bed with her little brother to make room for the extended family who are visiting over the holidays. It’s a line from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation , which is either a movie you’ve never seen (which begs a whole other set of questions that we can unpack another time) or a movie you watch ever...

There are two ways I could tell this story. The first would be to wait a little while longer until I have some more clarity around how this narrative will actually unfold. This is my preferred way of sharing anything personal: wait until things have worked themselves out, and only then drill down into my experiences for whatever I think might be helpful (or at least mildly entertaining) to others. Lessons learned, victories won, tales to be told. I’m not alone in this. Most of us prefer to tell our stories from the end backwards. In the middle, things are too messy and too uncertain and, well, too raw. I had a conversation once with a friend who was in the midst of an unspeakably challenging season, and we wondered together what it would be like for him to tell his story right there in the middle of it—right there where he wasn’t even sure he would make it out alive.  And so the second way I could tell this story of mine is to do just that, to tell it from the middle, which is wher...

From a bit of a distance, I can see the leaves on the highest branches of the Autumn Blaze Maple in our backyard catching fire as they stretch upward into the cool, early fall sky here in Southern Ontario. Sitting indoors, though, in the comfortable spot where I spend the early moments of my day in quiet reflection, I can only see a third of the tree at most, and only a solitary branch of red against the backdrop shades of green. But even a third of something beautiful is enough to inspire someone who happens to be paying attention, and so, one day last summer, I snapped a quick photo from this same vantage point when our tree was still in the fullness of its summer glory. When we moved into our current home seventeen years ago, there was a small and rather unimpressive Ivory Silk Lilac in the back corner of the yard, but nothing else to provide our growing young family with any kind of shade. This made for plenty of hot summer days in the backyard with no relief from the heat and humi...

And just like that, it was gone. The silver, 7-seater 2008 Grand Caravan that had been parked in our driveway and part of our family for the past decade slowly backed out onto the street, shifted gears, and drove away to live out the twilight of its life registered under the name of a grateful new owner. No comforting hugs or firm handshakes. No floral arrangements delivered courtesy of long-lost friends and distant family members. No eulogies or photo boards or virtual guest books. All that remained was a Kijiji ad that would be taken down within the hour and an insurance policy that would be amended with neither pomp nor ceremony. A couple of weeks ago, when the first of many potential buyers was on the way to take a look at our minivan, I grabbed a container of all-purpose wipes and the old vacuum we keep in the garage for cleaning vehicles and I got to work. I started by taking out the winter floor mats that I never bother removing thanks to the amount of dirt that accumulates over...

We stopped for lunch at the Athabasca Glacier, our food spread out on the tailgate of a pickup alongside Highway 93, right in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. On the crest of the range, the imposing and yet rapidly disappearing remnant of a previous ice age spreads out across the sky, a stark reminder of how small and finite we humans really are, but also of how even these comparatively frail frames of ours can have a disproportionate effect on the environment in which we live and move and have our being. When we pulled into the parking lot, we were greeted by zero degree temperatures and six-foot high snowbanks, both of which seemed strangely out of place given the mild weather and complete lack of snow in Calgary, where this road trip of ours began. In fact, though, it would be more accurate to say that this road trip began several years ago, when my longtime friend and mentor, Tom, first encouraged me to come and see what he was up to. There was a stretch of more than a decade whe...

Everything around me is different. The tall, coniferous trees at the edge of the conservation area marking the western boundary of our rental property belie the truth that I am nowhere near home. At a glance, they could pass for a species native to Ontario, which is the first thing my son pointed out when he saw them towering over the yard. Their slender, skyward-stretching trunks mimic the palm trees that thrive here in Central Florida, but instead of the iconic spreading leaves that show up on most every postcard sent from this sunkissed state, the branches on these trees are covered in unusually long needles with small pockets of seed cones mostly hidden from sight. There’s a small lawn sprawled out between the house and the trees, but again, it only looks like the kind of lawns that I’ve walked barefoot across since I took my first steps. In truth, the turf here is thick and coarse and crunches underfoot, more straw than grass. In a cardboard box in my parents’ home, there’s a ph...