Author Archives: ij

Out With The Old, In With The New

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I’ve eaten too many chocolates this Christmas. And too many chips and cookies and crap. And like many others, on January 1st, 2010, I’m going to resolve to myself to stop consuming so much and lose a few pounds, especially before my annual trip to the spa the first weekend in February. I can’t possibly lie on the massage table looking like this.

I always tell myself that I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions. That’s because I pretty much never stick to them. Does anyone? I mean, the intentions are earnest, but the flesh is weak. Why do we put ourselves through the torture of yet another disappointment?

People don’t only resolve to lose weight, they resolve all kinds of things in the New Year. And I often benefit from it, for instance, because people often decide to learn something new, and some of them end up coming to me to learn guitar. January is always a busy month, almost as busy as September when people go back to school and back to work. Thank goodness, because Christmas often leaves me scraping the bottom of the bank account barrel. The flurry of new students starts to dwindle by the end of January, though, as they start to face the reality of learning an instrument. I can tell pretty quickly if they’re going to stick to it; learning anything takes a little practice. It doesn’t have to be a lot of practice, but some people start coming in every week to tell me they haven’t practiced at all.

I always tell them that practicing guitar is like flossing teeth. It’s not easy to get into the habit, but it doesn’t take a lot of time and the benefits are great. But even that little bit of time every day or even every two days, becomes overwhelming for some, and they start to feel guilty or embarrassed at their lack of commitment. Many of them, instead of saying that they just don’t like it, end up politely coming up with other reasons for quitting. And I just have to say “It’s okay, it’s not your thing, no hard feelings!”

When we resolve to learn something new, it’s always with the right intention, just as with resolving to lose weight or go to the gym regularly. The follow-through is the real challenge. We have lots of enthusiasm in the beginning; it’s fresh, new, and we feel good about ourselves for doing it. The good intention waxes, and then it wanes. And sometimes we find out that what we thought might be a good idea is not really our thing.

Which is why I always tell a new student to rent a guitar for a month instead of buying one, and to commit to a month’s worth of lessons. Then at the end of that, they can decide if they want to continue. As far as I’m concerned, if they’re not getting any pleasure out of playing, it’s not worth the money!

Maybe that’s the same attitude we should take with our other New Year’s resolutions. Try it out for a month and see how we do, and give ourselves permission to let go if it’s not our thing. It doesn’t mean we have to give up any hope of learning something new or losing weight or getting in shape; it just means that what we have chosen may not be the right fit. So for the month of January, I’m going to commit to eating healthier and getting more exercise.  Are you with me?

We’ll see how it goes 🙂

IJ

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The Real Joy of Christmas

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One of my favourite events of the year is the annual Christmas Drive-Thru that CHEK Television and a number of local sponsors put on every year to raise money and donate clothes and toys and food to the Salvation Army.

The last two years it’s been a live broadcast from a local hotel during the news hour. Instead of commercials, the news cuts to the hotel, where CHEK staff and other volunteers happily unload all kinds of donations from people’s cars, while the Salvation Army band plays Christmas carols. My job has been the same over the past 16 years or so; I direct traffic.

I love directing traffic. I’m usually not where the real hubbub is, I’m out of the shot of the cameras and the “celebrity” staff and the unloading. But I get to see the look on driver’s faces as they are approaching the main event. I direct them with a happy smile and wave them through, and they usually have big grins on their faces, looking forward to giving their donations and maybe catching the eye of one of our better known on-air personalities.

Sometimes they look a little confused because they are not sure which way to drive through, so I make sure they know where they are going. There have been a few incidences over the years when people did some pretty wacky turns or ended up on a curb in their confusion. Sometimes as they are approaching from a block or so away they start to slow down, so I enthusiastically wave them over until I see them speed up, a little more confident that they’ve come to the right place.

I try to catch them on the way out too, and thank them and wish them Merry Christmas. It’s the best job ever, and even when it’s cold or wet or miserable out, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

So the other day when I went to my father’s care facility to spend the annual Christmas luncheon with him, I understood the grins on the volunteers faces as they worked tirelessly to feed everyone and sing songs and make merry. It was a huge job, even with an army of volunteers. Not only did they serve regular meals to everyone, but they served special meals to those who had special diets. The staff delivered the medications to all of those who needed it, and a lady sat on the piano and played Christmas carols, while a volunteer Santa visited and had his picture taken with every guest. We shared a table with a brother and sister who must have been in their 70’s or 80’s, whose 103-year-old mother was also there. She was deaf and in a wheelchair, but you could tell by the twinkle in her eye that she was definitely with it!

This is the time of year when the best comes out in a lot of people. I know, I know, the worst comes out in others, but I’m going to do my best to ignore that part of the season. Instead I want to focus all of my attention on the people who do so much for others this time of year, whether it’s volunteering at a care facility, or standing in the cold ringing a bell and taking donations. I’m going to contribute by patiently letting the driver in my lane, even if he didn’t signal first, or opening the door for someone who’s got an armful of packages.

Let’s face it, Christmas is a difficult time for a lot of people. Maybe in some way, it is for you. So if you’re feeling the need, do something for yourself by doing something, no matter how small, for somebody else.

And have yourself a Merry Little Christmas 🙂
IJ

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What Is Tolerance, Really?

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Protestor Holds Bottle, Oakland RiotsImage by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Let us not speak of tolerance.
This negative word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences.
Rather, let us speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect.
Father Dominique Pire 

I hear the word “tolerance” bandied about quite often, and the above quote puts my feelings about it in a nutshell.  Tolerance implies that we are simply putting up with something or someone, and what is the good in that, really?  A lot of people use the word in a sort of glorified manner;  “practice tolerance”, “encouraging tolerance”.  And every time I hear it used that way, it seems somewhat holier-than-thou to me.  What does practicing tolerance mean anyway?  “Here I am, putting up with your stupid behaviour because I’m a tolerant person.”  Yeah, so?

When I wrote an earlier blog on compassion I had no trouble sitting down and coming up with thoughts and scenarios about it.  The word tolerance came up a few times in the last couple of weeks, which made me think that I should write about it also.  But when I first sat down to do so, I hit a wall because I don’t think it’s a very good or descriptive word.  In the above quote, Father Pire attempts to pare it down to “mutual understanding and mutual respect”.  Even though I agree with that sentiment, there has to be something better than that to describe what the “t” word falls short of doing.

Occasionally my guitar students describe me as a very patient teacher.  Patience is defined in Dictionary.com as:

1. the quality of being patient, as the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain, without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.
2. an ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay: to have patience with a slow learner.

The thing is that I don’t FEEL impatient or annoyed with them;  I am not suppressing restlessness in any way.  Which makes me think that these are the things they are actually feeling themselves!  It doesn’t bother me at all how long it takes, or how many mistakes are made, but it probably bothers them.  So am I patient, or not?

To have tolerance or patience seems to mean  a feeling of intolerance or impatience initially, and simply not expressing it.  In other words, there are members of my family with whom I am extremely tolerant of and patient :-).So it appears that the whole purpose is to not come to the point of those negative feelings in the first place…or, if you do, to nip them in the bud right away.  This, to me, is a much more interesting subject, and probably means making a lot more effort!  How do we not feel these things?  And what do we call it when we don’t?

If I can venture into Buddhist thought for a moment, Buddhists say that much of what causes our psychological and emotional ailments is our sense of “self”.  When we see ourselves as separate from everything and everyone else, not only do we suffer with expectation, disappointment and a sense of entitlement, as discussed in my earlier blog on Compassion, but we often have difficulty understanding and accepting others, simply because they are “different”.   We become prejudiced and judgmental, and yes, intolerant and impatient to boot!

It’s amazing what self-examination brings to surface.  And often, just standing back and observing your own thoughts, especially in a situation that proves challenging, will actually dissipate the negative stuff to some degree, if not entirely.  However, many people are dealing with something else too…fear.  And fear is a very powerful pill.  When we don’t understand something or someone, our fears can rise up and completely overtake us, leading us to all kinds of negative feelings and behaviour.  So we put up our dukes.  Religious and racial intolerance have lead to wars since the beginning of humankind.  And not only don’t we understand others, we also want them to be like us.  What an added complication!

I think we started to get it right in the 60’s (yeah, I know, you probably think I’m somehow still stuck there :-)), when peace and love were the words of the day and we began to fight against racism and injustice and to protest wars.   I remember watching news footage of all of these events on our little black and white TV, and feeling a tangible sense of good things to come, even though I was just a kid and didn’t really know any better.  My parents kind of scoffed at the long hair and wild clothes, showing their own intolerance I suppose, but in their own hearts they were also anti-war and against racism.

There are still individuals and groups out there who are trying to change the world in a good way, but it’s not foremost in kids’ minds anymore, and we older folks have become rather complacent since we sent our last tie-dyed t-shirt to the Sally Ann.  How much has the world really changed?  These days there seems to be more religious and racial intolerance than ever;  more recently we see factions of both Muslim and Christian groups ready to kill each other at a moment’s notice, and even though there is now a black president in the US, you can Google Michelle Obama and find horrible caricatures of her as a half-monkey on the internet.   And we humans always seem to find something (or someone) new to hate.

As much as we’d like to finger point, the truth of it is that we each have some of those tendencies inside.  As an example, I remember walking down a street close to my home a couple of years back and a small group of black males walking towards me.  They wore their pants below their butts and had splashy hoodies on, with the hood on top of their skewed baseball caps, and they pretty much looked like they could easily have just scored some drugs on another street corner somewhere.  I’m ashamed to say that I felt fear.  I was walking with someone else at the time and we talked about it after we had passed them.  I don’t think the conclusion I jumped to, that these were people I should fear, even came as complete sentence in my mind.  It was a very automatic, almost instinctual response, which leads me to think that there is something biological or “programmed” going on too.  But that’s no excuse.  I have a brain, and not only do I have a brain, I have one that can reason and distinguish and understand all kinds of things if I take the time to do so.

I am a person who examines myself and my thoughts often enough because it is my nature to do so.  I certainly can’t expect people who don’t know how to look at themselves that way to get past their own intolerance any time soon.

So what is a word that describes tolerance, but without the intolerance to begin with?  Maybe the reason I can’t find one is that it doesn’t exist.  Yet.

IJ

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