Author: Christopher K Wallace

QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS

It’s true what they say: The quality of your life is measured by the quality of your relationships.

Most of us are lucky if we can count on one hand the people we consider close enough to confide in, to turn to in times of turmoil and trouble. Even, to be able to say “I love you,” to someone, be they man, woman or child.

Or, just to check in and connect, somehow, on some level, to let others know you exist while recognizing they exist too. And I’m not even speaking about only being able to tolerate someone else’s company. Or liking them.

Liking a person is kind of important if you’re going to consider them a friend. You think? I bet we’ve all had friends at some point we didn’t care for, people we really didn’t like.

One of our brothers tonight called to say his dog passed away. It was an honour to take his call.

Thirteen years he watched over his friend. It was a runt from a champion line, but because of a heart murmur, it was going to be put down. My friend rescued the little pooch.

He spent ten grand getting her a heart operation way back in the early days. At six months it was attacked by big mean dog and had to have 18 stitches, undergone without complaint. All her teeth had been removed…

And today, bringing her into the vet to see if there was anything he could do to make her more comfortable, she waited patiently in his arms in a room.

He looked at her, she looked at him, she closed her eyes.

She was gone. Just like that. As if, “thanks boss, but I’m 95 in people years and we’ve had a great life together. Goodbye.”

His daughter is 21 today. Most of her remembered life this little dog was part of it. As her father, this rough-around-the-edges son-of-a-gangster won’t tell her now. Not on her birthday. He’ll wait and tell her later in the week in person. He’s like that now, a man. He wasn’t always.

And that’s the thing about life and love. We may start out with not a lot of it in our heart but if we give it time, if we allow it for ourselves and others, it will find us.

They say there are three levels. One is “what can you give me” type love. It’s Janet Jackson singing “what have you done for me lately” while shaking her ass. Fuck off.

Two is a trading relationship. We trade with others all the time.

You tailor my suit coat for a hundred bucks, saving me from throwing out a perfectly good suit jacket I had made in Hamilton by Bruno the Tailor in ’89, and we’re good. Do it right and I’m happy, you’re happy.

But is that love? I don’t think so. Yet, many of us have only a trading relationship to come home to every day. And that’s the thing, you see: It’s not quality.

It’s why my gruff friend, as hard as any guy, grieved today. Because his little dog gave him nothing but level three: unconditional love. The dog made itself belong to my friend, unquestionably, irrevocably, and loved him even on days where my friend may have been unable to love her back.

It’s part of a man’s DNA to take care of others. If he does it or not is another thing. It’s not enough to call yourself a man because you produce more than you consume, so there’s extra to go around. It’s bigger, much deeper than that.

I once knew a fella whose background was the Irish Mob in Canada. Eastern Canada based, he worked out west. I think it was mostly because all the guys above him had been whacked.

Those Montreal Irish, The West End Gang, purportedly connected to the IRA guys back home, scared the shit out of the bikers and the mob most days. They made Montreal bank robbery capital for many years. Forced the Canadian Bankers’ Association to undertake drastic changes in their procedures.

I noticed he always had a small dog with him. Little thing, probably a Bichon/Poodle mix or something. One day, I asked him, “Hey George, no disrespect or anything (respect is big with goodfellas, like a fucking religion), but why is it I see you with such a small dog all the time?”.

Fucker looks at me quickly, stares me in the eyes. I brace myself just a tiny bit. Suddenly, he softens a fraction and says to me matter-of-factly, “Because little dogs need protection too.” His eyes held mine for a moment and he looked, well, very human. Obviously, I accepted his answer.

In fact, I thought it was the best response ever. Sure shut me up, and no, I didn’t probe further. I knew there was something more to it but it wasn’t the time. What else could I say?

My friend today telling me about his little dog filled in a bit more about what George meant. See, my friend told me he grieved more today for this little dog than for his own mother and father when they passed.

More pain than the death of his mother or the death of his father?? Is that a sin of some kind? Maybe.

It’s just both guys had experienced little in the way of unconditional love in their lifetimes. Yet, their humanity, surrounded by a fortress of protection learned in a lifetime of pain, was there, mostly hidden, but intact.

It just took one little dog to bring it out.

In the quiet moments away from others, the loyal pooch and master found and celebrated what was important.

Not sad at all, I say. More like, hopeful. It’s a reminder to recognize pure love when we see it and know it’s real.

Because there lies the real power in life. If we are not standing up for good, we can’t even call ourselves neutral. Because good is love, and love is what counts. Indeed, it is love which is powerful.

Today, I salute all men and their dogs, big or small. Condolences to all of us who have lost a beloved pet. They are like family, perhaps even more. Man’s best friend is also a bridge to what is best in a man.

Find it early or find it late, we must all find love.

Rest in Peace Trixie. 2005 – 2018

Thank you.

Stay powerful gentleman,

CW

https://www.facebook.com/groups/advisortomen/
Continue reading →

THE CHAIN OF BEING

Christopher K Wallace 2 Comments

THE CHAIN OF BEING

Let me tell you how I best understand the fundamental links of being. These four variables together comprise something I call the being chain. It is these four factors which operate mostly unknown, influencing everything, especially how we think and interact with each other and the world.

Contrary to what most people believe, we exist emotionally and then use our brain (usually the left brain in right handed people) to rationalize things later. We tell ourselves a story of why.

Emotions occur faster than the brain can think for good reason: If a threat is present, we don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of a situation. Instead, we’ll use our fight or flight system to prepare to either escape or resolve the danger immediately. OK, basic enough.

Out and about, we exist in a mild fight or flight state most of the time.

The human brain is a prediction machine. It uses the body’s needs, and prior emotional experience to make sense of the circumstances in the environment. Everything we do, our perceptions, our actions and our learning is based on making and updating expectations.

In fact, all our disappointments are driven by our expectations.

Even sight is based on predictions and expectations.

What you see comes in through the eye and hits the visual cortex at the back of the head. Most of the signaling goes from the eyes to the vision center there.

But, some neurons go the other way, coming and going from higher levels of the brain (the cerebral cortex) down to the visual cortex. These are thought to carry predictions. If you have seen it before, you are likely to see it again. If you can’t identify something, your brain will fill in the blank from memory until you see a more accurate picture. This is helpful remembering a route home, but also allows us to see imgaes in clouds on a summer’s day.

The brain uses interoception to gauge the body. That means it checks what’s going on with you physically through its special sensors. It does this primarily through the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus system, which is connected to the heart, gut and organs.  It uses something called proprioception to gauge where you are in a space, and exteroception, which gives you an awareness of your surroundings and stimuli derived from it like light and sound, etc. We focus mainly on interoception.

For example, 100,000 neurons line your gut, another 40,000 exist in the heart. More than 80% of vagus neurons are afferent, meaning they signal towards the brain. These give the brain a constant update of what is going on physiologically, in the body.

From this, you get two general emotional states: valence and arousal. Valence is simply comfortable or uncomfortable. Arousal is either on or off, alert and agitated or resting.

Feelings are predictive, not reactive. Long before we become aware of feelings we have, they have already taken hold of our body’s system. The brain is constantly trying to predict what will happen next to prepare you for circumstances.

You probably remember overreacting to something on incomplete information. We all do it. It’s a natural part of what it is to be human. It’s only as things unfold can we tell if our reaction was appropriate or not. We are constantly adjusting. The better we understand this, the easier it is.

Feelings are predictive responses to the body’s needs based on prior emotional experience, then tested against the social reality before you after the fact.

We learn emotions first as babies, and they become increasingly complex as we are exposed to new experiences. Contrary to the idea we all possess the same emotions, it is more that we experience many of the same things which produces a similar storehouse of emotional responses.

Every experience you have as a young child onward contributes to your bank of feeling states. These are called upon predictively (and mostly below the surface of awareness), allowing you to face whatever situation is in front of you.

It’s a best-guess system, corrected after the fact.

Even as you read these sentences, you are trying to predict where I’m going with this. In conversations with friends, you are doing the same; that is, trying to guess what they will say next. You’ve caught yourself finishing other people’s sentences more than once. Others have done the same with you.

Prediction is why when you first gaze upon a scene, you may see things you know from memory before seeing what is actually before you. That’s the brains prediction system at work!

In any given moment, your brain is using its vast storehouse of recalled emotional experience to determine the future—and the best emotional state in the moment to keep you safe. You are also using the same basic mechanism to predict and understand the people around you.

We sometimes jump to conclusions based on beneath the surface feelings about something. Other times, we under-react because our experience doesn’t signal the current situation as a threat or familiar.

No two people’s emotions are quite the same, simply because no two persons have lived in the same way. In the case of anxiety or anger, you may now understand how prediction is the real cause of our discontent and pain.

You can imagine all this brings great advantages. Recording old emotions in the body for future use is a handy evolutionary adaptation. Having feelings directly connected to your sympathetic system means fear can safeguard your life.

The sequence is this: Physiology (body) to emotional state (valence and arousal) leading to predictive feelings (based on old experience) and finally, thoughts. This is the chain of being.

Think of thoughts as an “explanation” for what’s going on with the body.

This is why we adjust after-the-fact. The body is way ahead of us, and thoughts come last in the chain of being. Where do we feel fear the most? In the body. Follow me so far?

By understanding feelings as imperfect guesses based on old experiences, we can take responsibility for them by countering their effects and letting them go.

What’s the best way to create new feelings? Create new experiences.

Doing new things gives you new feelings to store away for later. This is also how we break an old fear pattern by implementing new strategies.

Doing this gives you a deeper repertoire of scenes and emotional data points—which your brain will automatically employ and test against the ongoing reality before you. That’s also what maturity is about: Life gets better as we get better at life!

It’s worth repeating: all our disappointments are driven by expectations. Not only is this true, everything else about how your body and mind deals with the world is also driven by expectations. Changing expectations is going to the source of things.

To consciously change your state at any given moment, you can change what you think or change what you do.

DOING AND THINKING

The chain of being: Physiology, emotional state, predictive feelings, thoughts.

That’s your approach to life, factoring in your consciousness. Here’s something else: You can intervene at each end of this chain to tackle anything. You can change the body, thoughts, or both.

Focus and Language: two special forces bridging the chain of being

We simply cannot take in all the information around us and record it. Nor can we mentally attend to but a tiny fraction of the stimuli in our environment. The brain is amazing, but it has its limits.

Imagine looking around you with a large magnifier and only seeing through its lens. You would see some things straight ahead clearly up close, the rest of it at the sides would be blurry and faded. That’s what your brain’s ability to focus is like.

Focus is both mental and physical. You use your eyes to focus, and you turn your body towards what engages you in the environment. And, pictures from what you see engage your mind physically at the visual cortex. The rest of your senses operate on focus as well as you touch, smell, strain your ears to hear or taste something.

What you are telling yourself, your self-talk, your thoughts, are under your free-will ability to control by way of focus. So is your imagination.

It can also be either/or. You can stare at something new and for a moment, register no thoughts. In these instances, you can almost feel your brain trolling through its databanks trying to make sense of the scene. Other times you can stare into the distance and see nothing, while vividly day-dreaming about something unrelated.

Where you decide to focus works at both ends of the being chain. You can use focus to take control of fear by determining what your body will do and thereby, what thoughts come to mind.

Language: a bit of both worlds.

If you were born wild without language, it is thought that you would soon develop one to communicate with those around you. Like focus, language has both thinking and doing aspects to it. It straddles the divide between the two ends of the chain.

You speak a language, in which case it’s a physiological thing. Add to this you can whisper, and you can scream, you can also sing, and you can whistle. There’s a remote village in Italy where some of the old-timers whistle to each other to communicate. Whistling to them is a language on to itself.

You will often think in images, impressions, even feelings, and taken together, you often express these with the use of language in thought. “I told myself…,” we say to others as we explain ourselves. “What I was thinking was…,” is another. And all of our rationalizing, the story we tell ourselves after the fact to explain why we have acted, felt, or thought something, is expressed in language.

While what you do and what you think are the main doors to your chain of being, both focus and language play special roles.

Focus means you cannot remember much of your past. You can only recall a tiny part of your history depending on its significance and emotional intensity. What this tells us is to put full stock in a remembered past is a mistake, necessary, but rather weak grounds for making conclusions about the present.

That’s not to discount or dismiss the past entirely. After all, part of the richness of your life and most important lessons resulted from what you remember. It’s likely there was both pain and pleasure derived from your history, and these experiences added to the fullness of your existence.

But it’s important to realize the remembered past is a faulty record, and therefore accord it the skepticism it deserves. Studies show just talking about our past experiences changes what we remember in an exercise in reconsolidation. It’s said every time we revisit a memory, we put it away just slightly changed. We put a different spin on it as we reconcile the past through today’s eyes.

Again, it’s the power of focus, a great deal of which is not under conscious control as the chain of being rules.

A similar case can be made for language. When I was learning to write, my father used to tell me how important it was to get the wording just right. In fact, this is one of the best challenges of writing, or communication in general. Getting it right when we describe our situation or thoughts to others is far more effective when we find the exact words to express what we are trying to say.

And so, it goes with our thinking. If I tell myself I always get nervous meeting new people, chances are I always will. If I tell myself I can’t, what I am really saying is that I won’t. If I mention I am “outraged” when the word “concerned” would have done just as well, I pay for it physically in higher emotional arousal. Inflammatory words cascade through the chain of being and cost me, exaggerating their physiological effects in the end.

Talk angry and the body is angry too. Speak fearfully and the body cowers from life, afraid, protective, tentative, hesitant and weaker than needed.

The body is the universal address of your existence. Living in the present is the only way to live life effectively. The past is but a distant memory.

Sure, keep an eye on the future but spend most of your energy in the present—where the real action takes place. It’s all any of us can control anyway, right?

Similarly, you can tackle the chain of being at the thinking end to reframe things, thereby providing answers which create better feelings and a more relaxed emotional state.

Letting go of ill-will towards someone or something often results in a noticeable relaxation of the body’s musculature or internal process. It can stop our guts from flipping. It can make a headache go away.

I have two ruptured disks. I’m in pain every day. Yet, medicine knows of others who have two ruptured disks and have very little pain. The differences between the two might be found in my chain of being.

I know if I carry anger towards someone, my back will hurt more than usual. I had to learn this over the years. Now, I’m very careful to not carry ill-will or suffer the consequences. Part of my self-care is to not make things worse by triggering the chain of being with shitty thinking.

Another cool example of the chain if being is smiling. Even better, smile facing a mirror. The brain will sense your smile and release hormones to match the body’s condition. Suddenly, mood elevates. Every time you brush your teeth, smile at yourself in the mirror to finish, hijacking the chain of being in your favour.

I used to bridle my door to door reps’ mouths with a pen. Having a bad day? Sit in the truck with a pen across your mouth, forcing your face into a smile for 10—15 minutes. Sure enough, when I put them back out to work, they’d start selling again. I’ve done this successfully too many times to question its merits as an intervention.

Anyone in a full-blown panic attack can kill the pain of anxiety in ten minutes by going for a jog. There’s something about putting one foot in front of the other while staying upright at speed which negates the future-focused thinking characteristic of anxiety. Soon, the body takes control and releases the tensions held by thought.

I tell you all this because we often forget the body. Instead, because we tend to think in language, or in pictures and music, we focus only on our thoughts and convince ourselves this is where we should put the most stock.

But when you consider the chain of being, it’s plain to see the natural order of things starts at the body and ends with thoughts. When people experience trauma, there is a disconnect in the chain of being. Heart rate variability will lessen and tension may hold physically indefinitely. Unexpressed defensive postures usually employed at the time of trauma may instead by internalized in the body and cause problems later. This is why activities like yoga are so effective in this case, the breathing and body awareness allow for a reconnection of interoception pathways.

The chain of being is why I put the body first when I consider areas of my life. It’s body, spirit, people and work. It all begins with the body. Routine habits like good posture while sitting or walking, or activities like dancing, can elevate your emotional state and provide immediate benefits.

You may think you live at some street or avenue or town somewhere. While this is true as a place where you rest, put your stuff and get your mail, it doesn’t give the real picture about where you live.

The universal address of your existence is in your body.

Go rattle that chain…

Stay powerful.

Christopher K Wallace
Advisor to Men

https://www.facebook.com/groups/advisortomen/

ONE WORD

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

ONE WORD

I went to school in grade 3 with a girl, Lise. Poor, from “basse-ville” (lowertown), tiny, greasy hair, glasses, and a big-toothed smile which appeared only when she was still. She was often picked on, ridiculed, especially by the French kids who knew her from her “quartier,” or neighbourhood.

I temporarily appointed myself her protector.

She wore braces, from just above the knees down. They were cumbersome, all steel and leather. The kind of stuff you’d bridle a horse with, maybe even forged and crafted at the same shop. Saddlery braces.

She was left out… of almost everything. Though, I had nothing in common with her, me an Anglo, she “un Franco-Ontarien”, she was like my little sister that year.

Polio. This had felled this little geek. But her spirit? Oh boy. What a privilege it was to take her under my wing.

Of course, I have never forgotten P’tit Lise; moreover, her lessons are with me still. Her smile was sometimes directed towards me. To have a hand in that was reward enough.

I can still see her hobbling along, head down focused on the ground, hair hiding her face, hips moving in an exaggerated way as she brought each steel-laden leg forward into the next step while leaning on her crutches, little cuffs of leather at the forearm holding them to her. She was beautiful.

And later, decades ahead, in a recovery home for the addicted, I met Dale. He’d lost his leg to polio. Once he confided he was one of the rare cases, the one-in-a-million who contracted the disease from being vaccinated.

Unfair? Sure.

Dale was a bit of an asshole sometimes. Headstrong is probably a better word. I couldn’t see it at the time but he had learned his own version of truth, and was adamant about it.

But, what he had was balance. Not physical balance, mind you. No. He used crutches and later a rudimentary prosthetic which annoyed him. And he’d lifted weights and had good upper body strength. He was doing his best with what he had.

Somewhere along the way, after a suitable period rebelling and crying out for fairness, demanding he be treated by the universe differently than his reality, he lost his resentment.

He gave up his anger over losing a limb, replacing it with a kindness of spirit which inspires me to this day. He knew many were saved from the vaccine, and his casualty should be counted in that whole. He realized at some point, it was a numbers game. He shrugged as he told me this. He balanced things.

He looked when telling me this, expectantly, his defensiveness held back, below-surface, looking for signs of contempt. He didn’t trust me but took a chance telling me just the same.

He’d gotten straight before I did, so on the hierarchy of personal development, he could claim higher ground. And he was right. He was far ahead.

What he did so remarkably was this: he no longer asked, “why me?” and, instead, replaced it with, “why not me?”

Seems slight enough. Maybe too easy? When you lose a leg to nothing but the vagaries of life, to the well-intentioned efforts of those who were seeking to prevent the suffering of the Lise’s of the world, you need answers.

Dale found them, in his mind to be sure, but mostly inside his body, and eventually his heart. That one twist, a single reframe, was key.

He ended up marrying Shona, the hottest number to come through Our House in those years. The place was a unique recovery centre on James Street in Ottawa run by a recovered giver named Norm, and abetted by many of his converts.

I went to their wedding held at the Anglican church down the street, the church which had adopted our cause in recovery. We all attended Sundays as we sought to regain our spirits.

Together, Dale and Shona went off to serve the world. As far as I know, they still are.

What a difference one word made. N-O-T. Three letters.

Sometimes the smallest shift brings the greatest results.

__________________

Stay powerful,

cw

BETTER MEN — LIVE TRUE AND FREE

HASSAN’S FORTUNE

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

The old man sat down on a tiny stool he kept a bit back from the dry cleaner’s counter where he served his customers. He thought for a moment about how many years it had been since he hung up his sign, Quality Cleaners. That was back when the plaza was first built in tiny Manotick, Ontario, a satellite village just south of Ottawa on the banks of the Rideau River.

It had been a small community of horse lovers, and cattle and cash crop farmers, and even had an operating mill well into the 20th century. It was for these people, still now numbering only a few thousand, and a few others who didn’t mind the commute from the inner city for the chance to breathe fresh air in wide open spaces, that the village had survived.

However, in the last decade and a half, like many of the places around larger cities in North America, little Manotick had new subdivisions nipping at its periphery. It even had a gentrified core which made it look a little trendy.

This was good for dry cleaners, he thought. Maybe the extra volume of people will help offset the trend that saw less folks getting their clothing dry cleaned regularly. It had become expensive, no doubt. He liked to say he paid all his bills in dollars but only collected nickels and dimes in return.

At 73 years old, he remembered proudly he will have been married to the same women for 54 of those years on a Sunday soon. This brought a slight smile to his face as he remembered her, then and now. More than half a century and going, praise the heavens, he thought.

A customer pushed open the door. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday and so, he wasn’t very busy. In fact, he hadn’t had anyone in in over an hour. It wasn’t a regular, but he recognized the person as someone who had been there before.

Turns out the man lived a few miles east on acreage and couldn’t find a dry cleaner close enough to his house and so had come here. Happy to get his business, they struck up a conversation.

Soon, each reminisced about how long they’d been coming to Manotick. The man had grown up in the south end of Ottawa when the village was a forgotten outpost except to those who lived there. Comparing notes, each remarked how it had somehow survived and was now being developed.

“The new Vimy Memorial Bridge is a marvel,” said the man. “Yes, they finally got it built,” replied the shopkeeper. “I remember when we used to rent a property with 3 cottages on it just a few yards from where it crosses the river,” said the man, “boy oh boy, has this place changed. When I was a kid, there couldn’t have been but a few hundred souls out this way.”

Soon they were engrossed in comparing notes about what came first, which area developed best, and where it was headed.

He liked this stranger, but then again, he liked all his customers. It’s not just that he wanted them to spend money here, it was just part of his nature. After all, you can’t devote as many years as he had serving a community in dry cleaning, of all things, and not like what you’re doing.

He told the stranger about opening his tiny little shop, mentioning he’d come to Canada as a much younger man from Uganda. “Oh, Uganda, I get it!” said the man. “Idi Amin really left that place a mess.”

Agreeing with him, he counted how long since then. It had been 34 years of service to this small community, and his mind was immediately littered with events and faces as he felt all that time go by.

“I commend your commitment to your town,” said the man. “There is something about serving other people that gives a man’s life meaning,” he said.

“Yes!” said the shopkeeper, “that’s exactly how I feel about it.”

Soon they were exchanging testimony about helping their fellow man. Not at all in a way to stroke egos, no. More in a matter of fact way, as if they were reassuring each other this was how it’s done.

“I will tell you something,” said the shopkeeper after a while to his customer. “You know, last month, I went for a chest scan.”

“Oh really?” said the man, his voice concerned.

“Yes, they told me something was wrong, very wrong. It was a rare case and I was going to need experimental medications costing 25,000 dollars. Can you imagine? I’m not a rich man,” he said.

He remembered how devastating his wife of more than fifty years was at hearing the news. He remembered her face, her pain, her worry, and he winced at the memory.

“OHIP wouldn’t cover it. Too experimental, they said. So, I got on the phone with the pharmaceutical company. They agreed to provide the medications for free through a local pharmacy. Only, there’d be a $912 fee to dispense the medications here in Ottawa. We talked some more and soon, they agreed to waive this fee as well.  I felt very fortunate.”

“Wow, nice going,” said the customer, listening intently. “Let me get this straight: you not only got the pharmaceutical company to cover the cost of the experimental drugs, but you also got them to waive the local dispensing fee. Almost a grand?”

“Yes, that’s what happened,” said the old man. “And then, I got a referral to a top thoracic surgeon in Toronto that same morning. Only, I couldn’t get there with my health. There was a waiting list too. So, we did a teleconference at the medical centre by Billings Bridge. You know where that is?”

“Yes, I do exactly,” said the man, “I’ve had conferences with Toronto doctors myself from those same offices about my liver.”

“You know, then,” said the shopkeeper, “these doctors are busy.”

“Get this,” continued the shopkeeper, “I get on the video conference with the thoracic surgeon in Toronto and he says he knows me. “What do you mean?” I asked him. He says, “I remember having dinner at your home more than 30 years ago and afterwards, doing the dishes.””

Turns out when the shopkeeper was a much younger man, part of his service to his mosque was to mentor young people, especially new immigrants to Canada. He and his wife often hosted a dinner Saturdays at home and counselled arrivals about settling into their new country.

It was a way to help people transition, to provide a like-minded person of faith as a contact in the community, and to impart sound values to the newcomer. The surgeon, then a student, was one of them, and he remembered him well. The shopkeeper told the stranger about how his students at one point wanted to host a dinner for him in thanks and he refused the accolade on principle. He told them it was his natural duty to help them all, and they should focus on doing the same for others in the future.

“You can imagine my surprise,” said the shopkeeper. “I wasn’t sure what this meant but during the call, the doctor told me, “Either your heart is trying to divorce your lungs, or your lungs are trying to divorce your heart. You will need a transplant.”  He would put me on a list, he said.”

“The Toronto surgeon says the transplant will have to happen in Ottawa where it just so happens he has a friend at the Heart Institute, because my health is too frail and makes the trip too risky,” recounts the shopkeeper, “You can imagine how worried my wife was.”

“I can’t even grasp how difficult that must have been for her. How long have you been married?” asked the stranger.

“It will be 54 years next Sunday,” he replied.

“Bless you both my friend. So, what happened next?” enjoined the stranger.

“Right away,” he continued, “The Heart Institute here in Ottawa called me and said I had to be there in one hour to see the doctor. You know where that is?”

“No, but I can imagine we have good people here. I know the first Canadian heart transplant was done at the Civic. Is that where you went?”

“Yes, it’s right beside there now. It was another surprise,” he replied.

“How do you mean?” asked the stranger.

“So, I get to the Heart Institute,” he continued, “and I am by myself. There is a line-up to get into the parking, about six cars ahead of me and time is ticking by. A young guy comes to my window and asked for me by name.  He said the doctor sent him and he took my keys and told me he would take care of my car, and to go in immediately to see the doctor. He went off to park my car and off I went to see the doctor.”

“And so, you went in?” asked the stranger.

“I did go in, and he sees me. First thing he did was sent me off to get another scan in 30 minutes on an emergency basis. Then, he wants me to go home and prepare to be admitted any moment because they had a good candidate with viable lungs dying within the next 24 hours.”

“Wow, all this on the same damn day! It’s no wonder your heart didn’t give out!”

“I’m not finished,” the shopkeeper continued, “you won’t believe what happens next.”

“Uh-oh,” says the stranger.

“I get lost on my way to the MRI room. Can you believe it? I miss my test!” he exclaims.

“Oh no!” says the stranger.

“You know how big and confusing these hospitals are. I get there and I’m about 30 minutes late. The waiting room is full of people, some of them look sick, much sicker than I felt for sure. I went up to the lady at the desk and apologised for being late. Turns out she was a long-time customer of mine here at the dry cleaners. She tells me not to worry and puts me to the head of the line and I get my MRI!”

“Wow again!” remarks the stranger. “I hesitate to call this luck in the circumstances, but so far so good!”

“Yes, I was overwhelmed but I did notice it. You know, I thought this is how one should die. Like going away in a parade, everyone waving at you, but knowing they are being nice because you may be leaving,” he says solemnly.

“But, …,” replied the stranger, lost for words.

The shopkeeper continued, “Off I go home to pack a few things and explain all this to my wife. She is very worried. We’ve faced many challenges together, but this is the biggest.  The mood at home is very sombre, very sad. A little while later, I get a phone call. It’s the first doctor, the one who made the original diagnosis, requiring me to be at his office first thing the next morning at 8:30 am.”

The shopkeeper explains how he spent the night in prayer, reassuring his wife, consoling her fears, and trying to get some rest but knowing at this point, it was out of his hands. Fed up, he determines to leave it up to greater powers than he. God-willing he would be alive the next day. He decides this is a test of his life-long faith… and he must not waiver.

But in his darkness he dared to have a secret wish: it was to make it to a few Sundays from then to celebrate his wedding anniversary with his bride one last time.  He thinks to himself: we should be grateful for our 54 years together, whatever happens tomorrow. He pictures her face in his mind’s eye.

With that, he drifts off to a restless sleep, the anxieties of the day leaving him sapped of physical strength while his mind wished to remain awake and alert.

The next morning, he is at his doctor’s office on time. “You know what happened?” the good doctor asks, “you’re not going to believe me when I tell you.”

“I have no idea,” replied the shopkeeper as his mind raced with possibilities, none of them good.

“The doctor says, “I am very sorry, but I have made a mistake. You were misdiagnosed. I read someone else’s chart who was terminal and thought it was yours. It’s our fault. We have made a grave error, I hope you can forgive me,” his face filled with remorse.

“I was frozen in place, not believing my ears,” says the shopkeeper to the stranger.

“Oh my God,” says the stranger, “a mistake? That’s outrageous! The news alone could have killed you. He’s lucky he didn’t cause you to go into cardiac arrest from fright.”

“You know what I told him?” said the shopkeeper in a sly kind of voice.

“This I got to hear,” said the stranger.

“I said simply, “I forgive you, and thank you.””

“Wow, thank you? really?” replied the stranger, “Now I’m inspired. How did you come to that?”

The shopkeeper went on to say, “The doctor looked at me puzzled, mumbling something about how this was an unforgiveable error on his part and that he was ashamed of his office. He wouldn’t be surprised if I were angry and complained. Again, he said he was sorry.”

“I just smiled and repeated to him the same thing: “I forgive you… and thank you,”” said the shopkeeper, his voice now confident and relaxed, his eyes a little brighter, a beatific smile on his face.

Then, he told the doctor of his journey. “Did you know I was able to suggest the pharmaceutical company waive costs for their experimental medicine for humanitarian reasons and they did? That is an unusual arrangement, you’ll have to agree.”  And the doctor agreed it was unusual. “And then they waved the local dispensing fee of almost one thousand dollars on top of it,” even more unlikely.” The doctor sat still.

“If it were not for you,” I told him, “I probably would never have been thanked for giving those Saturday suppers all those years, and to know one of my students was a top surgeon in Toronto,” explaining now how he knew his surgeon.  “Wasn’t I glad I’d refused any accolades for doing this and thereby set an example to my charges? Look how this returned to me in my time of need,” he continued.

The doctor was fascinated by his good fortune, nodded and stared at him blankly.

“And doctor, how lucky was it that the surgeon in Toronto had a friend in Ottawa?” and, “did you know the Ottawa surgeon sent a parking attendant to park my car and usher me into his offices?”

“Yes, he’s a very well-known doctor, one of the best in the world,” answered the physician.

“And something else doctor, what are the chances, of all the people who work in a hospital imaging lab, one of them would turn out to be a long-time customer of mine. When I got lost and missed my appointment, with a double lung transplant operation a few hours away, it was she who made sure I got in despite others still waiting? Can we still call this luck?”

The stranger could only imagine what must have been a dumbfounded look on the doctor’s face.

“It was because of that appointment we are sitting here this morning, instead of at the hospital preparing for surgery,” the shopkeeper said matter-of-factly to his doctor.

The doctor agreed, adding the donor candidate will die that morning and his lungs will go to someone else who is already waiting for them in that very moment.

“Doctor let me again say, if were not for you, if it were not for your misdiagnosis, I would not have found out about all the wonderful people around me. What is the price of such a thing? Can you tell me? All these various people from different areas came together somehow to show me kindness and respect, and I owe all of this to you.  It is me who needs to thank you now.”

The doctor, tears in his eyes, blinked at the remarkable man before him and thanked him.

“And that was it,” said the shopkeeper.

“That’s quite a story my good man, mind if I write this one up?” asked the stranger.

To which the shopkeeper replied, “Oh sure, please do. Just remember we are all brothers and sisters.”

“You bet, I will never forget today. Do you have any more advice for me?” asked the stranger.

“Yes, I do,” replied the shopkeeper. “I will tell you this: Even the homeless on the street, don’t pass them by. You don’t have to give them money if you don’t want to but you should always look them in the eye and say hello at least.”

And the stranger was not at all surprised by this last bit of wisdom.

“Do you need these shirts by Friday or can you wait until Tuesday?” asked the shopkeeper.

“Tuesday is fine,”replied the stranger.

Christopher K Wallace
Advisor to Men

©2018, all rights reserved.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/advisortomen/

Hassan Ismail, shopkeeper

See This Rabbit?

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

See this rabbit? It’s no ordinary rabbit. I’ll tell you why.

Despite coming from a brood of ten bunnies born from our female’s last mating, this one is special: He loves freedom.

In that department, he leaves the other 9 rabbits in his wake. We can’t keep him in the pen. In fact, there are several white bunnies in this last batch and we weren’t sure if it was the same guy escaping all the time so we marked him. Big black magic marker stripe on its forehead. It’s always him.

It’s worn off now so tonight I marked him with blue. That was after I caught him in my garden. He ate half a tomato and devastated a whole cabbage plant, left a stub growing out of the ground. I have lots of cabbage this year so he chose well.

It took all three of us to catch him by cornering him in the garden. Missus lets the chickens in there to control the grasshoppers and had left the wire gate open. He ran full on towards it to escape but Charlie had it closed and was standing guard. He bounced off it like a trampoline and sat there stunned just long enough for missus to grab him.

This little guy will find the one little part of the pen where he can wiggle under or through something and fuck off. None of the other’s follow him. Not a one. And it’s a male, assuredly. Missus confirmed it.

He’s the great escape artist, can’t be jailed. No prison can hold him. He’s like El Chapo in the early years.

We’ve even had to leave him out a few nights on his own.

Couldn’t catch the little sucker. Despite being out there at dusk being eaten alive by mosquitoes and deer flies chasing the little prick with a salmon net, no way. He knows to either head into the culvert near the pond, a bush with several entrances, or get lost in the wood pile on the other side of the male rabbit pen. Finally, missus calls it off and says “leave him to the foxes and owls.”

But next day, we’ll spot him in the middle of the backyard grazing on the delicious green clover overtaking the lawn. Because that’s what he’s doing. He’s escaping to eat the better stuff found on the outside at the height of summer.

Another thing. Sometimes he breaks into the boys pen and hangs out with his dad and older brother. We’ll see him in there just snuggling up with pops, eating their food or munching down on the fresh green weeds I bring every day.

He’ll visit a while and then screw off from there. They have two inch mesh and can’t follow him. He is small enough still so can slip in and out all he likes. To them he’s a ghost, appearing and disappearing at will.

Missus has taken to putting him in his own cage within the wired pen where the mama rabbit and little ones are being reared. Tonight she said, “let’s just butcher this one right now and eat him.” I like when she shows some of that inner cave woman. Always makes me give her a second look.

But I’m not so sure. For one thing, he’s still pretty small. So he wouldn’t make for much of a meal. He’s also not very fat, probably due to all the exercise he gets running away from us.

Mostly, he makes me think of the difference between conformity and dissent. If I keep him to breed, will I have a backyard full of escape artists to contend with? Or will I be selecting for better genes and a more food resourceful animal?

Truth is, I’ve developed a grudging respect for him.

How can I not like a creature who finds a way to live his freedom? Talk about perseverance. No matter what obstacle is before him, this little guy never gives up. Even after a few days being confined to barracks in his special enclosure, he’s right back at it. To tell you an even nuttier truth: I’m more than a bit inspired by the little fella.

Oh sure, call him wascally. But so what? I lived outside the norms for a long time. It’s a wonder I wasn’t stewed myself.

What is true is that this little guy is a dissenter. Contrary to popular opinion, we should invite dissent into our lives and discussions as much as we can. I’m not talking about bullshit ploys like Devil’s Advocate, a faux-exercise in pretend-dissent.

No. We should take positions and run with them because even if we are wrong, everyone’s thinking around us is enriched because of it. Divergent thinking is where the best answers come from, not from group think, nor especiallly from echo chambers of one person’s thoughts.

This little white rabbit with the now blue streaks on his head will teach us how to build better pens at the least. He’ll teach us all about where a rabbit goes if it escapes. He’s still teaching us the best way to catch an errant rabbit. He’s also showing us what he prefers to eat.

Thirteen rabbits in my backyard and it’s this one, the pain in the ass one, from whom we are learning.

What a wonderful lesson for life.

CW
Advisor to Men
https://www.facebook.com/groups/advisortomen/

Be Great in Act…

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment
THOUGHTS INTO ACTIONS

“Be great in act, as you have been in thought,” said the original bard. What was William telling us when he wrote this directive, this mini-missive for life? Could be he was urging us to be more confident, because confidence is a big part of what takes thoughts and turns them into actions.

Sometimes fear does this too, but not in the “great” way Shakespeare was referring to when he gave this advice. Greatness, being your best in a moment, is something we all experience, if only in our minds.

The question is how to take those fleeting feelings of greatness and bring them forth into the world.

Acting is one way, a version of the old “fake it until you make it” cliché. And as much as this strategy has become a trite call to be something other than yourself in the internet era, it’s still a pretty good approach. No wonder actors love what they do. They perfect the “becoming something else,” repeatedly, even becoming addicted to it.

This reminds me of when I first learned to shoot pool. Oh, not the very first time, because that was as a 13-year-old when my big brother suddenly turned to me one Saturday and asked me what I was doing. Ten minutes later, Stephen and I were nearby at Centennial Billiards on Bank Street playing on one of the small tables.

I was terrible. I’m sure Stephen was only moderately better. We didn’t play again for several decades. In the interlude, he visited over a hundred countries in service of gov’t, while I did… other things. But little did he know, by way of introduction to this wonderful game, of the seed he’d planted in me.

I played it on and off for another twenty years before I got much better. In my early 30s, in college, I often played at Edgar Lefevbre’s East End Billiards, just up the street from my place in Cornwall. I had a cheap two-piece cue and could count myself as a moderately decent player, enough to hold my own amongst other players there who were the equivalent of duffers in golf.

It was when I moved to Southern Ontario and began to run a sales team during evenings all over Southern Ontario that I stepped it up. Each night, I had three or so hours to kill between dropping off my reps and picking them up again. I drifted into the pool halls of each town to play snooker.

Pool, meaning straight pool, eight ball and nine ball, hadn’t taken off in Canada. These were American games played on smaller tables and Canada was a former British colony. We played on 6’ x 12’ tables and looked down upon the pool shooters to the south, preferring snooker. Later, I came to appreciate these smaller table games just as much. Nine ball is my favourite.

The Canadian, Cliff Thorburn, had been crowned World Snooker Champion in England in 1980. Then he’d blown away the snooker world by scoring a maximum in the Championships in 1983: a perfect game of 15 reds with 15 blacks and then all the colours to score 147. At the time, it was snooker’s equivalent to breaking the 4-minute running barrier record.

When, in 1988, I moved to Hamilton, eventually I started playing at The End Pocket, on Upper James. Marty Olds had bought the place and I’m pretty sure he still owns it. Alain Robidoux, a French-Canadian from Montreal was by then our top player in England, ranked something like number 8. I heard the announcer say he used a hand-made cue built by Marcel Jacques. I later found out Marcel had been a bowling hall carpenter, building those beautifully precise tongue and groove alleys, and made pool cues on the side.

I know this because on a whim one day, I called a pool hall in Montreal, and by luck they could get a message to him. He called me back a day or so later and I found myself agreeing to meet him the following week at one of his local pool room hangouts. He tested my stance and measured my body and arm length, as well deciding on the thickness of the cue’s butt so it would best fit my hand.

$500 bucks and a few weeks later, my cue.

When I bought my cue, I still hadn’t met Marty and the rest of the boys at the End Pocket, but I’d been in to bang the balls around a few times. When I showed up to practice on table #6 at the back of the room with the Marcel cue, Marty noticed right away that I could play well enough. The cue gave me away as a serious player.

From then on, I was welcomed into the loose fraternity of the better players there. Never the best or most talented player, I only won one of his tournaments a couple of years later and got my name printed in the classifieds for it. But it was the endless games of golf and follow played for 25 cents a point that I remember most.

I didn’t like losing very much so I enlisted the help of Canada Fats, Tony Lemay, a gambler in Toronto who made a living at the racetrack and playing cards. In three lessons at $50/hour, Tony helped me find the stance I still use to this day, very much emulating Cliff Thorburn’s frontal approach to the ball.

By this time, I was playing in rooms from Scarborough’s Snooker Canada to places in London or Niagara Falls, and everywhere in between. I’d pop in and find a game, usually for five or ten bucks a rack and the table time.

Occasionally, I got to practice with a much better player. It was a fella in Brantford, Ontario who pointed out my biggest flaw, striking before I’d pinpointed the exact place on the ball down to the size of a pen mark, instead of a circle the size of about half a dime. My eyes were weak.

I think he was also frustrated at me not being a worthy opponent and could see my potential. He did something curious: he stood behind me and wouldn’t let me strike and move on until I’d corrected what it was he was telling me. Instead of allowing me to continue my poor form, he insisted on a correction on the spot by raising his voice and saying “no, no, NO, that’s not it, keep looking for it,” so I’d be forced to stop etching the flaw further upon my style, dismantling and rebuilding the weakness which held me back in the process.

Frustrated at first, by the time he was done with me in that one evening, I was making shots with such precision I ended up beating him. He nodded when I did, knowing he had beat himself through me. The score was just proof of the soundness of his lesson.

I think his name might have been Paul but I’m unsure. All I know is I’m grateful to this stranger for his coaching. I still think of him, still see him nodding his head in approval without saying a word. My game went up from there.

This was my pastime, not my professional pursuit. At one time, I considered buying a pool room but realized it would run my love of the game if I was forced to sit in a room all day hoping customers would spend money. I played for fun, and a little money, but the real fun was in playing well.

Never intending to become a better player, I had simply taken my thoughts about playing and acted them out. I’d faked my way into a level of mastery of the game by first getting a world class cue and then forcing myself to play to its level. Funny how that works.

There are two other enormous excellence lessons I learned while playing pool. One was about visualizations, the other about flow. I’ll report back to you about these in other posts.

In the meantime, I like to believe this era in my life contains valuable lessons, ones’ I still do my best to apply today.

think of ways you can act “as if” and see yourself in a different light. What are some ways you can realize some of those thoughts which surface in your mind, begging to be turned into actions? Often thoughts come and go and are forgotten. What if we acted on some of them instead?

Three hundred years after Shakespeare’s missive, what can we do today to honour his advice?

Sometimes confidence comes from little wins, ordinary victories accumulating over time into a meaningful whole, call it a gestalt of competence if you will.

At other times, it comes from taking risks. Something daring, perhaps done on a whim, and which can open a whole new area of life just because of it’s power as a linchpin to action.

It’s like putting on a good suit. Suddenly, people act differently around you and accord you with more respect and power than when you’re dressed in work clothes. Suddenly you’re standing straighter and taller, speaking clearly and with better manners. More about this later.

Suddenly, when we take risks, people appear along the journey and contribute something to our game. It’s just how things work, beautifully.

Realize the difference between thoughts and actions is often found in a simple leap of faith.

Go with it I say. Do it now, chase a passion.

Stay powerful.

CW

Advisor to Men.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/advisortomen/

The Wisdom of Mrs. Singh

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

The wisdom of Mrs. Singh,

For many years, my gal pals have told me quite directly I needed to better understand women. One went so far as to strongly suggest I have a daughter to really “get it.” Not the type to back away from a challenge, nor good advice, I say thank you Mariko. Charlotte has taught me plenty.

I remember once asking my father about this question. It was only in later life, in my 30s, 40s, and even 50s where my relationship with him permitted me to broach these kinds of subjects, without the usual judgments I would have received at a younger age. I needed those years to build emotional muscle I think. Perhaps, physical muscle as well. By then, I could take my old man; indeed, while his fearsomeness had not waned with time, my own had increased.

In any case, I remember asking about understanding women and he answered, “You’re not supposed to” with finality. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to hear this from him. My father, the man surrounded by books his whole life, who read one per week or so most of his adult life, and who could easily construct an impromptu lecture on the building of cultures and civilizations since the dawn of recorded history with little encouragement, came up blank when we discussed gender.

To be fair, it’s possible he liked the magic of not knowing, for there is some of that mystery in our sexual counterparts. But as a man with five daughters, that day my expectations were greater than he could meet. It was the only time I can recall being let down by his answer. Instead of his usual erudition, seeded with life-lessons he’d share at length: nothing.

I was on my own when it comes to sex differences. Of course, I have used the question of differences between men and women to shoehorn in greater understanding of others in into this thick skull of mine. For to look is to find, and It’s undoubtedly helped me evolve in other ways.

So, it was recently I found myself speaking with Mrs. Singh. She wore a beautiful green and gold sari, telling me she was too lazy to get dressed in anything else that morning. I remember thinking I do the same thing sometimes and put on track pants and a t-shirt. Comparatively, she looked wonderful; I would look like I was dressed in track pants and a t-shirt.

It was at her furniture store, an ample space filled with living room and bedroom sets built in an ornate style befitting someone who wore a brocaded sari. She interrupted our conversation only once when she went out back to ensure her delivery man had unloaded inventory correctly and counted the pieces that came in. Her desk set up against one wall midway into the cavernous space, littered with invoices and other evidence of commerce: It was her mission control and she ran it all easily on her own.

I was there to sell her commercial energy, something I do during the day. Unlike the newspaper business from which I came and has been radically reduced by the forces of creative destruction in the internet age, energy will last. 80% of the world uses electricity so demand will only rise.

Alas, I discovered she was already on a contract. It’s in these cases I get to act more as an advisor than as a provider, and the burden of compensation is removed from our interaction. Assessing her bill and doing the calculations, I could see she was overpaying. Determining this makes me her ally, her advocate.

Here, I took the liberty to call the 1 800 number of her supplier on my phone, getting us through to the right agent. Mrs. Singh went through the required identification process and rather than me prompting her in the background, stated my name and her desire I speak on her behalf.

Cancelling her existing contract would have cost her almost a grand. She could have justified it by the savings gained at the low price I’d give her for her remaining term. But then, her supplier’s customer service agent sensed she had a pro on her side and offered to drop her price right down to near what I could do. I was being used to grind the competition into chasing her business.

Given the length she had left on contract (23 months) my advice was as long as they gave her the same price for her household contract (for which I calculated they were overcharging her by even more) she should take their deal and I’d see her in a couple of years. My visit had dropped her rate by a third and I’d get nothing from it. She insisted I sign up her natural gas business, which I did, but it was a tiny contract in comparison.

I’d spent two visits and over three hours on this appointment with little to show for it. But then again, this is where I’m reminded I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it for the conversations.

My life can be seen in part as a series of quests to update and replace my father’s teachings and to go futher than he ever could.

To my polite prompting, Mrs. Singh explained the basic tenets of Sikhism, especially the part about we are all equals according to the guru’s teachings. At the Gurdwara, she explained, we all sit on the floor, no matter who it is visiting. Doesn’t matter if it’s a head of state or the poorest of the poor, they are welcome to sit as equals together.

And the langar, the food prepared by a cadre of volunteers, it available to all visitors, regardless of caste, colour, religion, ethnicity, rich or poor. Surprisingly, it’s a tradition adopted from the Muslim Sufis back when Sikhism started with Guru Nanak in the 1500s I later learned.

She explained the difference between baptized and non-baptized Sikhs, and told me of her upbringing in Amritsar, India. It was here I asked her about the differences between North American parenting and the parenting she’d used successfully with her daughters and sons, all educated professionals. I was rewarded with anecdotes.

Once. she wanted to attend the movie theater with her friends back home. These kinds of events were difficult for a Sikh girl, for the members of her community would talk and confront the family if she was seen. India is a dangerous place for a young girl, even if accompanied by others. “There’s a lot of rapes” she said. Her mother hesitated, but finally told her to go, but not tell anyone.

She went and had fun, returning home on time. When her mother asked her how it went, she fibbed and told her she did not go. By doing this, essentially, she got a “go to the movies” free card she could use another time. She laughed as she told me she used this trick three times, seeing movies each time all on the one permission.

I was reminded of how simple things we take for granted in Canadian culture are not held in the same regard by those coming from other places where conditions are different. As I listened to her, I take her implied counsel seriously.

My missus has told me she won’t allow sleepovers for our children. Her experiences growing up has made her realize the risks of a child being hurt of damaged in such unknown circumstances is too great, so she’s got this one rule. I’m fine with it too, for it appeals to my protective side.

Turns out, Mrs. Singh says the same thing. “No sleepovers” she stated unwaveringly as her first rule of parenting. She encouraged her daughters and sons to visit their friends but no matter the time of night, she is there to pick them up and take them home. As teens, the boys stayed out latest 1 am, the girls, 11 pm. Why the difference, I asked? Girls are more precious.

And when her daughter was 20 and in college, she begged her mother for leniency. Lovingly, Mrs. Singh agreed with her daughter’s newfound need for freedom. The new curfew is midnight.

Once upon a time in Amritsar, Mrs. Singh wanted to attend her friend’s wedding. “I got married at age 21,” she said, “and my friend was 20. I had to go and see her get married.” Not yet married herself at the time, it would be an opportunity to see what all the fuss was about. So, she pleaded with her mother, telling her how important it was that she go, after all it was her best friend, and this was her big day. Mother, in her wisdom, finally relented and said she’d agree, if her father gave his blessing.

Mrs. Singh begged her father for the opportunity to go. She told him how much it meant to her and how disappointed both she and her friend would be to miss it. She used all her charm, cashing in a lifetime of smiles to get her father’s approval. “You can go as long as your mother goes with you,” was his answer.

Not quite willing to let his daughter go, clear in that a daughter’s friend’s wedding was no signal that his role was now obsolete, he got the best of both sides in his decision. His emissary and co-parent would chaperone, and his sweet daughter’s request would not be denied. The Mrs. Singh before me wasn’t put off at all by this prospect as she recounted her parent’s decision. To the contrary, she was thrilled.

At the wedding, her mother took her aside and told her she was not there to spy on her, to prevent her from having a good time. Nor was she there to judge her behavior, or to possibly reprimand her. She’d raised a good daughter and trusted she’d act accordingly.

And she did have a fun time, telling me of how she played games the whole day and shared in her friend’s joy. In her explanation, I could see the satisfaction and excitement return to her face in the retelling of this unforgettable day. And the way she explained her mother’s role was an inspiration.

Then Mrs. Singh told me something so profoundly good. I struggled to remember it verbatim, so I could rush home and share it with missus. For we have a daughter… and daughters are precious.

She said a daughter’s mother should be like her best friend. She should be able to come to her mother with anything she encounters, any feelings she has, any doubts or fears, and that the mother must be a safe place for her.

If a boy looks at her a certain way, or smiles at her, or says something to her, it’s to her mother she must come for advice and reassurance. When her body changes, it’s her mother who will help her accept and incorporate these changes into her identity.

She must convey to her daughter, “your secrets are safe with me.” The implications were clear: the mother must be the bridge between adolescence and her daughter’s budding sexuality and the expectations of full womanhood.

How many women do I know who have had no such relationship with their mothers? And how tragic it is when this happens?  What pain does a daughter carry with her into the future, often for life, when she feels misunderstood by the very person from whose flesh and blood she is made? What a burden this rejection, and how despairing for all concerned.

Someone once said a child can get along without a father but will die without a mother. At a very basic level of nurturance this makes sense. At the higher levels of self-concept, even more critical. The Grant Study speaks to mother’s acceptance and importance longer term in a man’s life. Doubly important for girls, I think.

I have learned it’s the connection between adults and children which allows our young ones to feel valued. From that sense of feeling valued, a child or adolescent has the emotional foundation to learn discipline, to decide to delay gratification in service of a greater cause.

It’s as if absent emotional connection, all further learning is hampered. Like Maslow’s need hierarchy, we must first feel safely held in someone’s regard before we can move forward with higher order steps of learning. After all, children are motivated; they want desperately to be rescued from themselves.

I may not have made much visiting Mrs. Singh’s furniture store off Walkley Road in Ottawa, but I left with much more than something as trite as meeting a sales target.

Instead, I was paid in a different currency, in the great Canadian multicultural tradition. I gained a glimpse into another life which, in turn, enhanced my own. I’m reminded too that the world over, we are all people struggling with the same issues. It doesn’t much matter if we are talking about a daughter here, or over there.

I will do my best to be as good a man as your father was for you. I will ensure our home allows my daughter the kind of relationship you had with your mother.

Thank you, Mrs. Singh: precious indeed.

Christopher K. Wallace
©2018 all rights reserved

NARROWED THINKING

Christopher K Wallace 2 Comments

 

The Zone of Happiness

This week as I traveled about, visiting the lives of others along the way both online and in-person, I was struck by a few things I’d like to share with you. Specifically, I want to talk about narrowing thinking and how it lies at the crux of the best of human experience.

When I think of those times in my life when I was firing on all cylinders, it’s when I’ve been able to focus at such a deep level my total being was engaged in living in the moment. It’s when the distractions of my surroundings are inconsequential to what’s before me. It’s when time seems stands still.

I’m not sure if you know what I mean, but if you think back, you’ll quickly remember a scene from your history where you were so engrossed in what you were doing that all else didn’t matter. I wonder if you realize it’s at these moments when we are at our happiest.

Let me qualify that statement.  I surely don’t mean a form of bliss where we are like Snoopy just grooving to Schroeder’s piano. Though this is sometimes a part of it, it’s by no means the template against which we should judge our affective experience in these circumstances.

What I mean by happiest is more like we are blissfully unaware of feeling at all. At least, the tyranny of emotion is lost for the moment, and we leave behind all feelings of inadequacy. Our usual level of vigilance changes, but it’s not that we let our guard down. No. It’s because something else takes over.

That something is a feeling of almost limitless power, or better, power being expressed at the limits of our abilities. This is when we hit a zone, or our zone, and whether we hit it accidentally or on purpose doesn’t matter. What counts here is a condition which lies at the pinnacle of human expression. It’s as if we know it’s where we belong, a place where good things, sometimes great things, happen.

It’s a serious manifestation of our gifts coming together all at once, without being aware of limits or constraints which might cast doubt upon our competence. It’s more than confidence because it’s a blend of the mental and the physical, a symbiosis, the meaningful whole of an action. It’s the Gestalt.

Practice, Focus and the Impossible

The quick and easy way to hit zones is to practice over and over so new competence is ingrained in the cerebellum, like never forgetting to ride a bike once learned. Being able to shut out distractions is next, narrowing down focus to what is before you, so time is lived second by second, or not noticed at all.

When the first two conditions are met, the longer you linger there, the more chance you have of hitting the heretofore impossible. That’s when you stretch, using your powers of concentration and emotional equilibrium to push the boundaries of your skills. It’s a time when we truly get out of our own way, allowing whatever talent we have to sing fully, to express itself at its peak and beyond.

I’d sometimes get like this after a few years of shooting snooker. In my best games, I wouldn’t even notice my surroundings except for how they were needed to play the game. It didn’t matter who was watching, or what my opponent did. My eyes were on the green table cloth and the balls. My whole body and mind was an extension of the cue and cue ball and I could make that ball do my bidding without regard to limits. I’d control the game in a way far above my normal play.

I say the zone is also when we feel most alive. The connection between our existence and the world around us blends seamlessly, acting as one, without boundaries and without fear or need to explain. We are poetry in motion. We are the poet.

It’s as if we are nodding to the Universe, acknowledging its wisdom in choosing us, in bestowing a chance at life to this very being. It’s when we are fulfilling our promise, the pact we have with life itself.

Cheating the Zone

Sadly, I don’t think we get enough of it. And the peace and power derived from visiting our zone has such appeal that we often try to recreate its essence in other ways. Unfortunately, these are often maladaptive, poor substitutes for the real thing causing more harm than good. What lies at the heart of these coping mechanisms is the desire to narrow thinking, to thin out the complexities of life and simplify what occupies the mind.

Drink a few beers or haul on a joint and watch your thinking narrow accordingly. You’re in some kind of zone alright, but it’s not a celebration of your personal power. It’s a artificial hijacking of your sympathetic system, putting your physiology into a fear state to narrow your focus to escape danger. Whereas the real zone slows your heartbeat and focuses your power, this effect increases the heartrate and scatters your competence.

And it works—soon all your thinking of is pizza, or pussy, or fighting. Or you have slowed your body down, frozen, like a deer standing on the road staring at headlights. Or the rabbit you see on the neighbours lawn, immobilized, heart beating as fast as a snare drum, hoping it blends in.

For some, TV, food, porn, gambling, cigarettes, shopping all have the same capacity to narrow focus artificially, from an external view but without engaging the internal power and talent which exists in all of us. The suicidal try to do the same thing, narrowing their thinking down so effectively to escape the pain of life until, tragically, their options run out.

External vs Internal

The eyes see out, I like to say. So much of what we do is triggered by what the eyes can take in. Like all of our gifts, sometimes our qualities can become faults. Too often we see and respond without considering what we really seek. We all need to narrow our focus, to feel alive and celebrate our gifts in the moment. Too often we seek to do this by taking a pill of some kind, by relying on the environmental, the external solution to what really can only be solved internally.

You might expect I’ll speak now of finding more adaptive ways of narrowing thinking, of recognizing it’s draw as a fundamental expression, and encouraging you to make better choices. But here’s what I was taken with this week:

Turns out we don’t need 10,000 hours to become competent at something. See, the way I just wrote that represents the impression I took from reading Malcolm Gladwell’s famous missive about learning a new skill. It’s my own nonsense and represents the way I, along with most people I know, have misinterpreted the commitment he writes about. He’s talking about elite level mastery, world class level competence.

Old Dogs, New Tricks

In a TedX talk I watched this week, Josh Kaufman talks about researching Gladwell’s misunderstood recommendation and finding it takes around 20 hours to learn a new skill adequately. Of course, I thought when I watched him, I’ve learned plenty of things in less than 10,000 hours! Kaufman breaks it down further, suggesting just 45 minutes a day for about a month will do the trick. This is a refreshing antidote to the Gladwellian notion that it takes 5 years of hard slogging to achieve respectable competence at something.

I have 20 hours. 10,000? Not so much.

In just under an hour per day for a month, you could learn a reasonable amount about something or get good enough at something to then decide if you wanted to learn more! Piano enough to play Fur Elise, a language well enough to visit a foreign country, how to weld so you can make… anything. It just goes on.

Well, there are twelve months in a year, and how many in a lifetime? If average lifespan is 80 and we take just 50 of those years as potential months of learning, that’s 600 months of opportunity. Or 600 new skills we could potentially get good enough at in our lifetime.

Oh my, where have all my excuses gone now?

I was thinking about this when one of the guys in my men’s group told us a family friend killed himself on Tuesday. Booze was a big contributing factor. These are always tragic. People will say the suicidal was selfishly passing their pain on to the living. It’s possible. Though suicidal people who have lived through attempts tell us they thought they were doing everyone a favour. There are no good answers.

Fear Works: Just Not Well

Every day I run into folks who are affected by this scourge—attempting to narrow thinking by taking short cuts—using drugs and alcohol to kickstart adrenaline and cortisol in their system, not realizing that this IS their addiction. It’s not so much the booze or drugs, it’s these fear hormones which create an emotional state providing relief from the complexity of their existence.  While in fear, your focus is on survival, a much simpler scope, aimed at satisfying much baser needs.

And food and porn and gambling all do the same thing to a degree, using intermittent reinforcement to distract and narrow focus, attempting to gain a reward by way of a shortcut. Our eyes see out. But it’s here where the maladaptive breaks down: it’s like a dog chasing its tail. We never quite catch up.

And we don’t grow. Confidence wanes further for there is no competence in these.

There are no new skills to be found in that box of donuts, the next six pack of booze, the next shopping spree at the mall or the hardware store, the next pack of smokes or cannabis dispensary. You could argue there are skills to learn from the next porn clip you watch but that really depends how long you’ve been watching, doesn’t it?

The Search

What if we all realized this is what we were trying to do: narrow thinking. It’s our natural way of shutting out all the noise. Done right, it’s escapism with benefits. And it represents the only true way of meeting the need to live fully engrossed in the moment.

All sorts of things are like this. Watch any teenager who has mastered a video game at a high level. They get into a zone and if there wasn’t a clock on the screen and levels, they’d make time stand still. Look at their eyes, and they never leave the monitor. A friend of mine use to fly fish with such concentration that rather than go ashore to take a piss, he’d let it go in his neoprene waders and rinse them out later.

Neither of these extremes will kill you. Some of the other ways we narrow thinking can and will.  Yesterday I came home from a rather challenging week. Though I’m grateful to find myself alive every morning, I’m no more inured to the pain of life than anyone else.

Rather than go blow my mind with dope or booze, I instead sought ways to just calm myself and heal. Oh, I know there’s still pot kicking around here somewhere. And the beer store is a few blocks away. Heck, I could swallow a few Percocet, bumping up my occasional quarter tablet dosage to two or three full tabs and I’d be nodding in no time.

And these would have left me hung over this morning, feeling dissonance for having compromised my pact with nature, knowing I was ungrateful for the life I have been lucky enough to win. These would have eroded my confidence, which in turn, would affect my competence. This is the truth.

And that’s what meditation is for. No wonder it’s so popular. Even if you’re not a meditator, a walk will narrow thinking just as well. Perhaps I’m at an advantage because I have a slew of cognitive behavioural strategies I can implement to narrow my thinking. Well, these have come with practice. I also slept very well last night. I had to practice that too.

Come to think of it, I had to learn to drink in a dysfunctional way too. In fact, I worked hard at it over time, just as I did with the rest of it, from dope smoking to heroin use. Geez, it took me years just to learn how to roll a joint. Cocaine definitely took some getting used to—fed my paranoia. I puked my guts out first time I did heroin.  All of these things took concentration and trial and error before I could successfully use them to… narrow focus. When measured up against all these, it’s actually easier to learn to narrow thinking internally, by far.

So try to think of those times when you entered into a zone of competence, and remember how good that felt.

These days, when things get to me and I feel like I need a break, knowing the secret, the real impetus of my condition, that what really begs my attention is just to narrow my focus, I have other choices.

And in a month, looks like I might just have one more.

You could too.

CHRISTOPHER K. WALLACE

Advisor to Men, Counsellor at Large
at ckwallace.com

©2018, all rights reserved

Kaufman’s TedX talk:

 

A Question of Spirit

Christopher K Wallace 2 Comments

an essay by Christopher K Wallace

We don’t often talk of spirit when discussing substance use. Go big or go home seems to be the order of the day: all-in belief or nothing. I suppose this might be due to our physiology. After all, our eyes see out. We should be forgiven for seeking answers to big questions out there somewhere. As if looking to the heavens will reflect some perfect truth we can use to guide our actions. There’s merit to this: it often does.

But first, let me ask you something: Have you ever been afraid? Where you momentarily had the wits scared out of you? What happens? 

Your breathing shallows, your heart rate increases, blood pressure rises and thinking narrows as you focus on escape or resolution. We all know these symptoms as classic fight or flight. Now, think of what happens after you drink a couple of beers or smoke a joint or take any other mood-altering chemical. Sure enough, it’s the same thing: breathing shallows, heart rate goes up, blood pressure rises, and most importantly, thinking narrows. Using these substances puts your physiology into a fight or flight state.

The body doesn’t distinguish between medicines; moreover, it has no idea it’s “just a joint,” or “just a couple of beers,” or “doctor prescribed.” It’s all the same, considered as a threat to your system from foreign poisons, where your body is put off-balance, out of something called homeostasis. And once in this state, the body counters by doing everything it can to restore itself back to normal, including engaging the sympathetic nervous system to help.

Perspiration, breath, heart rate, liver and kidneys are all put on overtime use. Adrenaline and cortisol course through your veins in preparation for fight or flight—or freeze or feint, the other two Fs of the 4Fs, and often overlooked when your being is under attack. Meantime, the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine provides cover for the habituated user, making them think the buzz means everything’s OK. It’s not.


Let me give you some examples.

If you think of your first experiences with any of these substances, you may recall how your body and mind reacted with fear. It could be dizziness or vomiting from alcohol use; or an intense fear from using cannabis. Some people say they don’t get off on pot the first time they try it, that’s how good your body is at countering its effects. People stick with it and adapt; eventually, they feel it. Cocaine is another one which induces intense fear. And for some people, first LSD use is the scariest thing ever, resulting in a “bad trip.”

Remember in high school being over at that one friend’s house with the cool parents, where a garage or basement became a drug zone after school or on weekends? Maybe you passed the bong around until you were all pretty much unable to speak. Oh sure, maybe someone says, “Hey dude, do you think your cat’s stoned? Do you think it knows we’re high, man?” We all thought we were buzzed; when in truth, we were immobilized by fear.

Nietzsche said, “All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the senses.”

The brain relies on what comes in from touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight to log onto our world. Experience is derived from the senses; therefore, undermined sensory inputs means compromised experience. Alcohol and drugs create a fear response in the body while using dopamine to trigger your reward centers, keeping awareness of fear symptoms at bay. Beneath the surface, a tug of war is going on while you sit and get high.

The brain and body are not separate entities. In fact, your whole physical being is the universal address of your existence. As such, feelings live as equally in the body as they do in the brain through the tenth cranial nerve. Known as the Vagus Complex, it connects your brain stem to most of your internal organs, including the heart and gut.

Feelings come from experience. Think of what kinds of feelings a baby has compared to an adult. As the baby matures, it’s capable of a variety of emotions in increasing complexity as its experience grows. And, feelings are predictive, not reactive as we often think. Much of the brain works this way. Let me explain.

Your brain predicts your sleep and wake cycle and builds up levels of melatonin to prepare you for slumber. It predicts the eventual need for food by signaling with the hormone ghrelin well in advance of meal-times.  Even your visual cortex receives inputs from the eye, but also has neurons running the other way, from the cortex, which carry predictions affecting what you see. At any moment, beneath awareness the brain predicts what state is required and scans your bank of previous experiences for matching emotions in preparation for what’s ahead.

In this way, science tells us we live emotionally and use our thinking brain to explain things after the fact. Emotions rule because they occur milliseconds faster than we can think, acting as our early warning system. The line between reality and imagination blurs during substance use, while the body tallies the score. The brain’s memory doesn’t discern between stoned or drunk and straight. It’s all just input.

After decades of smoking hashish, the last ten or more years as a nightcap to my day the way others use a glass of wine to unwind, I noticed (and for the first time really took stock of) my physical symptoms. Then I asked myself this question: “Can you be afraid and confident at the same time?” Most people’s gut answer to this is to say: no, it’s one or the other as the feelings are mutually exclusive. If you are in fear, you may still be in action, but it is unlikely to be with much confidence. It’s more likely you are going through the motions, rather than giving things your best.

Moreover, if emotions rule my actions, without me even realizing it through my databank of recalled events, I had to ask myself what compounding effect substance use was having on my confidence?  I’m talking about real confidence here, the kind gained from trial and error. Sometimes, it comes from taking a great leap of faith; other times, it arises from a series of small victories adding up to a quiet competence. Either way, it’s always hard-earned.

Math is like that, so is spelling or writing. Even riding a bicycle results in a lasting physical confidence, whereas doing something like public speaking for the first time can vault a person into a new sense of self. Think of the first time you climbed high into a tree or jumped off the high diving board at the local pool. So much of our progress in life is because of these quests to add to our personal repertoire of skills and emotional durability. Life usually gets better when we get better at life.

The times on weekends where I’d drink a half-dozen beers on a Friday or Saturday night, or both, I’d find not much got done during the day. I would also fail to connect with my wife and children in a meaningful way. The things I’d planned to do on my days off were often put off or started but never finished. Once, I built half of a fair-sized shed, became unsure of my plans, so just dismantled it. I stacked the wood behind my house, and never returned to the task. Confidence.

And small things, ordinary demands a man rises to meet during life, were not being handled with any urgency. It didn’t take much to put me off my game. I came to realize with every beer I drank, what I was really doing was sipping on fear and pissing out confidence. Every haul on a joint meant inhaling more fear and exhaling a critical part of my power.

Who needs this confidence thing anyway? Turns out, we all do. I’ve heard it said confidence is the stuff we use to turn thoughts into actions. This has wider implications. Let me ask you, “How then, do you live confidently when you regularly subject your body to a fear state which cannot be resolved with action?” In my case, when I was honest with myself, I had to admit I could not.

I’d work hard at gaining confidence, and yet, doubt would creep back into my life. It meant I didn’t invest in all the technological wonders that have arisen in my lifetime and which I could have easily participated in. It meant I took jobs which kept me safe. It also resulted in me not standing up for myself when I should have. Overall, it kept me playing small. It was two steps forward, and one step back. Sometimes, admittedly, it was just one step back. Though, I had all the trappings of the middle class, I was living a charade.

I’m not talking about occasional substance use. I’m referring to habitual use, from more than once per week to daily consumption. Under the fear-load this engenders in the body, assuredly, confidence wanes. In time, this steady assault on confidence can become something called “learned helplessness.”

That’s when you tell yourself a story about confidence. You may realize it’s for other people, something off in the distance, far from your existence. Or, more likely, it’s something we don’t talk about at all because it means we have given up aspiring to becoming something more. In a measure, we abandon our dreams.

Can you live this way and survive? Sure. You can get by. But even now you’ll realize it’s not what Mother Nature or God had in mind when you defied the odds by beating all those other sperm to the egg, when you won the race of life. Damn it. This was not supposed to be our destiny. The Universe wants more from you, from me, and confidence is key to allowing our spirit to fly, to soar with the eagles in full view of the sun.


But here’s what happens. Twenty years may go by. If you’re lucky, one day you’ll have an epiphany like I did.  You may realize you have not lived those twenty years at all. Instead, what you have really done is lived one year…twenty times. 

Let that sink in a bit. I had to soak in it for a while.

 

Why did I need this jolt of fear everyday? When I searched a little deeper, it dawned on me. I’d been creating fear like this since I was a kid. I figured out my family of origin likely set me on this path through its uneven attachments and unpredictable violence. Paradoxically, I was a fear seeker. Early on, fight or flight had carried the day for me and I survived, thereby searing its red-hot brand upon my soul. I lived by it. It meant life or death to me. If there was no fear in my life, I’d seek it out, create it out of thin air if needed. As I recalled the decades gone by, I could see a significant part of my time was spent re-enacting a deep need for fear. Imprisoned this way as a little boy, I carried these emotional shackles into adulthood.

Fact is, I meet fear at an entirely different level than most people. I have been strangely attracted to it, mostly beneath my awareness. It’s as if my body survived it before and needed to prove it could survive it again. I was stuck in a loop. Perhaps it’s why I stand up to bullies. My first question when encountering people is to unflinchingly think or say, “How can I help you.” It’s why I act best when I’m protecting my tribe, a brother’s keeper. My self-concept silently commands: “Stand aside, this is for men.” It’s because I can, capably, fearlessly.

Yet, this was the gift I’d allowed to wane over time. The difference between how I saw myself and how I really acted caused me untold dissonance. Once I understood why I continued to use drugs and alcohol, and how this diminished my confidence, the allure soon faded. I must live true and free. I have a destiny to fulfill, a pact with the universe: to let loose my spirit as a guardian to others. When honourable men use their power for good, in service of themselves and those around them, life becomes meaningful.

This, then, is the key to our freedom.

More questions I asked myself: How much of your confidence are you willing to sacrifice to keep a fear habit for another year? How much more of your spirit can you compromise? We think we have time: we don’t.

And so, it was for me. I had been using drugs and alcohol to narrow my focus. Instead of finding my personal tract, where my spirit could expand and answer the universe’s calling, I was running from it.  Narrowing my focus was a good objective, but not this way. I have experienced the zone before: it’s a place where a mighty congruence of my ability and drive and concentration allow me to feel as if I am forcing time to stand still. It’s a place of command, where my spirit lets loose and flies high. And there, fully aware now, filled with meaning from serving myself and others and connected by purpose, I am set free: powerful once more.

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. who once said, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”I say to you then: let this be one of those times.

Stretch, my brothers and sisters, and we will find each other up there.

CKWallace, Advisor to Men @ckwallace.com
©2018 all rights reserved

References:

Alcohol, aging and the stress response,  See Spencer and Hutchison (1999) Alcohol Research Health 23 (4) 272-83
And Allostatic Load, Bruce McEwen, PhD in Neuropsychopharmacology, Nature.com

(Nietzsche quote, “All credibility…”: Basic Writings of Nietzsche (2011 edition), Modern Library – ISBN: 9780307786791. Also, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, p. 134)

(Emotions live equally in the body and brain: See Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory, 2011, Norton Books ISBN 978-0-393-70700-7)

(Emotions are predictive: See Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made, 2017, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 978-0-544-12996-2.

And The brain is predictive: Diane Kwan writing in the March Scientific American issue, Self-Taught Robots, has a nice graphic about the predictive brain citing How Evolution May Work through Curiousity-Driven Development Process, Pierre Yves Oudeyer, Linda Smith is Topics in Cognitive Science, 2016)

(Holmes quote, “When a man…”, See Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table, essay series appearing in Atlantic Monthly (1857) and book (1858))

 

Christopher K Wallace, B.S.T., C.H.

Advisor to Men

© 2017 and 2018 ckwallace.com

Dedicated New Year

Christopher K Wallace 9 Comments

Birth and death are ugly things. Often, usually, there is blood, tears, great travail and prolonged suffering. It’s not pretty.

Oh sure, we humans being meaning-makers, somehow we often manage to find beauty in both of these events. Perhaps we do so out of gratitude, or more like relief. Maybe it’s hope which drives our meanings.

You might know the story of your beginning by now. Maybe it’s part of your family lore. You may have been lucky enough to have sat down with your mother or father at some point while they regaled you with the tale of your arrival.

It may have been right there and then during that little talk when you realized how special you were.  You arrived, and there were people really excited about you, just you and your new place in their lives.

One of my sisters told her now adult child she came from a “sparkle in your mama’s eye.” I gave that one top marks for the imagery alone. Who wouldn’t want to come from a sparkle in someone’s eye? It’s like magic.

 

Since you are all here, and it’s the first day of the New Year, I’d like to mention the second part of our passage through life.

For many of us, having lived life on too much processed foods, sugar, booze, grains and cigarettes while not getting enough sleep, losing our mind is what awaits us long before death.

This is my father. Three years since his wife of 62 years passed away of cancer after a three day vigil in the family home. He has been sliding since. One of my sisters is dribbling water into his mouth to quench his thirst because he couldn’t at that moment suck on a straw.

Another sister found him in the morning a couple of days ago face down on the floor of a room in his house. She and her husband live downstairs so he can stay at home. He missed the bathroom in the middle of the night and got a little lost.

Soiled, cold, pissed off and in pain, he punched my brother in law–four or five upper cuts to the jaw–when he tried to help him by picking him up. My brother-in-law is a mountain of a man. Not much an eighty-eight year old guy can do to him but hurt his pride a bit. He’s OK.

Four of my father’s five sons were on hand last night to reassure him since he’s now been hit by my father, he’s truly one of us. Welcome brother.

A third sister made the call to hospitalize my dad. We hope he’ll gather his strength and come home for another while. I bring my children there every Saturday and at just four years old, Little Howie is pretty devoted to his Grandpa Howie.

But this is the end which awaits more of us, most of us even.

For me, it’s a good reminder: there is no tomorrow; there is only today. I must live the best way I know how. We know so much about nutrition, exercise, stress and my pet subject, sleep, that there are no more compromises allowed.

And there is no banking time either. Life goes by in a flash.

No. There is nothing like death staring you straight in the face to bring home the message loud and clear.

 

My father has pneumonia and a bladder infection. He’ll probably pull through this time. After all, he has the best medical care and a half dozen adult children standing guard for him in rotation.

Someone told me in the last few days pneumonia is the saviour of many an old person with dementia. It allows them to die rather than to linger. At home, my father gets up from his bed, goes to his bathroom and to his recliner in the living room and back to bed.

Occasionally, in summer he may venture outside to say goodbye, stooped over, shuffling, enamored as my children, his grandchildren scamper about; their vitality tiring him out. He told me recently the kids come over and raise hell for a while, but once they leave, it’s rather lonesome.

Today, at the hospital I conversed with him for an hour, politely answering questions and pausing for his responses. Only, the conversation made no sense at all. He knows who I am, it’s just his mind is scattered, his dreams a part of his living reality. This is common with vascular dementia, the circumstances trigger more confusion.

 

I don’t say all this to depress you. Neither do I need to signal in some way. Nor do I need sympathy. No. I’m alright with my father’s eventual death. I’ve reconciled that while he is still alive. He’s been too big an influence on me to go anywhere; assuredly, he’ll live on in me and my children like an echo down through time.

My dear mother taught me to read when I was five years old. But I wouldn’t be writing this to you unless my father taught me to write when I was around fifty.

One day, living in another city, I responded at length to a letter he’d written me. He never quite trusted email. Anyhow, my letter came back a couple of weeks later. My father had taken his red editing pen and marked up my copy with corrections and suggestions. Intrigued, we did it again, with me incorporating his lessons, and once more he sent it back.

This continued on for a while, and soon I was ordered to send stuff double spaced so he could do his thing. I obliged.

Much later, I had gained enough confidence and enthusiasm to write and send an essay called The Striped Cat. It was a childhood tale involving a time three of his boys had run away from home. It was a true story, situated in the old neighbourhood. This got his attention. It was real writing now, not just about relating the family news. He loved it. Can you imagine?

I have all of his corrections and remarks in a file in my cabinet. A few years ago, I sent an essay and while visiting him in Ottawa for some occasion, he handed it back to me when I arrived uncorrected. He said there wasn’t anything glaring he could tell me about it that would help.

I remember that day like it was yesterday. For me, it was better than graduation.

This is a man who has spent his whole life around words. First as a cub reporter in Halifax and then as an information officer in Her Majesty’s Navy, retiring as Editor In Chief of the forces magazine of the day, The Sentinel.

A couple of months ago I wrote something and showed it to him. I’ve been toying with copywriting try and appeal to a larger audience, and it’s not my usual style of writing.

Here was my father, speed reading those pages like he was gulping water on a hot day, and peering over his glasses he asked me pointedly why I was dumbing down my sentences.  No fooling the old editor. I had some explaining to do.

I wrote a story of how my son was rescued by a soldier who cut a seatbelt from around his neck while the missus was pulled over in distress and he told me “Good writing and a story well told.” He offered no suggestions or criticisms. I relaxed.

Can I say this? He’s my biggest fan. Of course, I can tell you this.

I grew up with books on every wall of the house. There was a bookcase in the kitchen for a while. Not only do I like to read, it’s as if I must. And now, thanks to my father, I have sort of caught the writing bug. My family generously named me their Clan Bard and Poet in Battle, mostly in encouragement. But still… it’s pretty cool.

This is the year I will honour my father and write more.  In all the years that follow, should I be lucky enough to live them, I write for my pops.

Though just recently, he’s unable to read anymore. You can imagine what that might be like if you’re a reader. He’s got more than 80 years of reading under his belt—thousands of books—and he’s hanging up the glasses. He read at a blistering pace of a book per week for most of his life.

And now, surrounded by books; not a word to be read. I suspected he wasn’t reading the Saturday Edition of the National Post I’d bring over. Finally, a few weeks ago he admitted he couldn’t see the words correctly. They were all jumbled he remarked, without a hint of complaint.

I declare this year is dedicated to writing essays I can read to my father.

I’ll write one per month to the best of my ability. These I will recite to him until he can hear me no more. That’s because he’s going deaf too. But I think just knowing I’m there reading to him something I wrote would be more important to him than the words themselves.

I wonder what will spark your imagination in this coming year?

Whatever it may be, here’s wishing you find inspiration and perseverance in 2018. May your lives be joyous and grateful, disciplined and without loneliness.

Most of all: may you waste no days and be filled with love all year long.

Happy New Year

Christopher K Wallace

© 2018 all rights reserved
ckwallace.com

 

WOW. I just turned 60 years old.

Christopher K Wallace 12 Comments

 

I want to thank everyone for wishing me a happy birthday. It’s very kind of you to take time from your day to send good wishes.

So what’s a guy do on his 60th? Well, here’s how my day went.

First thing in the morning I slapped my woman’s ass. Now before you get too excited, know it is part of my morning ritual most days. Yesterday was no different. I want her to know the man she chose is still just as interested in her as the day I first got to slap her ass a dozen years ago. To me, she’s not so much a mother and wife; she is my woman first.

I made the bed and opened the window curtain to look at the scenery and said, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

What I really mean by “Lord” is “universe” but I don’t sweat the semantics. Lord is just easier to say.

I’ve done this for 30+ years. It reminds me that I got to wake up breathing; whereas, I know so many others did not. That sets my tone for my entire day.

 

Once I was done that little ritual, I shuffled off downstairs, attracted by the noise coming from my 4 and 6 year old kids… and the smell of percolated coffee.

Is there a better way to drink coffee? I’m not so sure. Adding to the glorious aroma is that I know by drinking a little coffee every day, I will likely prolong my life. I’m playing the odds and, as a lifelong tea-drinker, thank the missus for the chance to share another morning ritual with her.

On my birthday, I got little presents from my daughter, cards and scribbles. It’s funny how she continues to teach me about love, something my gal pals said would happen. Meanwhile, my four year old boy ignored me.

 

Then, I changed a Facebook group to Powerful Men’s Group—Physical, Spirit, People and Business. These are four facets of a man’s existence I think are needed to find balance. Neglecting one area causes problems in the others. I may be Advisor to Men but I’m also Counselor at Large. Guys are invited to join by finding us on Facebook groups. https://www.facebook.com/groups/powerfulmen/

During my morning appointments, I got to meet with a butcher who has been in business for decades in the Ottawa area. He took the time to show me his complete operation, the adjoining coffee shop, proudly naming off the varieties of fish he carries, and how strategic he was about the layout of his building and its parking lots.

He told me about how his father sensed trouble back home when Joe was a little boy and moved his family out of the home for safety one night. Returning the next day, the home was trashed, victimized by a rival faction as sectarian violence overtook the country. Dad decided then and there the family was leaving Lebanon. Canada took them in as it does so many.

It’s hardly surprising the Lebanese are described as descendants of the Phoenicians, the great Mediterranean trading empire a millennium before Christ.

And their people have adapted to their new home, assimilating seamlessly into Canadian life. Even one of my brothers married a young gal of Lebanese descent. I call her FSIL, for favourite-sister-in-law. Don’t tell the others.

Conversations are a big part of my life. When I was a younger man and struggling with my demons, I didn’t take the time to get to know and appreciate the people around me. I do now. Canada has 20% of her population born elsewhere. An opportunity to visit the world without ever leaving the country.

After leaving the butcher shop/grocery, I stopped by a Tim Horton’s. I stood in line next to big guy in work clothes, maybe early twenties, when a man of about 40 shuffled in and went past us and ordered. I looked a little puzzled at the fellow beside me and said, “I guess he really needed a coffee.” He answered with a shrug, “Its Christmas, let him go ahead.”

I thought that was a nice way to think and told him so. We had a conversation about giving right there on the spot.

I told him about having a very rough day once and ordering a coffee from a drive-through after finally getting off the highway. When I came to pay, the teller told me the guy in front had already paid. I looked up to see the guy pulling away with a wave out his driver window.  I’ve never forgot that random act of kindness, telling the young man how he set a good example of tolerance.

Since it was my birthday, I ducked into one of those Anytime Fitness places to exercise. Recovering from a double hernia operation last month, I’ve become a little flabby around the belly and so, on my sixtieth, I snapped a picture as a way to hold myself accountable.

Any workout day is a payday of sorts. How nice is that?

Learner is my number one strength. If you are a learner, you must also teach. So mid-afternoon I did one of my regular overseas advisor calls. It is gratifying to work with people and see them improve over weeks and months. My clients teach me as much as I teach them. We are here to learn from each other.

Then it was off to gather the children and missus to go buy her a car.

Missus is good with money, bless her heart. I’d never entered a Walmart until we met. So we went to a Hyundai dealership to pick up an Elantra. She picked the colour. Says with my red truck and her blue car, we have both sides of the heart covered. It was deep stuff from missus; she’s our heart.

She’s thrilled about the heated seats and steering wheel. I think the back-up camera with in-dash display sold her.  The dealership wouldn’t give her much for her old car so, on her own, she got online and sold it to a guy who needed the motor. When we delivered it, I made him give her the money.

As I was about to leave the dealership, the GM came by and thanked me, before the team started grilling me about my card, Advisor to Men.

With a little prompting, I gave them a pep talk, leaving them empowered, standing taller and more assured about returning home to their wives and families.  It’s one of my favourite things to do.

By the time missus got home with the car, she’d figured out we could save $300 per month on fuel if I used it for business. It’s a good match this marriage thing. I may end up driving it more than she will.

She cooked me a steak and we had a cake. I blew out six candles with the kids. Howie refused the cake as he said it wasn’t his birthday. I think his last one really made an impression. Charlotte stood by at the light switch, all giddy until ma got the candles lit.

Of course, every year I get a pair of slippers. I like wearing slippers at home. One reason is I don’t like socks with holes in them. Slippers cut down on the wear and tear. Seems to me socks are already on the endangered list through the travails of ordinary laundry without adding to the misery by wearing holes in them unnecessarily.

Missus thinks if socks are going to go missing anyway, you might as well wear the hell out of them while you can. There’s a certain strength to that logic I can’t quite counter.

I decreed a couple of birthdays ago that everyone gets a present at birthdays. I’m doing my part for socialism, by appealing to the collective good in people. I want my kids to know “we are all in this together.” I have lived the “law of the jungle” both inside and outside of prison. Not interested.

Find it early or find it late, we must all find love.

Howie got elf slippers, Charlotte slippers shaped like bunnies. Missus and I got sheepskin looking things. We took turns showing off our new footwear to each other. Both kids got to wear them at school today for pajama day.

Turning 60 has me thinking about my future. I’m in OK shape and mentally, I’m at the top of my game. However, it’s at this stage of life when the clichés start to really sink in. Suddenly I find myself wondering about things I’d never considered before.  Read bullshit stuff like, “is this my destiny?”

It’s that Rumi guy, I suppose, talking about a precious red ruby inside me and all that. Then he writes “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.” Man, I’ve spent 30 years restoring my reputation, not always successfully. I think I get what he means though.

But he goes on to say “when you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Indeed, I do. I get that. I have been in my zone many times.

It’s how I feel when I am writing sometimes. I confess I’ve never had writer’s block. I often erase whole pages of writing and just write more. It’s also how I feel when I have the honour of teaching about something I know to someone in need. It’s how I feel around my family.

It was my mother who taught me to read at age five, but my father who taught me to write at age 50. I have practiced for ten years then. It’s time to put Scrivener back on this machine and write more.

I’ve also subscribed to Hyatt’s Focus Planner system for 2018. I don’t know about you but the most productive years of my life I used a day planner to manage my time. I’ve tried the digital formats and it’s just not clicking. I have been drowning in inefficiencies and I’m throwing in the towel. Analog is me.

After 14 years in newspaper sales, I should have known better. Print is still king over here. There’s a geographical quality to letters on paper not available as easily in digital.

As of a couple of months ago, after an absence of two years or so, I even get the National Post delivered to my home. Dad often gets my Saturday edition when I bring the kids to visit him and feed him lunch. There’s a certain comfort to sitting in my office and rummaging through the daily paper, though it’s yesterday’s news.

So that’s it. Turning 60 isn’t so bad. It’s been a great experience because I’m honoured to slowly morph into a version of an elder in my community. It’s a job no one asks for but each of us must do graciously. Most of all, this milestone for me is a great reminder to put into practice lessons learned over a lifetime.

To that end, I’m back into my stock trading account in the New Year, searching for good companies to invest in long term. I very much admire Phil Town and the way he freely teaches thousands how to invest according the same Benjamin Graham principles followed by Buffett and others. I met Phil a couple of times years ago and I appreciate his dedication to helping others secure their futures.

But this weekend, I’m tempted to take a little of that cash I have lying around in my digital account and buy Bitcoin. Perhaps I’m just following Rumi again, by being ready to “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

After all, Rumi also says “there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”

Kiss the earth indeed. Big manly hugs and kisses to you all.

Christopher K Wallace

©2017 ckwallace.com

5 Love Languages Part Three

Christopher K Wallace 1 Comment

Something like 70-80% of divorces are initiated by the woman. Google why women divorce and these articles will show up.

– The Good Men Project article lists infidelity, boredom, fantasizing about others, wanting equality of work, and women’s expectations for more as main reasons.

– A collective Huffpost therapists piece lists being taken for granted; having the same argument over and over; not being satisfied with their sex life; not enough talking and connecting emotionally; and having outgrown their partner and seeing divorce as the only way of putting themselves first again.

– Divorcesource.com says it’s often about losing connection when the kids are grown; a realization that life is finite and slipping by, especially in middle age where caring for elderly parents brings new stresses that often test a couple’s coping skills.

Just summarizing this sampling tells us something of what might be going on. Connection is our greatest need. For most men, it’s enough to be respected let alone be loved.  Love’s meaning is different things to different people.

And it is here where 5LL and its ilk are wholly inadequate. For it’s not about love at all. Leave love to the poets I say, the secret to good marriages has more to do with lust.

 

Listen to me here: everyone wants to be someone’s chosen. And in most cases, it is women who do the choosing and orchestrate things so you end up pursuing her.

Nature affords preciousness to women not accorded to men. She has twenty of years of reasonably safe fertility; you have twice that or more. There’s a 90 year old farmer in Rajasthan who fathered a little girl in 2007 at age 90.

And yet, it is you she chose, for your power and your ability to conquer her soul. And for this, she has given herself completely to you, revealing bits of her mystery in the process.

Just because she has children, and perhaps a job and other responsibilities, does not diminish, in the least, who she is as a sexual being. Of all the men she could have chosen, you were it. It was your power as a man which gave you access to her body and mind, to her inner world.

This is what captivated you, captivated you both in each, your power and her mystery. This must always be honoured.

Each time I take my woman sexually, the clock resets to zero. The pursuit then starts all over again: the teasing, the flirting, the complimenting and the rest of the way we play the game between us. I date her for the first time again and again.

Though we realize we’ll give in to each other in time, it is never taken for granted. I must earn her once more; just the same way I did when we first dated. That is a truer basis for the pair-bond cycle and one which all men should keep in mind.

She is your Queen.

Missus and I did the 5LL test. What we found was most of the questions were things we already did. On any given day I could have answered differently to the 30 questions. She said the same thing.

Sometimes, I could use a pat on the back, other times a little help with a chore. Whatever. No one needs to tell us we need to encourage each other, help each other out, hold and hug and love each other physically or spend time together. So many questions she said she wanted to answer “both” but had to choose one.

She went Quality Time 10; Physical Touch 8; Words of Affirmation 7; Acts of Service 5; Receiving Gifts 0.

I went Acts of Service 9; Physical Touch 9; Words of Affirmation 8; Quality Time 5; Receiving Gifts 0.

Looks like today I needed to spend time with her, say nice things and touch her. She sure liked it when I accompanied her to the phone store to upgrade her I-phone this morning, entertaining the kids in the truck for an hour while she took care of her business.

When she finally finished she was pretty impressed I had gotten her a coffee at the McDonalds while we waited. Does that count as a gift according to Chapman? I suppose it’s at least partly the little things, you see.

We might take the test in a month and get new results, but following the usual, significance for men, emotions for women, generality. Obvious to me perhaps but I concede not to everyone.

As it was, my little girl has stomach flu and has been vomiting all day. It was a bit of an “all hands on deck” time as we both attended to our sick child, her taking the lead. As the baby whisperer, I backed her up and put our four year old boy to bed.

The other implication of 5LL is that you can’t figure out how to treat your lady well on your own. That you are so clueless something as basic as encouragement, hanging out together, helping each other and remembering to get her a coffee is beyond you.

In my opinion, it’s a bit of a red herring. The real issue is to treat that woman of yours like you did when you first met and leave 5LL as a cute Facebook post without discounting it altogether.

Better still, remember Gottman’s 7 principles and dream together. Often.

Maybe you have children or are planning to, or maybe you don’t. Each other’s investment in rearing offspring will factor in your attraction to each other. I know I based my acquiescence to missus at least a little bit on how she spoke about her own upbringing.

Above all, remember your relationship or family is a consequence of your personal power as a man. It’s what gets you access to her mystery.

Stay powerful, she needed this from you then and needs this from you now.

The secret to relationships is to put lust first.

Do that and love will take care of itself.

Christopher K Wallace

© 2017 all rights reserved
ckwallace.com

If you have any  questions or would like to work with me, you can find information under advisement options on the main page. Thank for reading along.

5 Love Languages Part Two

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment


According to attachment theory proponent and developer of Emotions Focused Therapy, Professor Sue Johnson from Ottawa University, there are two main inquiries we need answered in a relationship. Are you there? Are you with me? These both must be answered affirmatively.

To me, the first question speaks to the feminine need for presence, listening, and being there fully for your partner. The second question is perhaps more masculine, referring to being on the same team, and having each other’s back.

Answer these two questions in the positive and you’ve got a good basis for a love that will last.

I think most women are irresistibly attracted to men of power. Your status in your woman’s eyes is a key marker of her happiness in the relationship. Less important is how your power manifests itself, whether you are the boss, well-off financially, intelligent enough to show potential, physically strong or even the bad-ass type. Power signals to a woman certainty. If she needs it, you’ll be able to provide, protect etc.

Men are attracted to women for looks first, and stay with her out of loyalty. Part of that loyalty involves how well she’ll mother his children if that’s in the cards.  If she’s loyal, she becomes his standard. When he thinks naked, he sees only her.

It is a testament to his adaptability that a man can learn to love almost anyone when the conditions are right. Furthermore, a man with a loyal woman by his side will defend her to the death.

I think this fits Johnson’s two queries. She needs his presence and power; he needs her looks and loyalty, and there is some of each of it in both.

In my decades of observing couples and living my own relationships, I note there’s something of a well-honed bullshit detector in most women. After all women are generally more empathetic and better at reading emotions on a man’s face. If a woman senses a man is being weak for no good reason, she will either rub salt in the open wounds of his weakness or hold him in silent contempt.

At this point, sex is pretty much out. Sound familiar?

Over two-thirds of conflict in a marriage is “perpetual” according to John Gottman. He’s the guy who can watch a couple talk for 15 minutes and predict with over 90% accuracy if they will break up within five years. The rest of conflict, “resolvable” stuff, is challenging but small change comparatively… so savour those communication victories for the sweetness they are.

In his book, After the Honeymoon, psychologist Dan Wile says you are inevitably choosing a set of unsolvable problems for the next decades when you choose your partner. The problems you choose are the ones you can cope with.

So how do you survive this dead-end? You live, you learn, and most of all, you laugh about it.

I like to put stuff back where I find it, or keep things in predictable places. Saves time and makes me more efficient. I don’t want to spend my life relearning when I do regular things.

Keeping our stuff in the same places is less important to the missus. Not a priority. It’s sometimes like a treasure hunt to find stuff in the house. While mildly annoying at best, a bit frustrating at other times, it’s not a deal breaker.

I chuckle at her, wondering what she was thinking when she tucked my stuff away to the point where I think I’ve lost it for good. When I find it again, it’s like a reunion. Over the 12 years I’ve been with her, she’s gotten better. Just like I’ve gotten better with money under her influence, though still working on it.

No complaints here, I don’t want to jinx the progress.

Want to read a good book about how to make marriages work? I recommend The Seven Principles by the aforementioned Gottman. When approaching a solvable problem, follow these steps (my notes added):

  1. Start-up soft rather than harsh. (How many times does flying off the handle not work for us to learn not to do it?).
  2. Learn to use repair attempts. (Take a shot at a solution as soon as possible. Then, listen more carefully and try again).
  3. Monitor your body for how tense you’re becoming. (Emotion is predictive, not reactive, and from interoception, experience derived concepts and social reality).
  4. Learn to compromise (make a deal; you can make those right? Give a bit; get a bit; look for the win-win).
  5. Tolerate each other’s imperfections (they become endearing after a time. Who wants to live with a carbon copy of themselves?)

Gottman contends it’s a myth you have to resolve all your marital conflicts to survive and thrive in your marriage. The key is to be constantly working things out good-naturedly.

The other big key is to dream together. Pillow talk might be a bit cliché but a version of it is essential in all marriages. In fact, Gottman’s principle number 1 is the idea of a love map.  Nothing beats dreaming together for big picture peace.

He follows it with 2. Nurture fondness and admiration; 3. Turn toward each other rather than away; 4. Let your partner influence you; 5. Solve solvable problems; 6. Overcome gridlock; and 7. Create shared meaning.

This bit about turning towards each other is a good point, also fitting Sue Johnson’s and her Emotions Focused Therapy briefly mentioned above. For example, rather than a guy getting freaked out about his gal’s relationships at work, it might be better to stand in front of her, gently touch her shoulders with both hands, look her in the eye with a slight smile and tell her you don’t want to lose her.

Turning towards each other sort of fits Chapman’s Love Languages. Knowing what missus appreciates just as she knows what I like can help make a relationship sail along more smoothly. That alone is not enough.

How do you overcome gridlock, those times when you’re both going nowhere on an issue? Gottman says you must be willing to explore hidden, root cause stuff.

It’s by uncovering and sharing the significant personal dreams you have for your life, as these unrequited dreams are most often at the core of what makes people stuck. He goes further to say endless argument is symbolic of some deeper difference crying out for attention before you can move on together.

So talk about your dreams, your aspirations together over a longer timeline.

Knowing this is such a precious gift.

Christopher K Wallace
©2017 all rights
ckwallace.com

5LL part three coming up. You’ll want to stick around for this.

5 Love Languages   Part One.

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

5 Love Languages? Give me a break.

I ask you: what kind of unfounded sorcery is this preoccupation with love languages?

It seems wherever I turn of late, in whatever forum, as soon as relationships come up someone asks the question: “what’s her love language?”

My, my, how far we men have fallen in just one generation.

Why in the hell would I want to know my wife’s love language? Does such a thing exist?  I have no intention of anticipating her every whim and desire trying to tailor my approach so that I become her best girlfriend in the process.  I know that’s an impossible dream. Wrong guy.

First out in 1995, Chapman’s book was rightly ignored for almost a decade and a half and did not take off until 2009. I’m not sure why… it took off at all. Oprah?

Only now, in addition to the original work, he’s also got versions for men, for singles, for teenagers, and for children, along with a 5 love languages book summary and a 30 day minute devotional. It may be out of control.

And all that’s in addition to another half dozen relationship books with his name on them. I’m pretty sure they’ll be an improvement. He’s an enterprising sort our Mr. Chapman, a marketing genius.

The author contends if only you knew your spouse or partner’s “preferred” approaches, magic between you will surely ensue. Fill her “Love Tank” by doing essentially what you do anyway, common expressions of devotion and appreciation for each other, only now named languages of love.

 

A kindly but fully indoctrinated soul on a post recently explained how he’s distilled Chapman’s game into the acronym CHAAP, with each letter corresponding to a 5LL equivalent , as in:

Compliments: 5LL Words of Affirmation

Help: 5LL Acts of Service

Attention: 5LL Quality Time

Affection: 5LL Physical Touch

Presents: 5LL Receiving Gifts

Is there research to back any of his claims up? Not much. The name is suspicious. (“You bought me a car? Now you’re talking my language, honey!!!”) Huh?

I suppose the good news is if your gal is the Receiving Gifts type, you can decide on the spot if that’s going to work for you longer term. (“I thought you wanted presence not presents, dammit!”) Everyone likes a gift, no exceptions. Duh..

Moreover, how many kids have a Love Language that includes Receiving Gifts I wonder? Isn’t that how Santa was created? Isn’t trading and receiving goods an imbedded trait in a culture dependent on each other for survival?

I think the idea of relying on 5 Love Languages as anything but a novelty pop quiz is weak. It’s the same kind of silly exercise we see on Facebook walls all the time. My friends and I find these amusing for the parts of them that are slightly true.

For example, only recently, I found out my dog personality in just a few moments of analysis: “You know about your loved ones’ needs very well and attack anyone who hurts them. The only way to get away from your power and strength is to never cross you. You’re as loving and as deadly as a Rottweiler.”

(Appeals to my protective instinct as a father and over-exaggerates the rest of it but I’ll take it on a slow Internet day).

Then I found out I was 31% undate-able, and 69% date-able. (Don’t remind my missus of what she already knows).

Oh, and I have an asshole quote: “I’m not an asshole. I am actually one of the nicest people you will ever meet. You’re just pissed because I can see through your bullshit.”

(I help people see through their stories and rarely piss people off doing it).

I’d put Chapman’s theoretical foundation on love languages in about the same category as these: cute, entertaining, and perhaps helpful to a degree, but casting a wide net with limited foundation.

Seems to me Chapman is taking obvious heuristic and repackaging it as if it’s the Shangri la of relationships, an ultimate panacea for what ails marriages, men, teens, and children.

And, well, everyone else too by the time he’s done. My advice is to skip the books and take the online test one time. That will tell you all you ever need to know.

I figure it’s only a matter of time before pictures start appearing of gullible souls flashing bookshelves with Chapman’s Complete Collection, all nicely arrayed by order of importance (or half read).

Anyone who studies these things knows an approach like the 5 LL is at best a way of getting people talking, and, at worst, a stretch into balderdash.

Should you try and be more sensitive to your partner’s needs? Duh. Does that need an answer? Should we try to understand each other in general? Again, stupid question. In what some call the age of empathy, this is yet another example of empathy run amok.

And that’s the problem with empathy in general. In a recent book, Yale University professor Paul Bloom cautions us by saying “if you are absorbed in the suffering of others, you’re less able to help them because achieving goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.”

Better to have something like compassion, or a version of cognitive empathy. That is, as Bloom continues, the “capacity to understand what’s going on in other people’s head, to know what makes them tick, what gives them joy and pain, what they see as humiliating or ennobling.”

Right about now you might be thinking, “Aha! That’s exactly what 5LL does!” Well, yes and no.

It’s just that 5LL is like the Myers-Briggs test given out all over corporate America: replication is weak and unreliable.

One day you’re an ESFI and a month later you’re an MBTI. In the same way, people’s life contexts change, and circumstances and maturity over time mean trivial preferences like those found in 5LL no longer hold up. They are a lousy way to go about things except on a very short term basis.

Relationships, and especially the differences between men and women, are challenging enough without imposing a “here-today, gone-tomorrow” rule of preferences, set like a trap to go off when you least expect it. What guy needs that aggravation? (“But I thought you liked chocolates sweetie? I’m on a diet asshole!”)

As human beings we are categorizers and meaning-makers. 5LL is a lot like following the Horoscopes: a little obvious bullshit for everyone.

Stay tuned. In 5LL parts two and three, I’ll speak to what really works in a relationship.

Christopher K Wallace
©2017 ckwallace.com all rights reserved

Need help with this stuff? You can reach me at ckwallace.com under advisement options

ALL SAINTS DAY

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 


Today is All Saints Day in the Catholic and related traditions. It’s a day to remember those who have preceded our departure from this world. It’s a day to remember the dead.

I recall clearly the first time I came across this event. It was some thirty years ago when I was first in recovery from severe addictions and a life on the streets. Though no doubt I’d been trained as an altar boy to attend the service each November, my youthfulness did not allow me to take in how profound the day really was. A decade or so later it was different.

And by on the streets I don’t mean I was homeless. Far from having no place to live, I had many. In fact, one year I had thirteen addresses. Try getting your taxes done chasing mail at that many places. That may have been the year I stopped filing for a while.

No, on the street wasn’t a reference to no place to live. It just meant a place other than jail.

I was out on my own at age 15. My father suffered burnout at his job and decided there wasn’t room under the same roof for two roosters. Since it was his roof, I was out. What followed was more than a decade and a half of decline, a descent from living in a rooming house and holding a job to eventually living completely off the avails of drug trafficking.

I remember my room on Gilmour Street clearly. Drab and dreary, I had used furniture and a two burner hot plate stove. No fridge, so I put my milk for tea out on the window sill in winter’s cold to keep, subsisting on Clarke’s Stew and Kraft dinner, peanut butter and jam when I could. More than once I had to kick down the door of the communal bathroom in the middle of the night and evict the rubbies holed up there, one curled up drunk in the oversized bathtub, another on the floor in front of the toilet, whilst they protested my disturbing their sleep.

Though that room cost me only $13 per week, I often panhandled in front of the Hitching Post tavern at Bank and Gilmour. Every Wednesday, I’d take the #1 Bank and Heron to my father’s home to report in and get my stipend of ten dollars, my allotment until age 16. I had the wrong clothes and a big chip on my shoulder, drifting from job to job. From making sewer pipes to working jackhammer on a road crew to warehouse work at a cleaning supply place and a swimming pool supplier. I went through many jobs. I lacked structure after dropping out of school and losing touch with all my friends and family.

It was also a time of counter culture, where I overturned my religious roots while the Vietnam War and Nixon’s white house played out on the airwaves. There was a certain nihilism to the times along with the threat of an imminent nuclear attack during the cold war’s prolonged stalemate. I didn’t expect to see age thirty. That was also the consensus among my peers.

After meeting new big brothers out on the street to replace the ones I had left behind, I drifted into drugs. I entered the black market trade just as Canada’s immigration policy opened up its borders to influences from around the world.

 On any given Friday, you could walk down Montreal Road in Vanier (a square mile of crooks we called it) and buy the best of any of drug producing country. Ottawa was “hash capital” we often said, fed primarily through the port of Montreal. The Edgewater and Mapes in Pointe Claire were key points of contact while the influx of immigrants to Ottawa, descendants of Phoenician traders from the Mediterranean, facilitated things so that a full complement of the world’s drug offerings were available.

Branded hashish like Black Pakistani, Green Moroccan, Blonde, Brown and Red Lebanese, water-pressed Kashmiri, and the strongest Afghani from Mazar Sharif could be had from peddlers accosting your walk every few yards along the route. For more, you’d go just off the main drag and down a few steps to the basement tavern La Broue, where you could buy anything in any quantity. There the guys would all lift the table and reach under its center and pull out bags of quarter pounds of everything available.

My rule was if I stuck with hash, I’d never go wrong. I had good intentions. Ten years later I had been carrying a gun for many years and was actively dealing harder chemicals, fully immersed in the criminal element. That’s the problem with this sort of thing. The fistfights and taking sides in informal gangs as a teenage punk soon give way to the serious gun play of adults fighting life and death over turf as an organized crew.

Sure I did some time for shooting people and was shot in return. I’ve been hit with ball bats and hit back. I took knifings and broken bones in stride. I gave as good as I got.

But this one day I sat in a little Anglican church on James Street, not far from where I had started my life on the street a decade and a half earlier. If only I had been able to foresee the future I was about to live, but it doesn’t work that way. I was in church trying a version of the religion I’d been brought up on. It was Christianity and I was prepared to give it another shot.

That day the priest gave a little speech about the dead, about the importance of remembering on this special day reserved for them. We were invited to think of their names, to reflect on their lives and departure to a better place, and to light a candle and say a prayer for their souls. I knew I had lived, survived, where many others had not. This weighed on me deeply.

Daydreaming away in my pew, I began to think of all the people I’d known who were no longer with us. I began to count how many candles I’d have to light, asking myself, should I light one for each of them?

I thought of Tommy, shot in the back a few blocks away escaping police, he dies while jumping the fence in what was coincidentally my sister’s backyard. Tommy and I had peeled potatoes in prison, where he used to sing in a high falsetto, “Big boys, they don’t cry aye aye” and make me piss myself laughing.  Speaking of pissing, he told me once “You know something Chris, a cold beer on a hot summer’s day is like little angels pissing on the end of my tongue.” That’s always stuck with me as the most apt description ever. I’ve thought of Tommy often in summer since.

I thought of Dave who died the day before he got out of prison. He was this handsome dude with Popeye arms who had been my partner for a while. He’d rob banks and I’d drive and we’d deal drugs and he’d do rips. He had a lazy eye and had an amazing insight to how the street worked. It was he who helped me escape after I’d been shot and stumbled out into his Lincoln. He first thought I was over-amping on some really good shit, until I showed him I was plugging a hole in my chest with my finger to prevent the air from hissing out. He apologized as he dropped me off at the Riverside, telling me he was sure I understood he couldn’t stick around. By then all I could do was nod in agreement as each breath filled my lungs with more blood, kneeling on the ground before the emergency doors while he peeled off as attendants rushed out to get me. Dave didn’t live through the getting out party thrown for him by the guys in Collins Bay Pen.

I thought of young Mikey, who died while sitting in a chair in my living room while I slept in the bedroom. He showed up one night with his partner to pay off a drug debt. When I told them no more hash until Monday, they wanted to party. My gal and I and another couple were doing heroin. Mike and his partner were chippers and had done it plenty of times. I told them to help themselves and they did. At one point, I advised Mike’s spoon was too full and took some of the Persian Brown heroin out. He may have added more when I wasn’t looking. While I was in the bedroom nodding off with my gal, the other couple and Mikey’s partner let him die right in front of them. He was cold and blue in the morning. What a waste, he was such a good kid.

I thought of Greg, who was part of the couple there that night. He ended up getting busted for heroin and was facing prison. His girlfriend started dating one of the narcs on the team that investigated him and he spiraled into depression. He had this really nice red Trans-Am he let me drive whenever I wanted. We lost touch after his bust but one day, just before he was to start his sentence, he drove that car into his mother’s garage and left the engine running. She found him, cherry red lips and all, dead and cold.

I thought of Charlie, a good old boy from up the valley in Pembroke, son of a cop. Chuck was handsome and had a winning smile with brown curly hair, an improved Gino Vanelli look to him. He was funny and a brother to me. But he was a wild man: fast cars and fast women, and the drugs and booze that went with it. He died on Conroy Road after hitting a train in the fog in the wee hours. With him in the pickup was a gal who was getting married the next day and another dude, all gone in a fiery death. The debris went up the tracks several hundred yards.

  

My list went on and on. I sat there a long time after mass was over, taking time to think of the dozens of people who had perished from what was really drugs and booze. Sure, some were shot enforcing for others, for revenge, even under contract, but all were related to the drug trade. I’m not sure if making drugs legal back then would have helped any of my friends. All I knew is I had lived where many had not.  Call it survivor guilt if you like.

It’s been several decades since the day I sat in on this Christian tradition we call All Saints. If we believe we are all forgiven our trespasses while here, and eventually make it into the Kingdom of Heaven, then the occasion has even greater meaning.

Something tells me if this were even only partly true, I’d have to spend some time in purgatory first. In fact, I expect I’d see many of my friends there, still doing time, never having been able to rectify things while alive to make it through the Pearly Gates. I’m not opposed to a reunification.

If you call me tomorrow and ask me how I am, it’s likely I’ll tell you the same thing I tell most people when I’m asked. It may sound flippant, or a little woo woo for some, part of that positive thinking personal growth overreach we commonly see lately. But each day, I wake up and find myself breathing I consider it a gift. It’s what I’ll tell you tomorrow: I got to wake up and give it another shot at life. Many didn’t make it overnight.

Though I’ve long abandoned a strict commitment to religion, I still appreciate many of its charms. I respect half of us are probably hard-wired to believe in a power greater than ourselves. Indeed, for a long time I’ve co-opted a Christian prayer, giving it an agnostic twist. I like to say each morning, “This is the day the universe has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

I know that alone is probably grounds for a sentence to purgatory. I’ll take my chances.


It is my little invocation, the manner in which I set myself to gratefully take on the challenges of the day.  See, my intentions are still good.

But there is something to be said for the traditions of the church. Its great Cathedrals, its ornate décor, the high ceilings with frescoes of various biblical scenes. The chanting and singing together as a congregation, the rituals of birth, marriage, death and burial. There is that sense of awe, the idea that some things are best left unsaid, or that cannot be expressed with words alone.

This is a calling within us all I think. I feel the same way when I look up to the clear night sky and allow my mind to drift among the stars. Words don’t have the kind of reach to adequately describe what we can contemplate in that instance. All things are possible is the message I get.

And there is reflection, a gentle reminder to think of those whom have passed before us, however their journey ended. We do it to honour not only their memory, but also to reaffirm our own commitment to this existence.

Perhaps then, it’s a day for all souls, the living and the dead.  This is worth remembering. After all, each of us lose cherished ones in our time here. 

Today, I share my soul cake with you.

Christopher K Wallace
©2017 ckwallace.com 

_________________

All Saints’ Day

All Saints’ Day, also known as All Hallows’ Day, Hallowmas, Feast of All Saints, or Solemnity of All Saints, is a Christian festival celebrated in honour of all the saints, known and unknown. (from Wiki)

Roman Catholicism; Eastern Orthodoxy; Anglicanism; various Protestant denominations;

All Hallows Day, Solemnity/Feast of All Saints

White (Western Christianity); Green (Eastern Christianity)

Church services, praying for the dead, visiting cemeteries, eating soul cakes November 1 

WHO IS SHANE CHAFE?

Christopher K Wallace 8 Comments

 

Where have all the real men gone? That’s a question that comes up often lately.

Not just from women. No. I worked hedging farm energy costs all last winter and met a lot of real men. Tough and grizzled career dairy farmers who knew precisely their role lamenting the same thing: where are all the “real men?”

Out east of Ottawa, all the way to the Quebec border the French farmers call our feminized men “les hommes rose.” Pink Men.

I get this query about good men from women practically every day. Just last week I did business with a formidable lady at an iconic city establishment. A divorcee, we got to talking: she’d be a catch, a real tour de force. “I’m not giving up” she says. “There’s a real man out there for me.”

And there is. I’ll keep my eye out for her.

It’s a confusing time to be male. First we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. Then the vote was expanded so all men got a say in how government is run. Reward for the privilege of dying for your people I suppose, which men have been doing forever.

After the Second World War, women’s enrollment in universities rose each year, to where there are now more female graduates than male. Laws were rightfully changed so that inequalities in the workplace were addressed.

Only now, it’s gone bananas. Men can’t open their mouths without risking offending someone and being sent off to sensitivity training. Or worse….

Men have been stifled like no other time in history. The very culture men created has turned on them and is now biting them in the ass.

Qualities in men revered for all time are obscured by a system devouring itself from within. It’s counterproductive.

Where are the Brave? The Courageous? The Decisive? The Protectors?

I’ll tell you where they are: hidden among us. Perhaps a little subdued of late, but every once in a while a crisis occurs and some exceptional man reminds us of the ideal.

Today missus was returning from a shopping excursion with two kids strapped into car seats in the second bench of our Honda Pilot. Behind the passenger seat sat our little girl Charlotte, behind missus was our boy Howie. All children are little miracles but in Howie’s case, maybe a little more so.

Having spent his first six months at Sick Kids, he’s been in and out since. He’s doing better now. If scrambled eggs, mashed squash, pieces of pork fat and the odd cheese and skinned apple are considered, then half his diet is solid foods.

My father had five sons. He had no namesake among his grandchildren until that little boy came along. I tease dad it’s because he was a drinker as a young man and it’s taken this long to forgive him. Dad can take a joke; he’s been a teetotaler for over a half century.

I know the Kurdish will name a child after a relation but only once deceased. However, while flirting with our family’s genealogy, I discovered it’s a Catholic tradition to name a son after his grandfather. I chose to honour my father.

Now aged eighty-eight, dad loves that little boy.

Mother Nature makes more boys than girls outside of times of famine for good reason. Boys die in childhood at a far greater rate. If they survive birth, the risk of death by misadventure or accident is a sad corollary to a boy’s existence.

When my first son reached age 25, I breathed a big sigh of relief.

In addition to Howie’s medical challenges, at one time he’s also been surrounded by a dozen specialists at a hospital trying to dislodge something he swallowed. His throat is very narrow, about as wide as a good sized pen. Not much room for choking mistakes.

He’s fallen off a swing and moved his bottom front teeth back. Another time he actually got stuck in a toilet toddler seat, bent in two, wedged in tighter and tighter as time went by, and had to be rescued by fireman.

 

Of course, I wasn’t there at the time. The pictures tell the story.

As a man, I realize I cannot be around all the time. There are long days when I’m away from my wife and kids working where they must fend for themselves. All I can do is provide for them as best as I can, making sure they are safe when I’m at home, holding them close to my heart when I am near.

But today we almost lost him. While his mom kept her eyes on the road travelling at speed down the highway, the boy grabbed the unused seat belt from the middle spot, twirled it around and around somehow until the full length of it was unfurled from its spring-loaded mechanism. Then placed it over his head.

It locked down tight. The more he moved, the tighter it became. There was no slack with which to back it off. It wasn’t a matter of unwinding it from his head because he’d twisted it over and over first, the way you tighten a tourniquet, and then inexplicably put it over his head while his mother drove down the road.

His thin neck and airway were encircled, being crushed as if in the grip of a snake.

Luckily, just as his big sister Charlotte alerted her mother, missus glanced in the mirror and immediately noticed his colour.  In her horror, she barely registered her daughter’s words for what she saw struck her like a bolt of cold fear.

Her boy was gray, on his way to blue. She saw the belt wrapped around his neck.

At three, whimpering sounds emanating from his mouth, he couldn’t countenance the gravity of his predicament.

 

Missus pulls over and springs into action. Yet, for all her efforts, she can’t get that belt off him. It won’t back off because it’s fully extended. By some unlucky fluke, he’s wound it around his neck in just such a way his every movement or any attempt to loosen it only made it tighten.

The belt had turned into a python refusing to relinquish its prey.

Mel knew the only way out was to cut the strap. She searched frantically for scissors or something in her console. Finally, with the boy fading, in a panic she jumped from the car and attempted to wave down passing cars.

The first ones going by waved back.

Just then she realized 911 help would never arrive in time; moreover, she was overwhelmed with crushing defeat considering that little Howie could come to this: a self-imposed death choke on the side of the road.

She was trapped helplessly trying to hold off some of the pressure from the kid’s neck, unable to release for an instant to call for help, a situation made worse because her phone was out of reach in the front seat.

 

However, someone had spotted her wild gesticulations from way down the road.

A lone driver pulled in behind her.

A young soldier in combats emerged from his vehicle.

And like all young men who live their lives ready for action, he came prepared.

One look at the boy and a tug on the belt to assess the severity of the locking choke and out came his weapon: a hunting knife used to “cut up tires at work.”

A couple of efficient slashes at the belt and the tightened noose released its fatal grip on little Howie’s neck.

The frightened toddler returned to his distraught mother’s arms.

Of course, she was a mess by this time.

Contemplating the death of her child, one she’d nursed and kept from the grave for nigh on four years,  a veritable soldier for motherhood herself, the next few minutes passed in a blur. She’s unsure if she even blubbered inadequate thanks to the mystery man.

She took some time to compose herself while sitting in her driver’s seat, no doubt glancing behind her to look at her children for reassurance.

When she finally dried her tears to see well enough to drive, pulling away she noticed the rescuer had stayed there too. He waited patiently in his car parked behind her as she gathered herself, as if still on duty, gallantly ensuring he was the last to leave the scene.

She hadn’t even asked him his name.

Well I found out his name is Shane Chafe. A heavy duty equipment mechanic from Newfoundland newly posted to Ottawa in service of our nation at National Defence Headquarters.

My mother was born in St John’s, Newfoundland.

The island’s history and culture have been part of our clan’s fondest remembrances of her. She had 10 pregnancies in 12 years, bearing nine healthy children. Her entire lifetime was spent singly devoted to her family.

She knew our little boy before she passed away a couple of years ago. It was at home, surrounded by all her adult children and husband of sixty-two years. She had supported us in so many ways in Howie’s first few months of life, seeing him through his roughest patch.

Unfaltering throughout her life in the practice of her Catholic faith, my mother sent us an angel today.

Not a pink cherub with a glorious set of wings floating on a cloud looking sweet and pure and full of God’s grace. No.

She sent us a man.

Charlotte calls him a warrior. “Daddy a warrior came and rescued Howie” she told me excitedly from the upstairs window of our house almost as soon as I pulled into the driveway this evening.

It’s not often that one gets the opportunity to thank someone for saving your boy’s life. I’ve had to do it before. There is no limit to the depth of gratitude I feel for this young man and his exemplary actions.

What are the chances the universe would put this exact person with these skills in this place at this critical time of need? This was divine intervention if there ever was such a thing.

While others drove on by, sedated, unaware of the life and death drama at hand, this man acted like men do.

He had the courage to stop, to bravely assess the situation while panic ruled, and then acted decisively to protect this little boy’s life.

And his words to me later?

“I’m just glad the boy’s fine and it worked out,” he said. “I’d want someone to stop for my gal if she was in trouble and I wasn’t around.”

You betcha soldier.

Mr. Shane Chafe good sir, I owe you one.  You deserve a medal.

You’re this family’s hero and we’d like everyone to know it.

Corporal Shane Chafe: Hero

© CKWallace 2017

[sgmb id=”1″]

Apology’s Gift

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

They say to forgive others, if not for them for you. This is so you won’t have to bear resentment into the future. The secondary benefit of letting someone off the hook is just a bonus. It’s higher-self stuff.

Whatever anger or frustration or disappointment a situation causes, failing to get past it maintains those feelings indefinitely. There they lurk in the shadows of our minds, influencing us in ways we cannot tell. It’s hard to measure the effect your lack of forgiveness has on others; its effect on you is assured.

We are born with a sense of justice; however, it is imprecise and fallible, having been personalized as we live. My sense of justice and yours might be significantly different, though we probably embrace morality themes somewhat similarly.

Under threat we look around for allies. If we find none, our defense systems will dump cortisol and adrenaline into the bloodstream. Eventually, if the menace is unresolved, we may collapse into powerlessness.

When our sense of justice is transgressed, it is natural to use anger as a punisher to correct things. Anger will raise your shoulders, bring your facial muscles taut, tighten the spine and abdominals and leave you in an elevated state of readiness.

Powerlessness is a cousin of depression. Hopelessness is its permanent form.

Fritz Perls of Gestalt fame asked why carry around a gunny-sack of anger? If you allow it in general, he said, soon your sack will become heavy and unwieldly.

Anger takes a toll on your beliefs, your body and your happiness; meanwhile, your list of perpetrators may feel nothing. Or at least, nothing you can be sure of.

It’s too easy to trap ourselves into a never ending loop of unfinished business.

I have not yet encountered a situation for which forgiveness did not help or was unwarranted. I have seen plenty of harm in my days. I have sinned and been sinned against.

A time may arrive when I will not be able to forgive. Intentional harm of my loved ones would be a hard one to shake. For all concerned, I hope it never happens.

There is great relief to be had in forgiveness. It can feel like a 180 degree turn, from anger to resolution in one key decision.

The body, once tense, relaxes; the mind, once pre-occupied, is freed; the knots in the belly dissipate; fear is replaced by courage; where there was darkness now shines with the light of love.

 

But what if you are not called to forgive but instead, to seek forgiveness?

What if you are willing to prostrate yourself on the altar of truth and admit your wrongdoing? Abandoning an untenable position—and its thoughts and feelings—is itself a great relief.

They say Canadians apologize as a matter of course, as a matter of pride even. I’m not sure if this is truly our culture. If it encourages people to apologize more, I’m all for it. Count me in.

I resisted for a long time how much to apologize and when. Now, if there’s a possibility of my being in some kind of error, I say sorry, albeit, maybe imperfectly.

Apologies are like insurance you take out on friendships: from little ones oft said to big ones where we were really out of sync, contrition is a key skill.

It’s free to be nice, I like to say. It’s also free to apologize: freeing for us both.

Letting an opportunity to apologize pass you by can be tragic. Tragic I say.

Then it is not so much anger that uses up your energy, rather regret.

 

Who are these people who profess to live life without regret?

Is it wishful thinking or I am I doing it all wrong? (which is quite possible). I don’t regret waking up in the morning, each day is an opportunity to learn and serve.

But regrets? I’ve had a few. So goes the song.

How could I not? I have some lasting most of my lifetime. Too numerous to list here, I’ll save you the tediousness of my confession. Undoubtedly, you have your own to consider, or try and forget.

AA’s Big Book has been around a while. I have an old beat up copy gained when I attended Spofford Hall in New Hampshire in the 1980s for heroin and cocaine addiction. Its pages are filled with handwritten encouragement from my fellow travelers. Reading it now, I realize they saw in me potential when I saw little in myself.

I’m not an AA member and don’t attend meetings. I may never drink again because I realize I don’t drink socially in any regular way. I may drink tomorrow. The inclination to over-drink is instilled in me deeply, like never forgetting how to ride a bicycle.

Say what you like about the “program,” as it is known. It has helped a lot of people turn from a spiral of self-destruction to leading fulfilling lives.

Its message is straightforward: give up booze, face the facts about yourself, ask for help, make amends to those you have harmed, admit when wrong and repeat as necessary, and serve others as a path to spiritual enlightenment.

Steps numbers 8 and 9 are key endeavours: 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Long before Gestalt Therapy and the popularized version of unfinished business, Dr. Bob, Bill W. and cohorts realized how critical addressing old stuff we carry around was, as a building block to effective living.

 

I think attachment is our greatest psychological need. Our emotions are set carefully in youth by the quality of our connection to others. As we age, patterns from those early years can really screw things up.

And if not right away, maturity and personal growth can eventually sober one’s perspectives. Sometimes that means living with more than a little regret.

The idea of reaching out to someone and taking responsibility without expectations is a powerful way to empower your sense of self. As simple as saying, “I realize I was wrong, you were good to me and I fucked it up. Sorry. ”

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible. People move away, we lose touch, they die. Even if alive, they may not be interested in opening old wounds.

It’s good to remember that we forgive first for ourselves.

In the same way, making amends is done to clear our own side of the street first. Should it benefit someone else, great. That’s ideal. But it’s not always necessary, nor is it possible or even likely.

Successfully forgiving yourself cannot be predicated on the acceptance of another. That’s too shaky a ground upon which to build your new construct. But keeping this idea of redressing past wrongs as a guiding principle, every once in a while it’ll pay off.

 

I moved back to Ottawa last year to be near my ailing father. Of course, I can barely drive down a street in most of the old city without being triggered in one way or another. Circumstances and faces impose themselves on my mind, often like mini-episodes played at high speed as I drive by.

I found an old business partner of mine from the early 80s through LinkedIn. We met for lunch. I apologized. All he said was “don’t worry about it; we were all fucked up back then.”

That’s it? Damn it, I carried that guilt for 35 years for fuck’s sake.

Now I see him weekly, went up to his cottage with my kids. Or I meet him and his grand kids either here at my farm or at one of those indoor playgrounds.

I’m privileged to advise him on business, a modern version of something we were working on way back. He closed me on that one by saying, “Isn’t it about time you came back and finished what you started?” He had me there.

 

As a teenager, at one point I lived collectively with others at 165 Laval Street in Vanier. It was a drop-in for many a runaway in the North-East end of the city. We sold hashish and other recreational drugs while attending every rock concert available. There I met a beautiful young gal who became a good friend. Through her, I met her brother.

Pat was a few years older than me and he became a stand-in for my own brothers. I did a lot of that back then, recreating my family of origin, sometimes with consequences I hadn’t thought of. Pat was good to me.  And we partied like rock stars, though, unlike me, he kept a job and even had a car.

At one point, I was torn between two groups of friends, allegiance to Pat and his sister on one side, to my current peer group on another. Something went down and I was forced into a quandary. I hadn’t the finesse to negotiate the divide. We lost touch and never addressed things between us. It wasn’t even my fight.

For over 40 years I have carried the regret of having chosen wrong. It has eaten at me a bit, knowing I was weak when I should have been strong.

It’s one thing to live this way, despising the self at some level, and being able to escape identity by drinking and drugging yourself regularly into oblivion. When this option is removed by choice, what remains is wistful regret.

Pat’s a pretty masculine guy as I remembered him. I held out little hope of ever contacting him through social media. In the ten years I’ve been on Facebook, I have searched for him occasionally to no avail. Something made me try again recently by looking for his sister first. I scored a possible hit.

In 40 years people’s faces and bodies change so I fired off a message that read:

“Not sure if I’ve got the right person. Are you the Pat I once knew in Ottawa when I was a scared kid all messed up on drugs? If it’s you, I’d like to apologize. You were good to me and I was careless and more than a bit of an asshole with that precious friendship. I’ve always regretted those times. I was in a loyalty conflict and didn’t have to balls to stand up for myself or our friendship. If that’s your sister, she was also always a doll with me. I was simply too screwed up to trust anyone. I apologize to you both. Best wishes. CW”

To my surprise, after a few days he answered right on my wall.

“Hey well never thought I’d hear from you again Chris. I hope your well. We will be in Ottawa soon for the big party. Hope we are able to talk. Nice to hear from you.”

Well that was too easy. Decades of self-loathing at stake and he says nice to hear from you? Where are the recriminations? What about at least agreeing I was an asshole? How many ways can I help you tell me off?

Instead, nothing. Just forgiveness.

Later he explained the bit about never hearing from me again.  Sister had informed her brother decades ago I had been killed in the 1980s. Not surprising given circumstances, and, lucky for me, an understandable exaggeration. For all Pat knew, I was gone. He’d made his peace with that episode of his life long ago. So my reaching out must have freaked him out a bit.

And they were coming to town in a week or two for Canada’s 150th. Turns out the festivities in the capital kept everyone busy but on the day before Pat left town, I was able to pick him up at his hotel near the airport and drag him out to the acreage where I live with my missus and children.

Mel kindly made us a wonderful steak dinner which we ate out back while watching the kids and animals gamboling about. And Pat and I caught up on close to 40 years of life until well past dark.

It was wonderful. It was truly something I’ll never forget. More so because I realize those opportunities are fleeting. We can be filled with good intentions one day about fixing past wrongs, and then rationalize it away the next.

In the end, I believe it’s best to take a shot.

I have advised others to do the same over the years. You just never know what can come of it. It could come to nothing, in which case you have done your best.

But it can also re-open old friendships as if they were never gone. What goes on in your head is only the half of it. You see, the other people grow up too. Not always, but mostly they do.

 

Perhaps good things do come in threes (omni trium perfectum). Not long after I made my first overtures to my old business partner, I received a message from my brother one evening.

He’d moved into a place in the Byward Market and upon meeting a neighbour, was recognized as a Wallace “by the eyes” I’m told. Turns out it was a friend of mine of more than 40 years. In fact, he knew our whole family back in the day, had met my parents and the rest of it.

When we eventually met up, it was he who apologized to me. It doesn’t matter for what, just that I was able to offer him forgiveness. We both won.

It’s our expectations that drive disappointment. Therefore, it’s best to have none. In my case, I reached out because I thought it was the right thing to do. How my attempt is taken is mostly none of my business. I felt I owed an apology regardless, and I would have felt at least a bit better no matter how it was received.

I was fortunate. In fact, almost every time I’ve done this kind of thing, it’s turned out reasonably well. These last two apologies, better than ever. Here I am with two good men my age nearby as friends again, and one to stay in touch with and visit on the west coast.

If you have people in your life you feel indebted to in some way, why not drop them a line and tell them so, without any expectations.

You will feel better at the very least. And you could get lucky too.

It’s apology’s gift.

CKWallace

© ckwallace.com 2017, all rights reserved

[sgmb id=”1″]

Why Advisor?

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

When I was first counselling in the late 80s, the term counsellor was intimidating. It spoke of a “there’s something deeply flawed in me and probably no one can fix it” kind of mentality. Going to see a counsellor could be an admission of defeat. It could be shameful.

Unless, of course, your counsellor agreed with you and you could use their expert advice to win an argument.

To make things easier, I’d tell people to simply consider me their coach. This was long before the term “life coach” existed.

After all, pretty much everyone’s had coaches at school, at church, in Little League and what have you. The description seemed less harmful, more approachable if you will.

Coaching has now become a multi-billion dollar industry.

It covers every facet of human endeavour and then some. Despite many who are talented, informed and very effective at what they do—and I know plenty of good coaches—there has been a watering down of the term.  

I found it didn’t fit me anymore in the current context of how I operate. To many, the term may seem to be the new “counsellor” of old. This is probably unfair, a result of its popularity.

Then again, I’m not coaching Little League.

I advise on business and productivity, marriages and relationships, parenting and aging, trauma and addiction, health and other matters of life, death and freedom.

Coaching hardly does what I do justice.

Also, at the least being coached implies I know the “right way”; that I have a system that works and if you follow it, you’ll score the win.

To some extent in shortened contexts this is true. I have a play book like any good teacher does. I know technique from trial and error.  I have seen good and bad.

More often than not though, in the longer game the answers are in my clients. I explore and facilitate things. Sure, I call upon my training and experience and learning, but ultimately, my calling is as trusted advisor.

Having lived a faulted life—especially in my early years—I am incapable of judging others. We don’t need to get into how faulted here. I’ve seen deep shit, life and death, also great triumph.

Over the decades, regularly someone took the time to share some of their hard-earned lessons, often as payment in kind for something I’d done.

Indeed, I usually paid dearly for good advice.

I listened… and I am blessed with memory.

I can recite chapter and verse about various gems learned from books, courses, my father, priests, professors, friends, business people and other learned souls of both genders; moreover, often attributing a time and place for each pearl of wisdom gratefully gained.

Being a learner is my number one strength. I suppose some will say what I have is depth. I think you’d want that in an advisor.

We all get advice from time to time.

Advisor it is.

CKWallace 
©2017

[sgmb id=”1″]

 

 

Toasting a nephew’s 18th

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

Dearest Brother Gavin.

I appear before you and your Ottawa clan with only love and wisdom, here on your 18th birthday.

Regardless of whether you can buy beer in Quebec or Alberta, and not in Georgia, when a man is old enough to don a uniform to fight and perhaps die for his country, he is undoubtedly a man.

And think for a moment of all of your experiences to date, everything that has brought you this far. All your trials and missteps, lessons learned along the way.  These are behind you now.

And think a bit about what you know; adding the sum of your knowledge to date and you will probably immediately realize you have much to learn. It’s something you will say to yourself again at 30, 40, 50 and each decade beyond.

And think about your parents. Think about your father.

Realize now how all of us inherit the temperaments of our fathers and our father’s fathers. You will have a great deal of Barnaby in you, and in turn, some Howard Carew Wallace, some Howard Vincent Wallace, some Thomas Patrick Wallace, some John Wallace and even some of his father, our founding immigrant Thomas Wallace.

Each of these men will echo endlessly down through time in you, as well as other men and cherished women who have come before you and contributed to your being. One day you will echo endlessly in others.

You are the culmination of two centuries of improvement, of 200 years of refinements in the search for freedom.

For that is what each man lives for: for freedom.

That is the past. You have the future to look to. Your growth will be based on how well you negotiate and improve on the temperaments of the male predecessors from which you came.

Never to be rejected, only assimilated and improved upon. You are a Wallace.

This is a journey each man must take alone. Oh, you will always have your clan by your side, and if not physically, at least in spirit. But your travels in spirit and wisdom are yours alone. It’s as if you are lost in the forest and no one is coming for you; by your own wits you must now find your way home, to freedom.

I have no earth shattering advice for you. Well, actually, I have plenty.

The first is to watch for key decisions. You will know when these occur because of their difficulty. These are the moments upon which a life turns. Make a good one and advance, a poor one and retreat.

It is these times when you must take your time and consult widely amongst your trusted circle, family and clan, uncles and siblings, advisors and trusted individuals.

To do that you must keep these people close to your heart. Attachment to others is our greatest need. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” said John Donne in Devotions.

Connection to others can mean your life or your death; you must choose wisely outside of your clan for who these people will be.

When you make such decisions, have a goal in mind and work it backwards from there to the moment you are deciding your direction.

Other than that, realize that everything in life worth having will come from doing that which is good for you, for those around you and for your society at large. You will find service to the greater good to be the fastest way to fulfillment.

And you must develop your personal power. For men, it is through their careful cultivation of power over their lives and power wielded for good that brings them freedom. Your life will be a series of battles, with some defeats and many victories; each a death and a rebirth, each another step to freedom.

Power will also get you the attention of females. Women are hopelessly attracted to men of power and confidence. To know this is to know the secret to unlocking the doors of love.

Which brings me to this book:  it’s called The Way of the Superior Man. It is used, slightly dog-eared as the best books often are. If you have the balls to read it at your age, it will answer many of your questions. I can answer the rest. Seriously. Or ask Uncle Matt. He knows a thing or two.

It is the book I would have written. When I read it, its eloquence was so precise that I bowed to the author in respect. I will one day write a sequel.

It will teach you many things if you dare read it.  Among them: how to handle premature ejaculation using an ancient eastern breathing technique.

And if you find the notion of becoming a Superior Man daunting, I’d ask you to consider not fear as fear; instead… think of fear as excitement. Fear is but a call for action. Action is the only thing the universe recognizes.

So with much love and affection, hope and goodwill I say:

 

Go forth my young nephew. Be bold.

 

True and Free.

PARENTING SIMPLIFIED

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

Kids need to orient towards a parent. It is how nature made us.

If that orientation is broken or weak, your children will orient elsewhere.

It’s just like a parent-less baby duck or goose bonds with a human, or a doll or a cat or a dog, imprinting and following them around as if they were its mother. You don’t want that.

Video games, drugs, risky behaviours, poor choices in friends and an over-reliance on peer groups are some of the ways a teen will make up for a lack of connection with a parent or parents or family.

What the heck do peers know? In general: not much. It’s scary how little.

Orientation is often the issue when kids go off the rails. And, after age 14, it becomes more difficult to maintain parental orientation as time goes by. Can you reclaim orientation? Yes, indeed you can. Why? Because teens want desperately to be rescued from themselves. Desperately.

So the heart of parenting is connection. It’s worth repeating. It keeps it simple. The key question to ask your self is this: Is what I’m doing going to increase connection… or weaken it?

If it increases connection, you are probably doing what nature intended. If it weakens or severs connection, that is wholly unnatural. Unnatural, I say. It goes against the natural order of things.

Ask yourself this question often; make it part of your approach.

So to me, it’s ALL about connection. Focus on connection right from the start. When parents realize it’s really this simple, many aha! moments ensue from its simplicity. Connection is surface simple but vast and deep in practice.

To connect, you need time. Not “quality time” so much as just time spent in connection. Safe, secure, predictable. The need to belong is universal. It’s largely what drives us in life.

From connection, the child will feel “valued.” Feeling like you matter to someone or a group of people is at the heart of attachment–our primary psychological need.

Connection’s opposite is loneliness. We do a lot of messed up things out of loneliness. How many of us have been in a group of people in our lives… and felt lonely? It sucks.

Imagine a child or teen feeling lonely while in your house? As part of your family? Happens all the time.

From connection and time and a sense of value, you can coach a child or teen to anything. What you want to teach them is self-discipline.

I don’t mean bootcamp discipline. Rather, the ability to delay gratification. It is the single best predictor of a successful life.

Intelligence helps a person live well but the advantage stops at just above average.

No. It’s self-discipline that counts.

Know any intelligent losers? Of course you do. We all know plenty.

Know any self-disciplined losers? Doesn’t happen. In fact, the two are opposites.

We could talk about how feminism is ruining the cultures of the western world. Dare me.

Or how the banking system uses interest to create scarcity and competition; its unrelenting need for growth forcing more parents into work to earn for their families. Double dare me.

But in the end, it misses what’s important. It’ll be the rare person who gets to 80 and says they wished they worked more or took up yet another cause.

Very few get a diagnosis of terminal cancer with months to live and wished they had a Ferrari.

No. Time and again, in the end people wish they’d spent more time with their friends and families, especially their children. Connecting with loved ones folks.

So just focus on connection. If you get that right, most of everything else takes care of itself. By putting connection first, everything seems to fall into place. It’s nature’s way.

Here’s a pithy quote:

“As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value.” Bessel Van der Kolk.

Find it early, find it late, you must find love. We must all find love, and it starts with the family of origin. Ideally, it’s where we learn how to love and be loved. This must be part of your legacy to your children.

Connection is your key.

© CKWallace, 2017

[sgmb id=”1″]