every breath

On the night I could have died, I was just watching television.

My wife had just turned in for the night. She said good night from our bedroom down the hall. I thought that was a good idea. I was tired of wasting my time on the Internet, I was tired of listening to the television, and I was especially tired of the laptop that was cradled on my crossed legs like a tireless puppy. I lifted the computer and leaned forward to put it on the coffee table.

That's when I felt the first punch.

The punch came from inside my chest, not outside it. I put hand over my chest, like someone in shock. I stood up, gingerly, mindfully, and started to massage my chest. I paced back and forth. It felt like someone was punching me from the inside. And not just any punch, a full-blown upper cut.  The whole time, my mind was working overtime, trying to figure out what this pain in my chest was. Within seconds it felt like someone was stabbing me with a knife. I finally walked into my bedroom and said, "Honey, I can't breathe."

My wife jumped out of bed, turned on the bedside lamp and asked me what was wrong. I explained that my chest was hurting and that I was having a hard time breathing for some reason. I laid down on the bed to rest. I closed my eyes for maybe thirty seconds and then jumped up. Laying down made whatever was wrong with me ten times worse.

"We need to go to the hospital," I said.

By the time we got to Centenary Hospital , which was about five minutes away, I could no longer freely and easily inhale. I had to be strolled into the emergency room in a wheelchair. I was hunched over and clutching my chest, which felt like it was crumbling in on itself.

The nurse was asking me questions: What was my name? Did I have my health card? And I didn't have breath enough to answer. My wife was answering all the questions for me. They could see I was in intense pain. My eyes burned with tears and my chest was burning even more.

They admitted me into an large, grey operating room where they did an x-ray of my chest. They provided me with an oxygen mask. When they got the results from the x-ray, a doctor came in and very earnestly told me that my right lung had collapsed and that they would have to do surgery to inflate it.

I had never experienced a collapsed lung before, nor would I wish the experience on my worst enemy. Not being able to breathe fully was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. My wife, who was maybe a month or two pregnant with our baby, was ashen faced and wide-eyed. The look of helplessness on her must have mirrored mine. I felt like things could take a turn for the worse at any moment.

What does a breath mean to us when we have so many of them without even noticing them? I read somewhere that we take around twelve breaths per minute. That works out to as many as 23,000 breaths in one day. It's no wonder we take them for granted!I was lucky if I could get twelve on that night I lost my ability to breathe. I never knew how important it is to be able to inhale and exhale deeply, freely, and to be able to say that "I'm alive." If I could, I would keep count of every breath I took.

I was in the hospital for almost five days recovering from the surgery with the help of a tube that came out from between my third and fourth rib. The tube was connected to a machine that worked to re-inflate my lung. It made the sound that a straw makes when you suck the last bit of Coke from the glass. It sounded like water being sucked deep into a long, dark drain. It reminds me of how something - someone - is here one minute and then the next is gone.

My favourite childhood memory

my favourite childhoold memory is walking out of our corner unit townhouse in north Scarborough, my brother and I holding my mom's hand on either side, no more than nine and six years old, respectively.

We'd walk through the grassy laneways between townhomes, walking past six conjoined homes at a time, tall like sentinals shoulder to shoulder, past their open backyards and their windows with opened curtains. Beneath solitary pines and maples. The drone of traffic getting louder as we approached McCowan Road.

It was the mall on the otherside of McCowan Road, called Woodside Square, that was our destination.

Fridays was when we would go, the three of us, to cash my mother's cheque of $322. We'd line up at the Royal Bank and wait to be called to the next teller. My mom would sign her exquisitely rehearsed signature, written in fine English letters. Each time she signed was almost like a performance. It was the only thing she wrote in English with ease and confidence. The two Ns of her name like soft waves between the boulders of the As. The F stood out because it was capitalized, printed and not in cursive. The S was satsfied, complete, a final statement and declaration that her name on that document was official, it was hers and nobody else's. (Given that she hasn't signed a cheque in so many years, I wonder if she still knows how.)

With money in white envelope, with bank book stamped and in purse, we would maybe get a hamburger at the McDonald's across the way.

Mostly, though, we would go to Zellers.

Zellers is a discount department store with high white ceilings and white walls striped with red. We would go there and my mom would look at clothes or shoes or kitchen stuff. My brother and I just wanted to go to the toy section. Superman and Batman and Transformers and Thunder Cats were there, in their protective plastic bubble, erect and waiting to be bought, to be freed, to be held and thrown and smashed and buried and found again.

She might buy us a toy on some occasions (and usually without my dad's consent!). She might buy something for herself. We also got Club Z points, too. It was a ritual that makes me think of the routine things that we do that children love, that make living so impossibly beautiful, so mysteriously memorable. Because I think we always had a sense that we weren't well off, that we worked hard, bloody hard, to have what we did. And sometimes, most days actually, just looking at all that stuff hanging and standing and waiting in those white, white aisles, was enough.

It was a small trip of escapism, a break from the routine of school and work and homwork and reading and learning our times tables. A place for me to imagine having all those toys with my brother and what adventures we could create for them, what wars we could wage with them, what ways we could wittle the last hours of the day before night came and we had to wait for next Friday to come along.

expecting from others

People will do their best, given what they know, what they believe about themselves and what they can do, given their limits and their fears and their insecurities. People are human because they are not consistent, because they are not perfect, because they are incomplete. But they do their best, which makes them beautiful, and great, and worth bestowing compassion and understanding.

So being realistic about what what we expect of people - especially our brothers and sisters, our moms and dads - might be the most delicate and daunting skill we can develop. Having high expectations is a good thing and we should have them - they tell the people we work with that we believe in them, that we see something that maybe they don't...yet. Not having any expectations isn't an option either.

But given that they are human, I should be flexible, forgiving, even kind when they don't fulfill my expectations. I should be because, ultimately, I have to expect more of myself.

Ordinary Things

Beauty truly is found in ordinary things and it takes a conscious effort to notice them.

As I sit here writing, I notice how there is a fold in the gold curtain screening one of the windows. That fold looks like a spine travelling vertically towards the curtain rod, almost perfectly balancing either side of the curtain.

There's a bejeweled metal crucifix sitting in front of a white candle and I'm impressed by how a source of spiritual light sits before a source of physical light.

One arm of our chocolate coloured leather love seat is reflecting all of the rain-muddied light that is coming in from the large window.

The traffic I hear sounds like ocean waves.

Looking to my left, down the short corridor between the dining room table I sit at and my bedroom, I can see my wife's feet hanging over the end of the bed.

There's a small bust of Nikos Kazantzakis in the display cabinet beside me, that reminds me of the busy market I bought it from when I was in Crete ten years ago.

There's a book with a close up shot of a gold Buddha on the cover - all I can see is his eyes and the bridge of his nose traveling down to the supple lips.

The spines of the hundreds of books we have peaking out from the edge of their shelves, almost seem like they are being pushed there by the books sitting behind them.

1o Year Text

The text I would get from my 43 year old self would read: "All you had to do was do it. The rest was actually not so bad after all."

This text actually came quite easily. It's the schism I need to remind myself with until the hardened calcium of protectionism I have been protecting for so many years finally breaks enough to allow me the flexibility I need to try and do and experiment freely and fearlessly.

10 Year Text by Tia Singh

Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagine your future self, ie, you 10 years from now. If he/she were to send you a tweet or text message, 1) what would it say and 2) how would that transform your life or change something you’re doing, thinking, believing or saying today?

(Author: Tia Singh)

Overcoming Uncertainty

The two goals that I have are: operating my own school and writing my novels. Both of these goals are pretty ambitious, and they're time-consuming ventures. Neither will be done in a year, necessarily, and both require discipline, commitment, passion. So let's look at these three things because there is a reason why these three requirements came out and I'm curious about where they might connect with whatever fears I have.

Discipline: It's something that I have been traditionally inconsistent with. There are times when I am quite disciplined and other times when I am not. What does the word discipline mean to me though? What comes to mind? My parents come to mind and their times in the past when they would discipline us with (shall we say) loud words. Discipline brings to mind harshness, meanness. But the other side of discipline is where my attention should be. The other side of discipline is enjoyment, success, satisfaction, triumph. The runner who gets up every morning to do his 10K job through the city knows that on the other side of his discipline is the triumph of success, of completing a marathon, etc. What word would, for me, mean discipline without actually using that word? Dignity. There is a deep self-discipline to working, and walking, and speaking, and doing things with dignity. There's an acknowledgement that you are doing things for yourself first. You do things from a deep, respectful place that honours and cherishes the life inside of you. So doing the little things that need to be done, whether it's waking up a little earlier (sometimes I'm good at this, other times I'm not), not wasting time on random websites (I hate you sometimes, Twitter), and actually putting away the random book from the shelf (I know, utter sacrilege to suggest not reading), and instead doing - with dignity - the things I need to do to get closer to achieving my outcomes and goals in life.

Commitment: Looking at this word doesn't bring up anything negative or fearful, per se. What does come up is the word time. I'm committed to my wife and family, I'm committed to doing a good job, I'm committed to feeding my mind with knowledge and wisdom and, of course, imagination and fantasy. There's the fear that committing to something else, despite the fact I want it, would take away time from doing nothing. Ahh. But not so ahh. I've known this has been lurking there for a long time. I wasn't the type of kid who took part in a lot of extra-curricular activities in grade school. I dabbled in a few clubs in high school. Most of my volunteer work was running a newspaper in university. Committing to something implies doing away with idleness. Being idle is attractive, seductive. The irony with me is that I hate being idle for extended periods. If I'm just sitting around reading my twitter feed, after a few minutes I start to get pensive and want to do something worthwhile, something that will make me feel...productive. The battle between idleness and productivity is often an intense struggle within me. But if living a life of dignity is a virtuous thing - and for me, it is - then being committed to something is far better than being idle and, more importantly, being attached to doing nothing.

Passion: This is an interesting one. I am a passionate person, all us Greeks are (nod to Homer Simpson). I want more out of life and I expect more out of myself than other people. I guess after reading and listening to Tony Robbins so many times, I've come to think that other people are far more passionate than I am. There's a weird feeling that comes over me when I hear others talk about how they lived and breathed their art or their dancing, or whatever it is: they talk about it as if nothing else existed for them. And that makes me nervous somehow. Maybe the word passion has come to mean foregoing the important people in your life. I'm thinking about my dad now and how little I saw him growing up because he was always working, doing whatever it took to keep us sheltered and warm and fed. Wasn't he living with passion? What's the difference between his passion and Lady Gaga's (I can't believe I let her into this!)? The other thing that comes to mind when I think passion is burning out. I'm afraid of getting to a point where I am no longer living and doing with dignity, with self-respect. I'm not afraid of pushing my boundaries, which seems to be the implication here. Passion also seems to carry with it a neglect of one's spirit. My dad worked three jobs, slept scant hours...for my brother and me. And I can't say with confidence that he lived a happy life for all that.

I guess I'm afraid of sacrificing too much. I don't want to look back and say, I should have done this, I shouldn't have done that. But then I'm just falling into living the perfect life, which is to say, having the perfect narrative about my life. But life embodies everything. It's not just a cliche, not just a truism. It should be a mantra. Because I have a hard time believing that most people authentically and truthfully live their lives accepting everything that life presents to them.

Overcoming Uncertainty by Sean Ogle

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write down a major life goal you have yet to achieve or even begin to take action on. For each goal, write down three uncertainties (read: fears) you have relating to each goal. Break it down further, and write down three reasons for each uncertainty. When you have three reasons for your fear, you’ll be able to start processing the change because you know where the fear stems from. Now you’ll be able to make a smaller changes that push you towards your larger goal. So begins the process of “trusting yourself.”

(Author: Sean Ogle)

Alive-est

I felt most alive on Sunday morning when I was talking to my wife's belly. I made sure that I spoke right into the skin, my lips stealing some of her warmth, conscious of every syllable, mindful of how my voice was coming from deep within my belly so that it would travel deeper, would resonate within, like someone speaking into a deep well to someone deep inside, unable to know for certain if what they said was heard until I turned my ear to her belly and held my breath and listened into the deep. There was movement amidst the rushing of fluids and my wife's shallow breaths, like someone shifting and looking around from left to right beneath the surface of a lake.

I spoke again, imagining that the vibrations of my voice would blend with and into the continuous formation of cells inside. I imagined the 20 week old life inside my wife's belly vibrating slightly to the sound of my voice, shuddering like a leaf does before a soft North Wind picks it up and gives it new purpose and a sense of adventure.

I can't wait until we see you, I said. Just grow healthy and strong and beautiful, I said. And my wife giggled, and her belly shook, and how could the life inside of her not giggle, too.

You're going to be a good daddy, she said. And was that her saying this...or someone else?

Alive-est by Sam Davidson

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When did you feel most alive recently? Where were you? What did you smell? What sights and sounds did you experience? Capture that moment on paper and recall that feeling. Then, when it’s time to create something, read your own words to reclaim a sense of being to motivate you to complete a task at hand.