December 27, 2015

This Christmas while hanging with family and friends, I was reminded the importance of faith, love, friendship, kindness, forgiveness, empathy, gratefulness. 

So many times I ask why I have been blessed as much as I have.  I have a real hard time understanding why I would deserve the great people and the great opportunities in my life. My meager human attempt to understand it, keeps me pointed to the ideology that good things are the result of good deeds. But that thinking is greatly flawed, noting that my actions and decisions are not even close to equivalent of the blessings in my life.

If not that then, I can only explain it one other way. Grace.  Grace of friends, grace of family, grace of the human race, and according to my faith, the grace of God.

And for that, I will be forever thankful.

Merry Christmas everyone.

December 20, 2015

I have always thought the dragon dance was a very cool part of Silent River.  I have always admired how it had the ability to bring the I Ho Chuan team together.  What I did understand was that the commitment to perform a dragon dance was immense, and discouraged myself from its involvement due to my flaky work schedule.  What I didn’t entirely understand, was the gears behind what makes the dragon dance so potent a team builder.

Over the last couple of practice times, I have had the opportunity to be part of the dragon dance as a fill in.  Truly I am a great test of their empathy, feeling most like a square cog in a Swiss watch, yet at the same time, feeling accepted, and instantly part of the team.

The development of a weapon form over a year of mastery requires many things.  The development of a dragon dance requires the exact same things with one exception. It requires familiarization with its movement, flow, and function. Identifying problems and working to solutions. It requires repetition to develop proficiency and skill.  It causes a stretch of limits and abilities to push out of comfort zones.  The dragon dance however, does this in a team environment, but in a much different way than say it would with a basketball or hockey club.  If a person has a bad day on a hockey team, he ends up playing less minutes and his lack of involvement is rather dilute. 

Alternatively, the link in a dragon dance team is literal.  It takes into account the physiology and abilities of each person.  Tall, short, limber, stiff, injured, healthy all these things taken from every individual get thrown into this melting pot and turn into a dragon soup that has its own flavour as a result of its ingredients. 

The experience this far has been really exceptional. The team’s patience, kindness and willingness to help advance my abilities are unbelievable.  My hesitation to get involved vaporized in about 10 minutes after hopping into the dragon.  I would like to thank all of you for that.  It truly is what has made this team exceptional.  

December 13, 2015

Nothing is a bigger test of your current perspective dial setting than a Canadian winter. While so many Canadians board planes to hot destinations, or snowbird the winter season away, it makes me wonder how Canadians get a reputation as cold dwelling snow lovers. 

For a number of years my winter perspective was in a drastic need of adjustment.  Rather than embracing what the season had to offer, I was anxiously looking for the onset of spring.  Well this year I have re-embraced my fondness for winter.

This year has already proved to be an awesome start to the winter season.  Snowball fights, backyard winter forts, tobogganing, skiing.  All those things that make winter as diverse a season as you can get.  Nowhere on the planet can you find four distinct seasons offering so many opportunities as you can in Alberta, and I for one, am very grateful for that.

December 6, 2015

The best things in life are free.  But do we truly get that? 

One of the great inventors of our time, Dean Kamen said “The ideal would be a machine that has no size, no cost, never breaks down, is available wherever you need it all the time, free.  That will never happen, there is a very pervasive but naïve assumption that aid means you give things away.  If you give things away with this mythical idea that it should have no cost, it will end up demonstrating that it will have no value.” From the documentary, Slingshot.

Sometimes, things need to take a piece of us before we realize the value added.  If we received the physical wellbeing, added confidence, and all the spill offs of the approach to mastery without giving anything of ourselves, we likely would not see the value in what we obtained.  What this means is, yes, there is a price to success in whatever you do, but it is in that sacrifice that the true value of the achievement is realized. That is common human nature.

We are crazy creatures.  Our brain seems to want to attach a sacrifice to every experience in order to give the experience value.  Take for example spending time with your kids.  Does the experience seem a little sweeter when you have put off work in order to spend that time.  Knowing you gave something up, has somehow made the time more valuable.

Take a lottery winner as another example.  Within a year, most winners would not rate there life enjoyment greater than prior to the winnings.  I think this is demonstrated because monetary freedom removes much need for sacrifice.  Remove the catalyst (sacrifice) and they lose value to life experience.

I am not sure if it healthy to be that way.  I really believe if we become more aware of the miracles that happen each day in our life, and the mind boggling probabilities that have come together for these miracles to happen, we would require less sacrifice to see the true value of our lives. Perhaps we might even recognize the sacrifice to be a miracle in itself, and to add value to the experience from a different perspective. 

For example we may gain an appreciation for the time spent away from the Kwoon for work as valuable, rather than toilsome.  From this perspective, stripping away our conventional view of value, we multiply our recognition of miracles in our life tenfold.

How we value the things most important in our life, has great implication on the value of our life.