Day: January 10, 2020

Being over in rural Ontario you tend to feel as though the happenings of the outside world don’t register as strongly as they should. Well today it has come to light that one family among those 176 lost, and of the 63 Canadians travelled in similar circles as my family. A friendly, quiet family staring back at us from the pages of an Obituary. A friendly and quiet family you recognize from your daughter’s pre school play group. We weren’t close, or even acquaintances, just on friendly and knowing nods in greeting as we piled our raucous and unruly young children into and out of the play room, wrangling our kids for snack or at circle time, and keeping our wee ones excited while chasing oddly shaped rubber balls on the field. We were all Canadians, doing our best to teach our kids, but now only some of us remain. A real tragedy. Brings the news, unrelenting as it is, right to your doorstep and demands you pay attention, even if you think its world news and not your concern. Humanity finds a way. Nothing I can say to their extended family would bring them back, or fill the void left by their untimely departure. May cooler heads prevail, and their contributions to humanity never forgotten.

Man, this shit is hard. It’s har-rd. But you gotta do it, you have to keep up, and stay on it, otherwise everything will just settle back into the way it was. If you weren’t happy with the way it was, then you’ll have to find a way, some way, any way to push on through and keep up with all of those tiny little incremental changes you’ve been trying to make. To get better, to be happier or more satisfied, or to obtain a goal or achievement takes work. Gods honest work. Put in the cumulative hours and be the change you want to see. Reach for a glass of water, walk a flight of stairs, turn on your favourite song and groove out to it for three minutes, thirty seconds. You have to consciously make those choices, deliberately. You ain’t a hero cause you did that once, you have to keep coming to the fork in the road and make that tough choice again, and again.

Sucks when you can’t pawn off your bad decisions on someone or something else. Got to, have to, must make those decisions daily in order to build up the muscle memory and create a lifestyle change. You don’t wish, you don’t want, you wouldn’t like, YOU DO. Just like Yoda says, you do or you do not, there is no “try”. And not in the sense that if you can’t do it perfectly from the get go then don’t bother. But do it, don’t try, sometimes, as a forgettable afterthought. Do it. Every day. Make that effort. Build it into your schedule. And get it done.

As a side note, I’m looking to go see Underwater tonight, and I think it’s going to be a fun sci-fi mix of the abyss and Aliens. It is January so I don’t have incredibly high Hope’s, but I’ve heard decent things about it.