Light Pokes Through

November rain didn’t fall on Vancouver Island this year.  At least, not as often as it usually does.

Instead, our days have been cold and clear. 

The nearby trails have been icy instead of muddy.

I’ve needed sunglasses more than a rain jacket.

Those trails have been a lifeline over the last few months.  Our family has experienced two significant health challenges.  In both cases, the worst may be behind us, however, the stress has been significant and ever present.  And it continues.

At the best of times, November darkness and gloom weighs me down.  This November was not the best of times. 

The sunshine couldn’t have come at a better time.

But the days are short, and the sun is low – very low – in the sky.  And that has affected my runs.

I’ve been exploring near our home.  Trails I have never gone down before. Heights I’ve never reached.  Views I’ve never seen.

So often, over the last few weeks, I’ve turned a corner and found sunshine streaming through canopies of green.  Shade surrounds me, yet the light streams through, and, behind it, the sky is as blue as the air is cold.

The light that makes it through is indescribable and special.  It’s ethereal.  Almost holy.

It stops me in my tracks.  I breathe it in. 

And I stop running, pull my beat-up old phone out of my running vest, and take photos which don’t do justice to the beauty of what I’m experiencing.

As is so often the case, I’m writing this on a Sunday morning.  One floor down, my daughter plays her electronic piano and sings ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’  I’ve never heard her do that before.  Her singing is more precious to me than the light streaming through the trees.  More precious than anything.

The rain was late but it’s here now.  An ‘atmospheric river’ hammering the island.  The sun won’t be shining through the trees today.

Maybe that’s a good thing.  If it happened every day, it wouldn’t be special.  It wouldn’t be magical.  It wouldn’t remind me that light pokes through.

The People Around Me

Midway through the last long weekend of the summer, our neighbourhood was still and quiet.  People were camping and travelling – the last flurry of activity before school started.  I was also still and quiet which allowed me to hear sounds hidden in the background – birds, a neighbour tinkering, a dog barking.  Nothing moved except trees and bushes swaying in a gentle breeze.  The air was warm even though it was early evening.  I sat on our front porch, hidden from view behind lush leaves and pink flowers.  My wife sat beside me, a glass of wine in her hand.  

Our home is usually a cacophony of sound – often emanating from, and around, our daughter.  She is rarely still or silent and her presence envelops my wife and I in her world.  But that Saturday night she stayed with her grandparents and her aunt.  The timing was good.  I love her more than anything in the world.  Even so, she drained me that day – physically and mentally, and my dad battery ran low.

Two days have passed, and now it’s Labour Day.  The unofficial last day of summer feels like the unofficial first day of fall.  I’m back on the front porch.  There’s no warmth in the air.  Grey clouds hide blue sky.  It’s not quite as quiet.  Kids have returned to the park across the street.  Distant traffic is louder.  A pink pick-up truck I’ve never seen before just drove by our home.  There’s gloominess in the day, or in me, or in both. 

We all grow up returning to school in early September.  It’s familiar and comforting.  I live it now through my daughter’s eyes and her emotions – an amalgam of nervousness, fear and excitement.  My little girl, who once weighed less than four pounds and spent her first few weeks in an incubator in an intensive care unit is about to start Grade 2.  It’s a mix of emotions for me too.  Gratefulness for her sheer existence.  Wonder and awe as I watch this little person grow and develop and change every single day.  Thankfulness that she is still young and naïve and plays with dolls and loves mermaids.  Concern for her gentle soul as she grows up in a world where not everyone is fundamentally kind, or inherently decent.  I remind myself that most people are good most of the time.

Many of those good people live in our neighbourhood.  Kindness abounds and is often centered around our daughter.  We returned from a walk this morning to find a bag of cookies on our doorstep, made for her by a thoughtful woman who is a masterful baker and gracious person.  We were returning from that walk because we’d borrowed ‘Skye,’ a little terrier whose owners allow us to walk their dog, to help my daughter overcome a fear of dogs.  Our living room now has a miniature dollhouse thanks to another neighbour who needed to find a home for his 98-year-old mother’s family heirloom.  That this man thought of my daughter and reached out to us so she would have that dollhouse meant the world to me.  Several weeks ago, our family “camped,” when a good friend parked his 40-foot motorhome in our driveway for the weekend.  His generosity made for sheer joy for my girl who is desperate to camp, and saddled with parents who are not desperate to camp.  Roasting marshmallows in our driveway was as special to her as a trip to Disney. 

This morning I contemplated leaving our neighbourhood.   After we’d walked the dog and found the cookies, I hopped in my car to drive by a house for sale.  It’s not far away. Ten minutes maximum.  But the home is on a steep hill, in a subdivision built on a dramatic incline.  The subdivision has beautiful homes, many with ocean views.  The home I drove by is newer than ours.  It’s bigger.  It’s near a pathway that leads to the ocean.  I miss living a short walk from the ocean.  I tell myself that I should “want less” and I know there is much truth and wisdom to those two words.  Yet, I’d like to live in a home that’s a little bigger, with a yard that is a little smaller, and needs less care. 

I wrestle with what’s the right thing to do.  What’s the right thing to want – or not want.  When I drive in that area, when I walk in that area, it does not feel like a neighbourhood.  It feels like a collection of houses that happen to be in the same location.  The steepness of the streets make it so much less walkable than where we live now.  And walkability breeds contact and conversation – kindness and friendship.    

There is so much value in taming our desires and being grateful for those things we have.  I would miss this neighbourhood so much if we ever left it.  I do feel drawn to the ocean.  It has always had an almost mystical allure for me.  But if we moved to be closer to the Pacific, I would leave behind the trails, hills, and mountains which are so close to me now.  I can run from my home, and, in less than five minutes, be totally alone in nature.  That is another gift which our neighbourhood gives me, every single day. 

Yesterday, I hopped on my bike and escaped high up in the forest.  I rode, and hiked, and found myself alone, and elevated, surrounded by acres of trees, with a spectacular view of mountains and the ocean.  Maybe that’s all the ocean I need.

It’s still Labour Day.  It’s still gloomy. And I’m still on the front porch.  I hear a basketball bouncing.  I see children riding their bikes.  I know school lunches are being made, and backpacks being packed.  And I’m thankful for where I live and the people around me.

I Did Not Run

After a couple weeks of constant heel pain, I stopped running and vowed to take a week off.

That was last Sunday. 

My heel is no better.  But I might run anyway.

Strangely, I don’t miss running. At least not the act or sensation of it. I’m not pining for the trails.  I’m not desperate to run long and slow, or short and fast.

But something doesn’t feel right.  Inside me.  I’ve felt it all day.  Call it depression, melancholy, ‘the blues.’  I’m not myself.  Not today.

I’m not sure why.  Usually a “weighted hike” helps.  So I tried that.  I put a dumbbell in a backpack and set off through the forest.  I ate fresh blackberries, sat beside a stream, and watched a fly land on a perfect green leaf. 

A weighted hike usually does the trick.  The dumbbell gets harder and harder to carry.  The shoulder straps dig into my skin.  I lean forward, seeking a posture where everything hurts a little bit less.  At the end of a weighted hike I’m in physical pain. But I feel better.  On the inside.  Nature, solitude, and decompression lift me up from within.

That didn’t happen today.  Today I got home and still felt blah.

I’m not sure why.  It could be because there is nothing I have to do today. The lawn doesn’t need cutting.  My daughter does not need to be dropped off at a birthday party.  My wife and I don’t have to go shopping.  No distractions to distract me from whatever I’m feeling inside.

Maybe it’s shift work.  Two long days followed by two long nights.  Four days of sleep deprivation and a messed up body clock.  The aftereffects carry into my days off.  I feel jetlagged.  I feel hung over.  I feel short tempered. On my first day off, I am mindful of how I speak to my wife and daughter because my fuse is short and my patience is thin. 

Today is my second day off.  I slept long and well.  I’m weary but not exhausted.  I’m well on the way to the feeling of “normal” that usually returns by my third day off.

Maybe it’s the work other people do.  My job title is Watch Commander.  I supervise approximately twenty-five uniformed police officers.  I sit behind a desk, while they are on the street, doing the real work of policing.  I hear it all over the radio.  Assaults, thefts, domestic disputes, overdoses, and a seemingly endless stream of mental health calls.  There are so many broken people, and the police officers I work with spend large parts of their days trying to help.  They work hard, and virtually everything they do is because something bad has happened.  Earlier this week a senior citizen was the victim of an unprovoked violent attack.  Her injuries are life altering.  The cops I work with arrested the offender and went with the victim to the hospital.  It happened at 7:00 o’clock at night, in a nice part of the city, on a beautiful summer’s evening. 

Maybe it’s the work I do.  Like a contentious situation which I could have handled better.  Or sensitive information which gets shared with me because of my position.  Or decisions which I make that affect the professional lives, and personal well-being of the police officers on my shift.  Men and women I’ve come to care about deeply since I started working with them earlier this year.

Or maybe it’s because I haven’t been running.  I biked this week.  I went to the gym.  I stayed active.  But I did not run.

It seems too coincidental that I would feel run down after a week of not doing something I usually do almost every day.

It’s funny, because last Sunday, when I decided to take a break, I was out on the trails in behind our home, and I wasn’t loving the run.  My heel hurt, and my motivation was practically nil.  I’d entertained trying a two-hour run, and knew I didn’t have it in me.  I just didn’t want it.  Which was unusual, because often I look forward to two-hours as the perfect amount of time to be out there on my feet – to challenge myself without overtaxing my system. 

So last Sunday, when I decided to take a break from running, I felt kind of proud of myself.  I felt like I was listening to my body and my mind and it was the perfect time for a break.  A week for my heel to heal and my running mojo to recharge.

And now six days later, I feel the opposite.  A reminder that running for me is about so much more than physical health.  And it’s not just central to my identity.  The blah I feel today is a reminder that running is essential to my  well-being.  Physical tiredness and work stress are nothing new.  They are essential elements of policing.  Nothing about this past week was fundamentally different than the last 23 years of my career.

Except it was one of the few weeks in which I did not run.  And today I’m paying the price.

Impermanence

My fiftieth birthday recedes daily, but it’s never far from my mind.  If I live to be one hundred, then less than half my life remains. 

I am impermanent, and the recognition of this impermanence colours my life.

I’m declining.  Physically and mentally.  Science, physics, and Arthur Brooks say so.  In his book. From Strength to Strength, Brooks writes abut how our mental and physical capacities inevitably fade with time.  However, Brooks, describes how the back half of our lives – the older years, can be filled with happiness and deep purpose, because the older we get, the better poised we are to serve others by mentoring and teaching, and as he writes, “to face decline – and even death – with courage and confidence.”  [From Strength to Strength (arthurbrooks.com)]

Brooks writes about Buddha.  Over the last year, I have become increasingly drawn to Buddhism, not as a religion, but as a system of thinking and way of being.  Impermanence is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy.  Both Buddha and Brooks caution us to be wary of attachment to things, be they cars or careers, because all things are fleeting.

I’ve attached myself to reading, writing, and running.  I’ve defined myself in those terms, whether naming this website, or describing myself on the dating app in which I met my wife.

All three are at the core of my life, yet I could lose any one of them, at any time.  Accident or injury make all three tenuous.  One bad fall on a steep trail could crack my skull and rob me of reading, writing, and running.  I can’t imagine life without them.

Actually, I can.  We’ve been travelling this last week.  Eight nights in Ontario, visiting family and friends. 

Over the last week, I have not been a Reader, Writer, or Runner.  Instead, I have been an Eater, Drinker, and Driver.

I let go of my attachment to clean eating and gorged on fried food and ice cream.  I felt ill every time I did it.  And did it over and over again.

I drank more over two nights than I have in the last six months.  Gin and tonic, beer and wine, rye and coke.  I drank only in part because I enjoy those tastes and flavours.  I drank to let go. I drank to decompress.  I drank for the buzz.  I drank to enjoy a night with friends.  A night I didn’t want to end.  An evening later, and many miles away, I drank because my wife and I played ‘Name that Tune’ in a bar along a canal in the small town where I grew up.  I drank there because it was fun, and I drank there to release my inhibitions, so I would get up and dance to earn extra points for our team.  I drank because, a night of drinking the night before created momentum and it was easier to say yes to drinking because I’d said yes the night before.

I drove a lot in Ontario, mostly on the busy streets of Brampton, an endless processions of red lights, and constant gridlock.  Two days of driving in Brampton, contributed to more than two strong drinks in Guelph, a picturesque city just outside the orbit of Toronto area traffic.  I relished the drive to Guelph, through small towns and the countryside.  We stopped in Rockwood, at a gazebo beside a river.  We visit this park every year because it is lovely, and water flows alongside it. 

The following day, on our way to the Niagara Region, we sat in traffic for what felt like forever, when an unseen accident, or the sheer volume of cars, ground the Queen Elizabeth Way to a halt.  After more than five decades of life, most of them living in Ontario, and hundreds of trips on ‘the Q.E.W,’ it was my first trip on that highway since the Queen’s death.  We finally escaped bumper to bumper traffic when an exit ramp led to fried food and ice cream, and an extreme hit of salt and sugar.  Junk food momentum had attained peak velocity.  My stomach still hurts.

Impermanence comes in handy when it comes to eating, drinking, and driving.  I know that when we get back to Vancouver Island, my meals will be fresh, my drinks will be ice water, and it will take me a month of commuting to encounter as many red lights as I did during a week in Ontario.

Impermanence will remain on my mind.  One of the best sports writers in the world is Joe Posnanski.  A few days ago, he did not write about baseball or athletes, and instead about his now adult daughter, and how they went to a Taylor Swift concert together, and how Swift’s music had been the soundtrack of his daughter’s life, since she was a little girl.  And while he loves his adult daughter more than anything, he misses his little girl. [Taylor-Made – by Joe Posnanski – JoeBlogs (substack.com)]

Every second of this trip I was conscious of the preciousness of having a young daughter.  A special seven-year-old who crammed a year’s worth of fun, adventure, and tears into a single week.  She shopped at a thrift store with her grandma and bought a five-dollar porcelain doll which she immediately treasured.  Two days later that doll’s head was crushed by a reclining car seat.  I saw her face the moment it happened.  Pure distilled sadness.  An ocean of tears.  Tears that halted when our good friend, who also saw it happen, entered her home, and returned with another porcelain doll.  One that had belonged to her mother.  A doll that was decades old – a Barbara Ann Scott figure skating doll.  A family heirloom passed from our friend’s family to ours.  Barbara Ann is on the plane with us now.  Likely her first time flying, en route to her new home in British Columbia.

I saw a lot of tears this week.  My daughter was disconsolate when she had to say goodbye to her aunt.  An aunt with whom she’d camped overnight for the first time ever in a Port Colborne backyard with a campfire, marshmallows and no mom and dad. 

More tears flowed at The Mandarin restaurant when a straw and some Coca Cola dislodged a loose tooth.  Blood streamed from her mouth.  Not a lot, but enough to scare her.  Mom took care of that quickly.  Then I joked with her about how blood gushed from her mouth and people fled the restaurant in terror.

A few days later, in Niagara Falls, the Maze of Mirrors, induced real terror.  Mom and Dad missed the clue in the title – MAZE!  We thought we were entering a fun house where mirrors would shrink us, expand us, and make us laugh.  Instead, it was an almost impossible to escape building, where mirrors made it appear as if we were everywhere all at once.  My daughter shrieked and cried.  We latched onto another dad and his little boy who were maze veterans and we exited on their coattails. 

Laughter and fun overshadowed tears. My daughter went on the Ghoster Coaster at Canada’s Wonderland.  She was scared, and she did it twice.  It was her first roller coaster ride ever and I was proud.  She played Pac Man for the first time.  She swam in the hotel pool.  The three of us jumped together at a trampoline park – the closest thing I got to a workout all week long.  She hugged everyone over and over.  She ate almost as much ice cream as I did.  She said she wanted to move to Ontario.  She didn’t want to leave her family behind.

All impermanent.  She’s growing up, just like Joe Posnanski’s daughter.  And the laughter and tears of this past week are already in the past.

We will land in a few hours and life will return to normal. Our home, our meals, our routines.  I’ll be at work in a few days and my stress will return.  My wife will return to her own more than full time job – managing the operation of our home and family.  Her stress will return.  My daughter will resume summer vacation, which as an adult, in retrospective, seems idyllic to me, but as a dad, I know will mean more moments of stress and tears for my little girl.

Every moment with my family and friends in Ontario was special.  I miss my parents, and my brother and his wife and children.  I miss them desperately and I miss them year-round.  I entered this trip drained after a few months of nightshifts, and the stresses of a new job. 

I finish this trip with a healthier soul, infused by family and friendship. 

I finish this trip knowing I will return to reading, writing, and running.  Despite their impermanence.

The Broken Bridge

We can look backwards in time.

Every time you gaze at the stars you are inside a time machine.

The light you see took years – anywhere between four and four thousand – to reach your eyes.

A star that you can see tonight may have exploded thousands of years ago, and no longer exists.  It is gone.  But you can see it.

Intelligent, highly educated people spend their lives studying these things.  Quantum physics.  String theory.  If you Google, “why there is no such thing as touch,” you’ll learn (but like me, perhaps not understand) that there is no such thing.  I thought I was sitting on the couch writing this.  Not quite.  Instead, “when you plop down into a chair or slink into your bed, the electrons within your body are repelling the electrons that make up the chair.  You are hovering above it by an unfathomably small distance.”

At the subatomic level, a particle can exist in two places at the same time.  A measurable thing that exists can be in more than one place at once.

Does any of it matter for any of us?  Arguably not.  Whether we know, or do not know these things, hardly effects our lives.

I do not think about them every day.  I rarely think about them at all.

Why did I think about them today?  Because I was straining for an analogy to help explain the unexplainable.  There is a broken bridge near my home.  Surrounding it are forests, and streams, pathways and fallen trees.  This little clearing in the woods is alive with birds and bugs.  I’ve never seen a bear there, but every time I go, I expect to.  It feels like exactly where a bear should live.  I am drawn to this place. 

In a subatomic world, where I can be in two places at one time, a part of me would always be at the broken bridge.  It exudes peace.  Sometimes I stand on the bridge and hear the water that runs below.  Sometimes, I sit on a log and just listen.  I’ve meditated there.  I’ve walked beyond the bridge and discovered a trail I did not know existed.  The broken bridge is the place where my inner voice yells the loudest, and the broken bridge helps give me the resolve to listen to it.  The broken bridge is the place that I limped to last week, when an old hip injury flared up, and I worried that, not only would I be unable to complete the Vancouver Marathon, but that weeks or months of pain loomed ahead. [I finished the marathon.  And my hip still aches].

When I walked there last week – “layered” is the word that stuck in my head.  The broken bridge and the world around it are layered.  Vibrant greens contrasting with dull greys and browns; chirping birds interrupting pure silence; trees reaching for the sky hovering above dead ones that have yet to fall.  All those things interact with each other.  Infinitely.

The day after the marathon we returned home.  We’d spent three days in Vancouver, in a busy downtown hotel, in a large city.  We were always surrounded by people and noise.  After we got home, I walked to the broken bridge.  I was alone.  The day before, I’d been one of thousands of runners. That morning, we woke up in a city with hundreds of thousands of people.  Hours later, I had the broken bridge to myself. 

The broken bridge always looks the same and is always a little different. It’s magical, like looking into the past, hovering on a couch, or being in two places at the same time.  I see it.  I’m immersed in the beauty.  But I can never explain or fully understand exactly what I’m experiencing and how it makes me feel. 

Your Inner Voice

Before I became a cop, I was a graduate student at McMaster University.  My studies were going well.  I was on track to complete a doctorate.  Academia was my future.  Teaching and research loomed.  I enjoyed the teaching part.  Less so the research, because the ultimate goal was to write obscure, footnote laden articles and books which only a handful of people would ever read.

As the months ticked by, and I got closer and closer to finishing a Ph.D., my inner voice intervened.  What began as a gentle whisper became a fierce scream.  My inner voice reminded me that I was studying Canadian history and was about to make that my profession, but, I wasn’t passionate about it.  At the end of a day of studying or writing, I would never pick up a book about Canadian history and read it simply because it interested me.  The fire had been extinguished – if it had ever existed in the first place.

There was a raging fire though.  I’d wanted to be a cop for as long as I could remember.  As I came closer and closer to finishing my studies, and my 30^th birthday loomed, I realized it was now or never.  Go after the thing I really wanted, or continue along the path I was on.

I went for it.  My friends and fellow students at McMaster were shocked.  They had no idea – none – that another side of me existed.  They had no more envisioned me as a cop, than as the Easter Bunny.

My family was with me all the way.  They knew what I’d always wanted.  They encouraged me to chase my dream.

Maybe it runs in the family.  My dad began his working life as a steelworker in Hamilton, Ontario, working grueling shifts under the inferno of a blast furnace.  He wanted more than that.  He enrolled in teacher’s college, studying at McMaster decades before I arrived there.  He went on to teach elementary school for years.  And then his inner voice became another inferno.  He felt called by God to become a minister.  Teaching had gone well.  He was on track to be a principal, to have a successful career, and a secure pension.  Instead, he listened to his inner voice.  He was true to himself.  And he and my mom sacrificed as a result.  For three years my dad had two homes, spending his weekdays at Knox College in Toronto, and his weekends with me, my mom and my brother in a small town in Ontario where he served as a minister at two rural churches.  My mom and dad must have spent those three years physically and mentally exhausted.  And now, 45 years later, as he nears his 80^th birthday, my dad is still a minister, preaching on Easter Sunday, the most sacred day of his year, my mom at his side. 

Some of the strongest memories of my childhood center around Easter weekend.  There was chocolate of course.  An avalanche of chocolate, coloured eggs, and hot-cross buns.  But I also remember the rhythm of that weekend.  Good Friday was a solemn day.  A day of great sadness.  I remember how draining that day always was for my mother and father.  Saturday was anticipation.  Sunday – Easter Sunday, was joy and celebration.  Those memories are forty years old.  Yet the emotions they conjure in me are as real as the glee I saw in my daughter’s face this morning as she hunted for Easter eggs.

Easter weekend remains an incredibly special, even spiritual time for me.  It is always a time for reflection. 

Yesterday, as I ran near our home, over a bridge, I saw water flowing gently on one side, and raging on the other.  Underneath the bridge was a transition point, where smooth water began to churn.  That water reminded me of the inner voice, how it is always flowing within us, and how sometimes it becomes so strong it’s impossible for us to ignore.

For a Moment…

My daughter is seven. 

I turned seven in 1977. Toronto Blue Jays’ bleacher seats were two dollars.  Jimmy Carter was President.  A soldier who’d fought in World War I and World War II visited our home.

My dad turned 7 in 1950. Harry Truman was President.  The Korean War began weeks after my father’s birthday.

My Dutch grandfather turned 7 in the 1920s.  Born during the Great War, that 7-year-old boy did not know that he would live under Nazi occupation and that his daughter, my mom, would be born as fighting raged around them.

I have no idea when my great-grandparents turned seven.  It must have been in the late 1800s.  I know nothing about them.  They are as mysterious to me as medieval peasants.  Their lives mattered.  And they are invisible to history.

Last year, a friend at work gave me a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.  A pillar of Stoicism, Aurelius and the Stoics encourage us to recognize and embrace our impermanence.

I think about impermanence daily. I always have.  But becoming a dad heightened that tendency.  Being a dad is like impermanence on steroids.  Every day my little girl grows up a little more and becomes less of a little girl.

She talks a lot.  Like when I’m sitting on the couch, trying to write this.  Part of me, inside, screams in frustration, yearning for silence so I can concentrate.  And yet, every word is precious.  Every silly, nonsensical thing she says, like, “what squishy butt isn’t marshy.”  (The answer is marshmallow). 

Impermanence is everywhere.  Yesterday I found a photo of myself from almost ten years ago.  I looked at it and thought, ‘I look pretty much the same’.  I showed it to my wife and she said, “You look so young!”

A few months ago one of my favourite trails was closed when an old-growth fir tree toppled in a windstorm.  For years, that tree had clung to the side of a hill.  It was massive and precarious, leaning at an angle that suggested it would fall any moment.  It did not surprise me that heavy rain and high winds sent it crashing to the ground.  It may have been hundreds of years old. 

Last fall I planted a sapling in our backyard.  It didn’t survive the winter.

 Marcus Aurelius  wrote, “Our lifetime is so brief … Consider the abyss of time past, the infinite future.  Three days of life or three generations; what’s the difference.”

I’ve gravitated to the trails over the last few years.  In part, it’s because the dirt paths are much gentler on my aging joints than unforgiving pavement.  But there is more to it.  Our forests are a never-ending reminder of impermanence. 

Stoicism invites us to put impermanence front and center in our lives.  To live neither in the past, nor in the future, but in the moment.  It is not a cliché to say that this moment, is all we truly have. 

And yet these moments span generations.  I look at a picture of myself beside the fallen tree and I see an expression I recognize as my father’s in my own face. 

This morning my daughter commandeered a bathroom.  She put a “Keep Out” sign on the door and told us she was turning felt into silk.  She called out for purple and yellow markers, scissors, and tape.  After thirty minutes she emerged and handed me a paper tie to wear when I dress up to go out for dinner tonight.  On the tie she’d written “you are the best dad ever.”

My daughter is seven.  This morning, for a moment at least, I was the best dad ever.  I know that too is impermanent.  A few years from now, a teenage girl may feel dramatically different about her father.

Stoic philosophy reminds me to accept and embrace the reality that trees grow and trees fall.  Daughters are young and silly and daughters grow up.  Dads age, and dads hobble and dads look more like their own fathers.  Each of those moments is all that we have.  And yet, those moments bind us to the past and anticipate our impermanent futures. 

A Perfect Day

Yesterday I ran for 30 minutes, and my legs felt like they were encased in concrete.

Tomorrow, I have to do a 16-mile run.

Today my legs needed a break.

So, I walked, slowly and alone, on trails near our home.

Not my usual running trails.  For those I head uphill towards the Malahat mountain.  Between logging roads and side trails, I can choose at least a dozen different routes.

But I walked south.  Downhill.  Less choice.  Infinite beauty.

It wasn’t a perfect day for a walk.

It hailed minutes before I left, and rained on me the moment I left the house.  But without the music that usually accompanies me on my runs, I listened to rain pitter pattering on my jacket.  Minutes later the sun came out.  By then I was in the forest.  It was lush and green, and everything shimmered.  The shimmering stopped when the hail came again.  It pelted me before it turned to rain.

It was not a perfect day for a walk.  But if my legs needed the rest, my head needed the space, fresh air, and solitude.  It had been a challenging 24 hours as a dad.  And when I wasn’t focused on parenting, work usually found a way to slip through the cracks of my mind.

Running can be great in those moments too.  But running is different.  Running is always about getting from Point A to Point B and back again.  Running has a physical purpose:  intervals; long and slow; hill repeats.  Even when I’m just out for an easy run, there’s a purpose behind that run.  It’s part of a larger training program.

A walk is different.  There’s no set time.  No exact mileage I need to hit.  I walk to move and breathe and immerse myself in beauty. 

When I run, I barely ever stop.  Stopping defeats the purpose of the run.

Walking is different.  I stop frequently.  At the edge of a cliff, or at the foot of a fallen tree.  I pause near a stream and listen to the water flow.  I step around a damaged bridge and wonder if it fell victim to ice and flooding, or teenagers and booze.

A few minutes after I’ve left the house, my daughter texts me messages of love and nonsense words.  I text back, and when the texts keep coming, I call her, tell her I love her, call her crazy, and say I’ll see her soon.  That wouldn’t happen on a run.   

Sounds, sights and smells are more intense on a walk.  There’s time to absorb them all, instead of running through them.  Walking is peaceful.  It is gentle on the body and gentle on the mind.   

I’m not looking forward to my 16-mile run.  The best part of a long run is finishing it.

I am looking forward to my next walk.  It might even happen later today.  I’ve invited my wife and daughter to come to the bridge with me.

It’s a perfect day for a walk. 

Even Freya

I’ve never written about Freya. 

She’s young, energetic, and getting fat.  When I wake up before dawn she follows me into the kitchen, meows at the pantry door, and fixates on her bag of cat treats until I open them and shake some on the floor.

Freya climbs up onto the bed and sleeps on my wife’s head.

Freya’s a little scared of my daughter and my daughter’s a little scared of her. 

We’ve had Freya for almost a year.  She makes me smile.  I love her.

But I’ve never written about her.

We live together but she’s on the periphery of my life.  I allot a small amount of my physical and mental energy to her. 

These few sentences may be all I ever write about Freya.

Yet she is a living creature.  In my home.  A creature whose fear when she first came here was so overwhelming, she hid behind a couch for days.  A creature whose capacity for love and attachment is so strong, she follows my wife throughout the house, day and night.

I take Freya for granted.  She adds happiness to my life, for a minimal price.

It’s easy to take things for granted.  Those things, big or small, that together, are the fabric of our lives.

In my last post, I wrote about how I was leaving the homicide unit where I’d worked for years.  I’m gone now.  And people keep getting killed.  The unit is very busy.  I know my friends are stressed and exhausted and giving everything, they have.  I spent a significant portion of my career working with them.  And now that I’m not, I think about them, especially when collectively, they are being pushed to the limits of endurance. 

Careers evolve.  I work with a new team now.  Uniformed officers on patrol in Victoria –  a city of extremes – where beauty and disorder co-exist.  Our team is filled with young men and women who are starting their careers.  They’re talented, enthusiastic and committed to the fundamental precept of policing – helping people.  Our team has veteran officers too – like me, these are cops with decades of experience.  We look at the ‘kids’ and we want them to have fulfilling careers and happy lives.  Their passion for the job is inspiring – it reminds us of why we signed up to be cops, years and years ago.  In turn, those of us who have been around for awhile, hope that the youngsters will benefit from our experience and example.  Maybe some lessons we learned will make things a bit easier for them.

One lesson I’ve learned is the importance of connection. My days, and nights, at work start with coffee.  Three or four of us get together.  We seek out quiet places, although, being in uniform, we always attract attention.  We huddle together around a table.  We laugh, plan the day, debrief things that have happened, talk about stuff that needs to get done.  Some of us have known each other for years.  Even so, this time together, coffee and conversation deepens those friendships.  Not everyone has worked together before.  We’re forming new connections.  Getting to know each other – professionally and personally.  In one breath we’re talking about sick kids.  A moment later it’s the robbery that the entire shift worked on the day before.

Those moments are precious and special.  When I’m at work I miss my wife and daughter.  I want to be with them.  But that time together with my friends and colleagues adds richness and texture to my life.  When I leave policing, those are the moments I will miss.

It’s all too easy to take life for granted.

I started writing this piece a couple of days ago.  This morning I woke up to learn that two members of the Edmonton Police Service had been shot and killed.  Two young men murdered on duty.  That’s seven cops killed across Canada in the last six months.  Murdered for wearing a uniform and doing their best to keep people safe.

Sometimes writing helps me make sense of things.  But there’s no sense to be made of these tragedies.  Good people die and the world keeps spinning. 

My house is chaotic right now.  My daughter is giddy.  A category 5 hurricane ripping through the house.  She’s chasing Freya.  I just heard my wife say, “don’t go near her!”  Category 5 hurricanes don’t respond well to direction.

My daughter is very excitable.  We’re different.  I like quiet.  I’m not a talker.  She’s the opposite of both of those things, even when she isn’t giddy.  To finish this piece, I had to walk away from her and close a door.

I worry that I take her for granted sometimes.  This beautiful, precious child, and sometimes I feel too busy, or too stressed, to just be in the moment with her and give her my attention.  When I choose not to spend time with her, I feel so guilty.  A little girl asks for her dad, and sometimes her dad says no.  Even when I’m doing it I feel awful.  Afterwards, I just want to be with her and throw my arms around her.    

Life happens every day.  The big and the small.  The things that happen to us, and the things that happen to others, hundreds of miles away.  It all affects us.

I feel tremendous sadness for those fallen officers.  For their families.  For their friends and colleagues. My heart is heavy.

And I’m thankful, so thankful, for the love in my life.  My family.  My friends.  Even Freya. 

.

The Phone that Might Ring

I’ve spent most of the last seven years in a homicide unit.  The work is often intense.  There’s always pressure – on some days the vice grip squeezes harder than others – you always feel something: a horrific scene, a family’s grief, the urgency to prioritize public safety, the slow and often frustrating grind of the court system.  The phone that might ring.

That was the hardest part for me.  Being on-call.  I tried to be stoic.  I often reminded myself that I had no control if my cellphone rang.  By that point someone was already dead.  All I could control was my reaction.  Answer the phone, be professional, and begin the investigation, an investigation that almost always takes many months, if not years.

That mindset – controlling what I could control – helped.  But it was a constant challenge.  My phone was always with me.  In the bathroom, beside my bed, jammed in the center consul when I was driving anywhere.  A day off never felt like a day off when I was on-call.  I could not relax.  When I was on-call my wife and daughter were on-call too.  Every family decision or plan had to take into account – what if the phone rings?  What if I must leave immediately and be gone for days on end? 

That phone accompanied me on countless trail runs.  We live in a neighbourhood surrounded by trails.  The cell service is exceptional.  I could be alone in the woods, confident that if someone called, I could answer.  Trails runs when I was on-call were not the same.  I’d stuff my running vest or backpack with a pen, paper, and a cheat-sheet to remind myself of the questions I had to ask, and the direction I had to provide, if someone called me and told me there’d been a murder.

Dozens and dozens of trail runs while on-call.  Sometimes the phone rang, but I was never called out for a homicide while running.  In fact, it was while running, on the trails, that I came the closest to being able to relax.  The magical quality of putting one foot in front of the other again and again sometimes made me forget that I was on-call at all.  That didn’t happen often, and when it did, it might just be for seconds or minutes at a time.  But it did happen.  Running has that power.

This was my last week in the homicide unit.  I didn’t say “goodbye” to anyone.  I don’t like that word.  There’s a finality to it.  Saying goodbye might have brought the simmering sadness I felt to the surface.  I felt the weight of leaving a group of friends and colleagues who experienced the same daily pressures I did.  The experiences we shared created bonds that transcend time and space. 

In a few days I return to nightshifts.  I know lack of sleep will affect my body and my mind.  My family will be effected.  My daughter has never known a dad who is gone all night and sleeps during the day.  There will be adjustments for all of us.

I also know that on days when I’m tired, with brain fog that feels like a hangover, I will head to the trails.  I will put one foot in front of the other. And the magical power of running will help restore me.

Running with Pain

A couple days ago, I hit the treadmill hard.  Two and a half miles at almost maximum effort.  It hurt.

There was only one other person in the gym.  A big guy.  Strong and tough.  He was hammering the weights.

Between strides and sets we shouted encouragement to one another.  “Good work,” and “keep it going.”

It was early in the morning.  Still dark and cold outside.  Classic rock boomed. He grunted while he lifted.  I fought to keep pace with the belt spinning below me. 

We were driven and we drove each other.

And we were distracted.  His family had recently been hit by a significant health crisis.  We weren’t talking about it in the gym.  But I bet his mind went there, even when lifting heavy weights.

My mind drifted too.  To a family I know that recently received devastating health news. 

My body hurt.  Not injury pain.  But the pain of significant effort.

When it hurt, I thought about something.  I thought that I could not outrun the pain.  Straining, tensing, groaning, tightening up, did nothing to make me run faster or smoother.  The pain was inherent to the speed – the equivalent of 10 laps of a track at the edge of what I capable of doing.

I thought that I could not outrun the pain.  Instead, I had to run with the pain.  Pain was my companion.  It wasn’t going anywhere.  I tried to breathe smooth.  I tried to run effortlessly.  I imagined that pain was an entity, as real as a person, running beside me.  My new running partner.  Sometimes I let pain sneak ahead, and I tucked in behind it, like pain was leading the peloton and I was letting pain do all the hard work, while I drafted along.

When I was running with pain, I thought, “does the analogy hold?”  When real life hurts – not some meaningless run on a weekday in Victoria – but real pain in real life, can we try and do the same thing?  Can we run with pain?  In real life, pain is rarely two and a half miles in sixteen minutes.  Pain is often days, weeks, months, and years. 

I don’t know if the analogy holds.  But I wonder if it does.  When things are bad, nothing is more prominent than pain.  It dominates.  It may be impossible to defeat.  But maybe we can run with it, beside it, knowing it’s not going anywhere, but also knowing that neither are we.  That when we give maximum effort, and have someone close to us, providing encouragement, that we can continue.  And that we can tuck in behind the pain, knowing it is strong and fast and will take the lead, but we can get behind it and it will pull us forward towards where we are going.  Wherever that might be.

I don’t know if the analogy holds.  When I think back to the hardest times in my life, I don’t know what I did, or how I approached it, other than day by day.  I didn’t name pain or think of it as my companion.  So, I don’t know.

We’re not far from 2023.  I hope to take on some significant physical challenges.  One race or event every quarter of the year that will test my fitness and force me to train to pain.  To push my body so it will grow.  Pushing my body will mean pain.  Fast runs, long runs, and heavy weights.  In that sense, I’ll be inviting pain into my life.  My choice, for events that I choose on dates when I want to do them.  Not real life at all.  But when I feel that voluntary pain, I will imagine that pain is my companion that will be with me for the duration.  I won’t outrun it.  But I’ll stick with it.  Until I get where I’m going.  We’ll get there together.  To those events.  Through those events.  And whatever will be will be. 

That morning in the gym reminded me that running and training and events on the calendar are both crucial and inconsequential.  For so many of us they are integral parts of our lives, yet they’re not really life. 

I emerged from this week with few answers and many questions.  Questions about fairness and good fortune and the unpredictability of it all.  And a question about pain.  Can we run beside it?  Does the analogy hold?

At Home

A lot can happen in a short time.

I spent much of the last month away from home – almost two weeks in the Fraser Valley taking a course, and then a short stint on the west coast of Vancouver Island, as part of a team assigned to an investigation.

Wildfire smoke clogged the valley, the debris of millions of incinerated trees hung in the air for days on end.  The floating particles found their way into my lungs and permeated my clothes.  Every piece of clothing I wore outside reeked.

While I was in the valley, a police officer was murdered not that far away.  I was in a room full of cops when the news broke.  Grief hung in the air, as real, and more hurtful than the ash from the fires. 

Everyone on the course had many years, even decades, on the job.  The officer who was killed, had barely three – her career was in it’s infancy, her life, in many ways, just beginning.

When the course ended, I drove home.  The wildfire smoke did not dissipate until I reached the ocean, more than 100 kilometers away.  I took a ferry home.  I was so glad to see my family.

I took the same ferry again last week.  One of thousands who gathered for the slain officer’s funeral.  Her family, friends and colleagues spoke so well.  It was clear that she was a special and remarkable person. 

It was in the days between ferry rides that I was on the west coast of the island.  My unit investigates death.  The small town where this occurred is a tourist mecca.  However, we were not there as tourists.  We stood out everywhere we went in our pressed pants and dress shirts.  A few days in this town reinforced a truism of our work – that when someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly, the effects are wide, profound and long lasting.

Despite my observations, and my job, none of the things I write about above were about me.  My career, and my current job, put me in a position where I have the privilege of trying to play a part, however small, in trying to help people through dark times.

However, the things I write about above do affect me.  They continue to mold and shape me even though I’m over fifty years old, with more than two decades on the job. 

This morning I’m at home with my wife and daughter.  There’s coffee and juice, waffles, dolls and a Barbie movie.  A perfect Sunday morning.  Outside it’s grey, the fog hanging over the trees reminiscent of the wildflower smoke which hung over the valley.

Today I will run on trails, read whenever I have a spare moment, call my parents and hug my girls.  I’m thankful to be at home.

The Trails I Love

It hasn’t rained for months and the trails I love are dust not dirt.  Steep inclines are virtually impossible to climb, because the ground falls away.  Downhills are treacherous because my trail shoes have nothing to grip.  It’s like sliding down a sand dune at the beach.  Every run is hot, with the sun beating down, and radiating back up.  I finish every workout filthy, covered in sweat and grime.  And I love it.  I love overheating, and being dirty, and dropping to the ground mid-run to crank out some push-ups, and then getting back up looking like Pigpen from Peanuts. 

The trails I love are so close to my home I can be there in minutes.  Hundreds of people live around them.  And I almost always have them to myself.  They feel like my special place.  My little secret.  I go there to train hard.  I lift rocks, and logs.  I run with them.  I carry them.  I squat them.  I don’t need to pay for a gym.  More weight than I could ever lift lies on, and around, the trails I love.

Last year I saw a bear.  It was only about fifty feet away.  I was scared, but I stayed calm.  I backed away slowly.  He, or she, took little interest in me, as it lumbered along its own trail, at its own pace.  I barely merited a sideways glance.  Every time I go out to the trails I love, I wonder if I’ll see a bear.  I don’t want to encounter one.  And yet, a part of me always hopes I will see one again.  From a distance of course, and a perfectly safe vantage point.  A bear that’s disinterested in me.  A bear that lets me revel in the majesty of one of Creation’s most incredible creatures.

I was home alone when the Queen died.  I was shocked, and a little numb. I had never known a world without the Queen.  So, I walked to the trails I love, and I sang “God Save the Queen,” to myself, and I was thankful for a woman who lived her life with grace and dignity.  I remembered that she was not perfect, which reminded me that none of us are.  Perfection is an impossible legacy.  Dedication, fortitude, service to something bigger than ourselves – those are obtainable – not easy, but obtainable.  The Queen showed that for over seven decades.  She gave us all something to try and emulate.

I’d give anything to do a hard workout on the trails that I love. It’s been a while.  But my body can’t.  I was part of a team of law enforcement officers that ran 129 kilometers in three days last week to honour peace officers killed in the line of duty.  It was a very special, very sacred, event.  It was also an event I started with a sore knee.  A mildly sore knee.  A doctor or physiotherapist probably would not have said, “the best thing for your knee is to run 80 miles, mostly on pavement, over three days.”  Now almost a week after the run concluded, my mildly sore knee, is constantly hurting.  I’m not in agony, I probably won’t need surgery, but something’s not right.  Doctor Daryl tells himself that rest and stretching will do the trick, and, in a week or so, all will be right with my left knee. 

Even if my knee wasn’t hurting, I still wouldn’t be running.  Thanks to Covid.  I tested positive a few days ago.  It hasn’t been awful, but it’s affected me.  A laundry list of mostly mild symptoms:  weariness, coughing, loss of taste, night sweats, something going on with my right eye.  I have nothing to complain about. I’ve  improved daily.  And my path to normal began yesterday when I left the house for the first time in three days to walk on the trails I love.

In a few weeks, November rain will arrive, and the same trails will be flooded.  The days will be grey, and I’ll return from runs sopping and caked in mud.  I will gripe about our wet winters and the lack of sunlight.  But the trails I love will remain beautiful.  Shine or rain, they exude stillness and peace, bring comfort, guide me towards stillness, and help me be my best self.

Tinged with Sadness

Late last year someone challenged me to write a piece that wasn’t tinged with sadness.  I haven’t, and I’m not sure I can. 

Thanks to Susan Cain, I have a better understanding of why.  The same author who helped me understand being an introvert has now written ‘Bittersweet.’  Bittersweet is a way of being, “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time.”

I’m bittersweet.  To the core.  I think about death daily.  Susan Cain reassures me that’s okay when she asks the question, “How should we live, knowing that we and everyone we love will die?”

Thinking about death daily means I think about life.  About the people, values and things that matter most.

About my daughter, who just had an epic Sunday morning meltdown, sparked by her fear of being alone in the home, when I took my coffee and laptop to the front porch.

A front porch I chose because it offers me beauty and silence, a cool breeze, flowers, and bees.

Epic meltdowns are not uncommon.  Our daughter is highly sensitive.  She feels joy intensely and sometimes rages uncontrollably.  I’m proud of her though.  Twice in the last two days she has used breathing – one minute of quiet deep breathing alone in her room – to calm herself and end her tantrums.

I’m trying to use breathing to better myself.  Over the last few months, I’ve started to meditate almost consistently.  The essence of that meditation is the breath.  Focusing on the breath, recognizing that thinking will interrupt that focus, and then returning to the breath.

Meditation is training for the mind.  It need not be religious or spiritual.  Its benefits are supported by science and by high performers – elite athletes, Navy Seals and Fortune 500 CEOs are meditating and they’re speaking very publicly about it.

I’m not searching for a Holy Grail.  I’m just trying to be a little bit better.  A better husband, father, cop, and human being.  And a little bit happier.  Maybe even ten percent happier.

All those things are possible. I feel it already from my brief foray into meditation.  I know it, because of books like ‘10% Happier’ by Dan Harris.  I’d known about this book for years and listened to Harris’s podcast occasionally.  But I only read the book a few weeks ago. 

I couldn’t put it down.  I recommend you pick it up and not put it down either.  Harris is a journalist who writes honestly about his career and the highs and lows of his life.  He holds nothing back as he takes you on his journey of inquiry, scepticism and ultimately commitment to a life that includes meditation.  It’s also a life that recognizes the impermanence of everything. Dan Harris thinks about death too.

I exercise daily – running and strength training.  Days off are rare.  I now understand that meditation needs to be a part of my daily routine.  The mind and body are not just inextricably linked, they are part of the same whole.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time with Susan Cain and Dan Harris, diving into their books.  And then earlier this week, Cain appeared on Harris’s ‘Ten Percent Happier’ podcast.  It was one of those moments where I felt like my worlds were colliding in the best way possible.  If you have an hour, please listen.  If you have more time, get your hands on ‘Bittersweet’ and ‘10% Happier.’  Both books will enrich your life.  Read together, their power grows exponentially.

It’s tranquil on the front porch now.  My daughter has calmed down, she’s in the backyard with my wife, happy and calling for me, “Mr. Daryl … Dad.”  She’s excited about going swimming later today.

I’m sipping coffee.  Writing.  Content. Knowing that I can be both bittersweet and happier.

I Used to Watch…

I used to watch ‘Meet the Press’ every Sunday without fail.  A political junkie, I relished my weekly immersion into U.S. politics.

I used to watch Sunday night baseball on ESPN. The Yankees and Red Sox.  The Cardinals, Dodgers and Giants. Every game was an opportunity to relax, and a reminder of my childhood.  When all that mattered was baseball.

I never watch Meet the Press anymore. The closest I get to it is the fading coffee mug my wife bought me years ago.

Baseball comes in snippets.  Five or ten minutes at most.

Life changes when children come.  That’s normal and to be expected.

However, most dads aren’t 45 when they have their first child.  I had four and a half decades of mostly living for myself.  Doing what I wanted when I wanted. 

That’s not easy to give up.  I have an innate selfishness.  I like to get what I want when I want it.

There’s a reason this blog is titled, ‘Reader, Writer, Runner,’ and not “Political Junkie and Baseball Fan.’  When life required me to prioritize, politics and baseball went out the window. 

Reading, writing, and running sustain me.  They nourish the essence of me.  My aging essence. 

Every day I’m conscious of my age in a way that I wasn’t in my thirties and forties.  There’s a starkness to being in my fifties that doesn’t go away.  I’m reading a book about an ultramarathoner who ran a 50 miler in 2001, weeks after September 11^th.  The runner had just turned 60.  Which means, he’s over 80 now, if he’s still alive.

Twenty years doesn’t seem very long ago.  Maybe because September 11^th is seared into our collective consciousness.  Twenty years is sobering.  Twenty years from now I’ll be in my early seventies.

Twenty years from now my daughter will be twenty-six years old.  An adult.  Forging her own path, with the confidence and vibrancy of youth.

Now though, she’s still just a little girl.  Instead of watching Meet the Press on Sunday mornings, I watch ‘Come Play with Me,’ a YouTube show about dolls.

Instead of watching baseball, I’m in the park, playing with my daughter.  If there is anything better in the world, I don’t know what it is. 

One of my favourite podcasters, Martin Yelling, talks about the seasons of life.  I love the analogy.  It helps me accept being a slower runner, and a reader who is helpless without his reading glasses.  Time takes a natural toll on speed and eyesight.

Time offers gifts too.  It was a gift that I became a father late in the seasons of my life.  I’m a fifty-one-year-old dad who bought his daughter a book about fairies a couple of days ago.  When I gave it to her, she squealed with absolute and pure joy.

This morning instead of Meet the Press,we may play croquet on our back lawn. Tonight, instead of the Yankees versus the Red Sox, we’ll be at the park.

There isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be.

Scattered Thoughts

I’d like to write more, but often I’m pressed for either time or ideas.  Sometimes a photo prompts my next piece. Usually something happens that I feel compelled to share.  When the ideas strike, the pieces often write themselves.  I’m just the conduit.  At least that’s how it feels. 

Today I have time but no ideas.  Photos but no stories behind them.  Many things on my mind, and none of them flowing through my fingers.  More like scattered thoughts colliding.

I’m fifty-one.  Maybe closer to death than high school.  I was thirty when I became a cop.  I remember driving home at the end of a nightshift, pulling into the driveway, and wondering: wondering when I’d feel like a grown-up, wondering when I’d feel comfortable in my own skin, wondering when the world would make sense.

The world still doesn’t make sense.  Yesterday in Buffalo, New York innocent people were slaughtered in a grocery store.  I grew up near the U.S. border.  My parents shopped at that grocery chain regularly.  The grocery store is called “Tops.”  I can still hear their jingle in my head “Tops Never Stops Saving You More.”

I’ve given up trying to make sense of the world. That’s not going to happen.  Which ironically, may be an important step in having a better understanding of myself.

I may not be there yet – understanding myself that is – but I feel like I’m on the right path. It’s only taken half a century.

Fatherhood has helped.  Not that it’s easy.  Every day I grapple with being a dad.  When to discipline?  How to teach life lessons?  What’s the best way to help an innocent child become a strong and confident girl?

Until very recently I listened to the Marathon Talk podcast.  The hosts embraced the notion of trusting the process.  It’s fine to have a goal, but the goal is secondary to the work you do along the way.  It’s the steps that matter, whether in marathon training, or raising a daughter.  Any goal is the product of the steps and moments that came before it.  Take your steps.  Live in the moment.  Keep your eyes on the horizon.  Never stop moving.

I became truer to myself when I stopped eating meat.  I eat a whole food plant-based diet because I believe it’s my best chance to live a long and healthy life.  There’s more to it than that – changing the way I ate showed me that, daily, my ideals and values could be in alignment with my actions.  That was a powerful lesson. 

Veganism led me to Rich Roll.   Rich chronicled his journey from addict to endurance athlete in his book ‘Finding Ultra.’  His podcast guests are leaders in their fields; health, neuroscience, athletics, and the arts.  Podcasts have reshaped the path I’ve taken in my life. They’ve changed the way I breathe, encouraged me to write, inspired me to wake up at 3:00 a.m. to run miles in the dark, and, conversely, prompted me turn my alarm clock off because sleeping may be the best thing any of us can do to promote physical and mental health. 

I used to have one or two books on the go at any one time.  Recently it’s been five or six.  Although the world doesn’t make sense, books help me navigate my way through it.  I’ve been reading about survival, hostages in Iran, a German general kidnapped in wartime Crete, the latest Reacher novel, a collection of essays from Jedidiah Jenkins, and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.  I read with a pen in hand, underlying meaningful passages.  I read with my journal by my side, and I copy especially meaningful passages into it.  Great writing moves me.  Incredible stories inspire me.  They all help me focus on my process and my path ahead.

My wife and I have a close friend whose mother is terminally ill.  Words so often fail in those situations.  So we sought the answer in words more eloquent than any we could ever express.  We sent a copy of Susan Cain’s latest book, ‘Bittersweet’ which is about grief.  Cain wrote ‘Quiet,’ a book about introverts.  It helped me better understand myself.  Without having read it, I know ‘Bittersweet’ will be an eloquent, thoughtful work which will help people all over the world.

I have a friend who did something special yesterday.  He ran one hundred kilometers in fourteen hours.  That’s more than two marathons.  He suffered.  He endured.  He finished.  His achievement was even more remarkable because of his training.  His longest training run was 10 kilometers.  He’s in excellent shape.  Obviously that helped.  But, on paper, no coach would draw up a training program without incorporating much longer runs.  On paper he should have done 20-, 30- and 40-kilometer runs.  He didn’t.  He didn’t need to. His mental toughness is off the charts.  He ran sixty-two miles yesterday with his mind. 

The mind.  That’s another thing podcasts have helped me appreciate.  The power of the mind.  To heal.  To create.  To help us reshape ourselves through meditation, and by visualizing the lives we want to lead.

Two more scattered thoughts.

Yesterday we adopted a kitten.  Her name is Molly.  Our daughter’s name is Molly.  We’re going to have to rename our daughter.

The pictures of the fallen trees are from a cutblock not far from our home.  I walked through it, and although it was undeniably apocalyptic, it wasn’t awful.  There was beauty in the desolation, and in the rich green forest behind it. 

Nails on the Trail

The trails near our home are open to everyone.  The backcountry beckons.  I run while others mountain bike, hike or walk their dogs.  Some ride their dirt bikes or quads.  Sometimes when I run, I hear their engines roaring in the distance.  When we cross paths, I breathe exhaust fumes instead of fresh air. 

But the forest and trails are vast and my encounters with motorized vehicles are always fleeting.  I wave or nod to the riders as we pass one another.  We have different interests but a shared love of the outdoors. We mean one another no harm.

I love to run hills.  There is nothing better for the legs and lungs.  And I’m lucky.  I can walk out the front door, and minutes later be doing a grueling uphill workout.  Long and steep it holds the false promise of reaching a peak.  But there’s no summit for a long time, just short breaks, and then more inclines – steep dirt tracks with scattered rocks and boulders.  They’re ideal for trail running.  And motorbikes.  Sometimes I see the bikes themselves.  Usually tire tracks are the only evidence of their presence.  They are loud but my encounters with them while running are rare.  And we can not hear them from our home.  But others must, because this isn’t the backwoods yet.  More like the shared backyard of a subdivision where hundreds of people live.

A few weeks back I was running up one of these short, steep trails when I saw a nail laying on the ground.  And then two nails, and a third and a fourth, seemingly buried in the dirt intentionally, all over the trail.  Each one placed carefully and with malice, guaranteed to puncture the tires of a dirt bike, or a quad.  Equally guaranteed to pierce a dog’s paws or a child’s flesh.

I picked up eleven nails and filed a police report.  I returned a few days later and found at least ten more.  Maybe I’d missed them the first time, buried underneath the dirt and rocks.  Maybe whoever put them there had returned. 

It is in our nature as human beings to hurt one another.  We hurt those we love.  We hurt people we hate.  We hurt people we don’t know.  So, I was not surprised to find those nails on the trail.  Not surprised.  But saddened and angered.  Thankfully, no one was hurt. 

I still run that trail.  I was there yesterday.  I found six more nails.  One was visible, churned up after I ascended, I spotted it on the descent.  I excavated the area and found five more.  I picked them up and added them to the now harmless pile of nails I’ve created inside a nearby concrete barrier. There are thirty nails in that pile now.

Thirty.  Someone carried thirty nails to that trail, got down on their hands and knees, placed them individually along both sides of the trail and right down the middle, and then covered them with dirt and rocks.  That’s cold. That’s premeditated.  That’s malicious.  That’s humanity.

The dark side of humanity. 

We’ve had illness in our family recently.  Metaphorically one of us stepped on a nail on the trail.  That nail was Covid.  It hit hard.  Its effects are still being felt.  Things are improving but not back to normal.  In the toughest days we saw the best of humanity.  A sibling and parents who dropped everything to care for the one they love.  Friends and neighbours coming to the house and offering their medical expertise, bringing soup, dropping off cookies.  Flowers and well wishes arrived from across the country.  We saw the best side of humanity.

The absolute opposite of nails on the trail.

The World Should Stop

There are moments when the world should stop.

Like the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this week.

Innocent people suffer immensely while we go about our lives.  Last night was movie night at our house.  Fairy tales and princesses for our lovely six-year old.

In Ukraine, how many six-year old girls are terrified?  Right now. 

Ukrainians fight back. Fiercely.  Inspiring the world.  Civilians picking up rifles, and turning bottles into Molotov cocktails.

I pour my second cup of coffee.  Think about the mountain bike ride I’d like to go on.  Or maybe bouldering at the climbing gym.

Time to check Twitter.  What’s the latest from Kyiv?  Not Kiev.  Is that all we can do for Ukraine?  Spell, and pronounce, their capital city correctly.  Retweet their heroism?

My mom was born in Nazi occupied Netherlands.  I wish my grandparents were still alive.  I’d ask them what it was like to be young parents in a war torn land.

The world didn’t stop for my grandparents.  The world mobilized.  Canadian soldiers liberated my mother’s hometown.

There won’t be any Canadian soldiers in Ukraine.  NATO intervention could lead to global war.  Nuclear missiles might fly.  We fight with economic sanctions, and kick Russian banks out of SWIFT, a banking system none of us had ever heard of until two days ago.

The world should stop.  But it doesn’t.

A few minutes ago my daughter asked, “can we play Go Fish?”  “No,”  I responded, “I’m writing something.”  My no lasted for about 10 seconds.  We’ve played three games since then.

The world should stop.  But it doesn’t.  And the people of Ukraine fight on.

Bury Things Deep

Sometimes the first time my wife learns about something in my life is reading about it on readerwriterrunner.com. 

When we first met, I told her that I liked to “bury things deep.”  Maybe I was exaggerating for effect.   There’s a difference between burying things, and not talking about them.  I’m very good at not talking.

But I don’t bury them.  To do so would mean hiding them away, somewhere within me – walled off from myself and unexamined.

I’ve seen a lot of death and misery in the last two decades.  Death and misery come with the uniform.  More and more over the last few years, I’ve seen colleagues suffering.  Sometimes one incident is the proverbial last straw and the weight of what my friends and colleagues have seen becomes too much to bear.  Sometimes the one incident is so awful it does it on its own.  For others, there is no one incident, just accumulated suffering.

I’ve learned that when this happens to my colleagues, they are injured – a physical injury as real as a broken leg. 

I’ve learned that this can happen to anyone, at anytime.  And not just first responders and veterans.  The pandemic has made things worse for everyone.

Last week I got a call from a close friend who was going through a tough time.  I don’t think I could have handled the things he has weathered.  He inspires me.  I think he would acknowledge that for many years he buried things deep.  And that part of coming to terms with those things is the opposite of burying them.

There are a lot of ways to shine a little light on dark places.  You’re probably already doing them. 

I read a lot.   I read with a pen in my hand and a journal by my side.  I underline passages that move me and copy some of them into my journal. 

I run.  Almost every day.  Sometimes listening to music that transports me a million miles away.  Sometimes in the stillness of a forest where all I hear is the stream that flows beside me.

I write.  Things I haven’t yet told my wife get posted online for anyone in the world to read. Anyone in the world, including my mom and my ex-wife and my ex-partner.  That’s a varied audience.

I talk.  Sometimes. One of the things I value more than anything in this world is going for coffee with my wife, at least once a week.  We have one or two favourite places.  We sip Americanos.  And I actually talk.  Things that have accumulated throughout the week come out.  And speaking those words, to her, over coffee, always feels good.

I’ve always known how important, reading, running, and writing are in my life.  I knew it instinctively.  I felt it in my marrow.  But I’ve increasingly also come to understand that it is when I read, run, write, and sometimes talk, that I shine light on darkness.  Far from burying things deep, I actually deal with them head on.

Postscript

I thought about some of these things last Sunday as I ran with good friends as part of the Wounded Warriors one day run from Sooke to Sidney on Vancouver Island.  This year’s team is gearing up for their 600-kilometer run from the north island to Victoria later this month.  (As a former member of the team, I was privileged to be able to join them for the one day run).  The funds they raise help first responders and veterans going through difficult times.  Those funds also help their spouses and children.  If you’re so inclined, you can visit Home – Wounded Warrior Run BC (akaraisin.com) to learn more, and perhaps even donate.

Thank you.

Daryl

Aching

An old injury resurfaced recently.  Hip pain, dormant for almost a decade, flared up.

Except pain isn’t the right word.

It’s an ache.  A deep ache, down to the marrow itself.  An ache that morphs into leg pain and back pain, burrowing itself elsewhere in my body, so that my hip feels fine, even though that injured hip is the source of all the discomfort.

But injured isn’t the right word either.

Because injury and pain go hand in hand. 

Tearing a calf muscle mid-run is an injury – sudden and sharp pain that stops a run dead in its tracks. 

Sometimes trail runners crash to the ground, tripping on camouflaged roots or unseen rocks.  Bones break.  Ligaments tear.  Doctors intervene.  Life changes until injuries heal.

Aching is different.  Aching doesn’t send you to the hospital.  Aching doesn’t stop you from continuing.

Aching comes with options.

Push through.

When my hip aches, and the muscles and joints around it seize up, I continue running.  Because I know I can.  That long dormant ache is a part of me, as real as blood and flesh.  As alive as family and friends.  I know everything about that ache.  I know that I can keep running, and the ache may worsen, but the injury will not.  The ache hurts, and that hurt affects me.  My body tries to compensate.  My gait changes, my strides shorten.  I bend forward.  The ache gets into my head.  Trying to stop me. But I know I can push through, because, it is just an ache.  Going forward will not make it worse. 

Pushing through isn’t always the answer.  Aches must be cared for.  When my hip flared up, I stretched.  Not much, but more than usual.  Every day.  Twisting and contorting my legs and back as much as possible, with a laser focus on targeting that hip.  Using a foam roller to burrow into the joint where the ache lives, and loosen it.  Doing all I could to ease that ache.  Under no illusions that I was making it go away forever.  But knowing that with some love, and care, it would subside. 

A few weeks ago, someone once close to me passed away.  He was a good and decent man.  An honourable man who served his country in wartime, his community in peacetime, and raised a family that loved him to the end.

I hadn’t seen him for several years.

Coincidentally his death coincided with my aching hip. 

On a run last Sunday, as I thought about the difference between “ache” and “pain” I thought about him too.  And I realized the same analogy applied.

His death did not stop me in my tracks, and leave me grief stricken.  It did not injure me to the point of being incapable of going on.  Instead it made me ache inside.  Sadness and sorrow which I pushed through, going about my life seemingly unchanged and unaffected.  Yet the ache was there.  An ache which stretching and foam rolling could not help.  So I tended to it in a different way.  By reflecting on talks and walks, meals and memories.  Being grateful for a life well lived, and a chance to share in that life.

Last Sunday’s aching run was a miserable day. Cold, wet and windy.  I did not want to hit the trails.  But I went out anyway.  Aching.  And while I was thinking these thoughts, the clouds lifted momentarily.  There was a bit of sunshine, and I stopped, and I took a picture.  And then I kept running.  And the ache in my hip got a lot worse.  But it didn’t stop me.  And I made it home just fine.

Flat Miles

Flat miles.

There’s no such thing on Vancouver Island.  Up and down, up and down.  Every run is a series of ascents and descents. 

Southern Ontario is gloriously flat.  I took advantage of that a couple weeks back, when I was home, alone, visiting my family.  I logged a lot of miles.  It was easy to do.  I had lots of time, and few responsibilities. 

I ran every day, except one.

Things happened in Ontario.  And I ran.

That’s the thing about running.  It’s with you always.  Wherever you are.  A runner can always run.  A runner can structure his day around a run.  Or a runner can squeeze in a run even when the day is busy and unyielding.  A runner finds time to run.

And think.

I had lots to think about when I ran in Ontario.

My mom.  Recovering from a stroke.  Working so hard on her rehab. Moving so well.  Speaking so well. I was very proud of her.

My dad. We ran together.  That was special.  He’s been doing it for five decades.  Part of the first great running boom of the 1970s.  He’s nearing eighty and still running.  Runners run.

My grandparents. I visited my grandfather’s grave. Born during the Great War, he and my grandmother started their family during World War II, in occupied Holland. My mother and her twin sister were born as the Battle of Arnhem was fought nearby. A famous battle – The Bridge Too Far battle. My mother’s twin died shortly after she was born, in a starving nation, torn by war. My grandmother’s name is not on the gravestone. Her ashes were scattered elsewhere. In my memory, they are always together.

My wife and daughter.  They did not make the trip.  My daughter is too young to be vaccinated.  There was an emptiness to this trip home, because my entire family was not together.

Guelph.  A small-town in Ontario.  I miss small-town Ontario.  I miss the brick buildings, Main Streets, and cenotaphs in town squares.  I miss walking in a small-town.  I miss feeling I’m part of a small-town.  I didn’t realize how important it was to me until I left it behind.

ACAB. An Acronym for ‘All Cops Are Bastards.’  Spray-painted on the wall of a cake  shop in Guelph.  I know a lot of cops.  All cops are not bastards.  I thought about how widespread anti-police sentiment has become.  I thought about the assaults my colleagues in Victoria have been subjected to recently.  Serious assaults.  I thought, if the ‘C’ in the acronym was replaced with a letter that stood for a different group, it would be a hate crime.

People.  I didn’t fly home to wander through small-towns.  I went for people.  Like my wife’s best friend and her husband.  They have become my friends.  A trip back home without seeing them is unimaginable.  People I only met a few years ago, are now important parts of my life. 

Life takes twists and turns.  I had dinner with my ex-wife. For the last 18  months, she has been on the frontlines of the battle against Covid.  Her efforts have kept vulnerable seniors alive. She has endured immeasurable stress.  She’s led her staff through difficult times.  I am proud of her.

In life’s twists and turns, there are constants.  Like my brother, and his wife and their children.  They are proverbial rocks in my life.  We don’t talk often and see each other rarely.  And yet we are there for one another, with a closeness and comfort level that transcends distance and time. 

I thought about the people I did not see.  My friend Stitch.  A man who has suffered, and endured, and come out the other side.  Strong and resilient.  If I called him and said I needed him, he’d drop everything and fly across the country in a heartbeat. No questions asked.

I thought about some people I have not seen in many years.  Once good friends who I let slip away. 

These are some of the things I thought about when I ran flat miles in Ontario.  It was hotter than I would have liked.  No crisp cool autumn days. And the colours of the leaves were muted, not vibrant.

Runners run.

And runners think.

And when this runner arrived home, in rainy, hilly, British Columbia, he was greeted by a daughter who shrieked, “daddy,” and he was a hugged by a wife he loves and missed, and he was thankful for everything he has, and everything that was.

What are the Chances?

Yesterday I wanted to run for an hour.  Not 59 minutes. The difference is psychological but real.  There’s comfort and completeness in that extra minute.

Sixty minutes means thirty out and thirty back.

Our home is surrounded by forest and trails.  I have many options, but one favourite – a short jog down the street and I disappear into the woods, unlikely to encounter anyone in a world of silence.

I climb, and descend, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, usually somewhere in between.  Yesterday I checked my watch, once or twice, determined to turn around at the thirty-minute mark.

Twenty-four minutes into my run, on an isolated hilltop that overlooks our neighbourhood, I sensed where the run would end.  I have been running long enough, decades now, to have a feel for pace and distance.  It’s almost instinctual.   

The tree.  I would finish at the tree. 

There are tens of thousands of trees within miles of our home. 

There’s one that stands out. 

Pictures don’t do it justice.  My pictures at least.  But it is wide and thick and towers above everything around it.  It’s a special tree.  The kind of tree that protesters would chain themselves to, if a logging company ever threatened to cut it down.

What are the chances?  What are the chances that tree, my favourite tree, would be exactly thirty minutes from my home, along my favourite route.

It got me thinking.  About something that happened two weeks ago.  I ran a trail race, with a friend.  “Trail’ doesn’t do the event justice.  Almost twenty miles long, with 4400 feet of elevation, it’s a never-ending series of ascents and descents.  Nothing is flat.  Nothing is easy.  Everything burns.

About four hours in, my buddy was in pain – run stopping pain.  He moved to the side of the trail and stopped moving.  He’d been hurting for awhile but had never stopped.  He’s not the kind of guy to stop.  Ever.  So, I knew he was in agony.  And just then, at that very moment, another runner came by, her palm open, salt tablets in her hand.  She offered him a handful.  He swallowed them.  And almost instantly his pain lightened.  His legs loosened.  He was moving again.  What are the chances?  We’d been on the course for hours.  He’d been stopped for seconds.  At that very moment, in his time of need, another runner, carrying exactly what he needed, came by. 

He and I talked about that moment.  We talked about God and chance, about life’s profound moments and what lay behind them.

I work in a unit that investigates homicides.  Fortunately, on the island we live on, they are relatively rare.  Relatively is a relative term.  Because our plates are full.  There is no shortage of work.  Even though sometimes months pass between murders.  Months. 

Until a few weeks ago.  When there were two murders within hours.  Over a hundred miles separated them.  Only minutes separated them.  What are the chances?

I don’t know.  Perhaps there are answers.  Maybe none exist.

Sixty minutes.  Salt pills.  A hundred miles apart.

One tree.

Ashes

Ashes

It’s been almost a year since a vet came to our home and put Maggie down.  She lay on the floor in our living room.  The painkillers, which had given us a few more months with her, no longer worked.

The morning she died, she walked into our bedroom.  A room she wasn’t allowed to be in.  Later, she nudged her way into my bathroom.  Also off limits.  She did it to be closer to me. 

Two unmistakable signs that the time had come.

I said my goodbyes on the living room floor.  My daughter, Molly, hugged Maggie.  Told her how much she’d miss her.  Molly was four, Maggie thirteen.  Molly had never known a world in which Maggie did not exist. 

This was pre-vaccine.  Only one of us was allowed to be with Maggie at the end.  I took Molly upstairs.  My wife, Sonja, stayed with Maggie.  They loved each other very much.  I’d had Maggie for years before I met Sonja.  But Maggie became her dog – Sonja spoiled her, spent her days with her, spoke gently to her, and not surprisingly became the primary recipient of that sweet and strangely morose golden retriever’s affection and loyalty.  I’m thankful Sonja was with Maggie at the end.

I carried Maggie’s body to the vet’s van parked in our driveway.  A neighbour, walking her own golden retriever, saw me carrying the white shroud and knew exactly what had just happened. 

A week later, Maggie came back to us.  Ashes in a cannister.

I didn’t know how to tell Molly about cremation.  I didn’t want to tell Molly about cremation.  So, I fudged the truth.  I told my daughter that the vet had used chemicals to transform Maggie’s fur into little white particles. 

Sonja loved Maggie, but not Maggie’s ashes.  So, Molly and I took that cannister, walked the trails near our home, and scattered some of Maggie’s ashes in a stream where my girls had spent countless hours playing.

It was a big cannister.  And there was another special place where Maggie needed to be, and where I needed to take her.  Victoria, and the ocean, along Dallas Road.  One of the most beautiful places in the world.  Maggie and I had lived in that area for years.  In different homes, at different stages of my life, she was my constant.  My faithful companion.  We’d walked hundreds of times along that stretch of beach.  I’d thrown thousands of stones for her.  She chased every one of them with abandon.  In my darkest hours she was my confidant.  When I felt alone, she was by my side, figuratively, and literally – on the beach and in the ocean, swimming near me as I threw one rock after another, she never gave up hope that just once, she’d catch the rock that splashed in the ocean, right in front of her.  Without Maggie, I wouldn’t have met Sonja.  My online dating profile picture was a photo of me and Maggie.  Maggie was indisputably and infinitely better looking than me.  I rode her coattails into Sonja’s life.

That’s why I wanted to spread the remainder of her ashes along Dallas Road.  But life intervened.  As it usually does.  So, for the better part of the last year, the remainder of Maggie’s “fur” remained in that cannister, in our garden shed.  Sadly, and honestly, a little forgotten.  I walked in there many times, grabbed a shovel, or the lawnmower, and never once thought about Maggie.

Last Sunday, on a sunny, summer’s day, we took Maggie back to Victoria.  Maggie’s remains accompanied us as Molly fed the ducks, ate French fries, and played in two different parks.  And then we headed to the ocean.

It was very windy.  I pictured Maggie’s ashes blowing back into my face, and hair, and covering my clothing.

Leave it to a five-year old to come up with the perfect solution.  While Sonja watched, Molly and I dug holes in the sand.  I poured Maggie’s fur into those holes.  We covered Maggie with sand, and then, covered the sand with stones. 

And then we walked away.   Before the tide came in.

I didn’t want to see it happen, but I knew that the ocean would wash over those stones, and take the rocks, and Maggie, back out into the water.

That had been our special place.  It always will be.  And I know that every time I return, I will look at the beach, and the water, and the mountains in the distance, and I will know that Maggie is a part of that splendor. 

Scattered Bones

Evidence of a kill. 

At the end of a side trail, not heavily used.  I might have been the first person standing there in days, weeks – maybe even months or years.

Scattered bones – bleached white.  A deer ripped apart, the spinal cord severed, a piece of a jawbone, a smattering of teeth.

An awful death.  Perhaps, mercifully, a quick one. 

A vivid reminder that our forests and trails, so near to our homes, are a different world.

I’d hadn’t gone this deep into the woods for weeks.  Since I’d seen a bear just minutes from our home.  That was six weeks ago.  On a well used trail at the junction of two paths.  If I left my home right now, I could be there in five minutes.  Or less.  My bear encounter happened at midday.  A warm day.  The perfect day for a quick workout.  Hill repeats.  Up and down, up and down.  Strengthen the legs, stress the lungs, tune out the world.  Music blasting in my earbuds.  I stopped tuning out when, on the last downhill, I glanced to my right and saw a black bear ambling up towards me.  Maybe 30 or 40 feet away.  A scenario I’d imagined a thousand times. I stopped running, pivoted, walked backwards down the hill.  Slowly.   Yanked out my bear spray.  Pulled the cord on the noisemaker clipped to my chest.  Knew in my head that black bears rarely attacked people.  Feared in my gut that this one would.  Kept retreating.  Got to the bottom.  Saw the bear at the top.  It looked at me, curious and calm.  And kept on going, towards the woods, away from me.

A few days later, I ran again on the same hill.  Head on a swivel.  No music in my ears.  A little scared, but knowing the longer I waited to go back, the less likely I would be to do so.  Still, that was close to home.  Close meant comfort.  At the junction where I’d seen the bear, I could see dozens of houses and cars passing below.  It was practically my backyard.

The side trail with the dead deer was not my backyard.  I’d planned this run for days, and then talked myself out of it the night before.  Because I was scared.  Scared to venture far from home.  Far from houses and cars and a pretty subdivision.  Into the land of cougars and bears.  I talked myself into a safer run.  Along well traveled roads, to a public park filled with hikers and mountain bikers. 

Then I woke up.  And talked myself out of the talking out. 

Maybe it was because an article from a trail running magazine popped up on my Twitter feed with an article about the rarity of bear attacks and the effectiveness of bear spray.

Maybe because I thought of my daughter.  The fears of a five-year old can be overwhelming – unfamiliar situations, unexpected change, a bug on our trampoline – overwhelming and every bit as real and powerful as the primal fears of an adult.  When my daughter is scared, my wife and I encourage her to face those things that frighten her.  To gain strength, incrementally, by winning small battles against little terrors. 

Or maybe it was just because I love to run on hard packed dirt, baked dry by a month of heat, in the midst of towering, never-ending evergreens.

So, I went for that run.  I added a knife to my arsenal.  Razor sharp, encased in a multi-tool which I carried with me for the entire run.  The multi-tool in one hand, a rock in the other.  I banged them together frequently.  “Make noise,” the experts say.  Scare the bears off before they see you. 

I made noise all right.  No earbuds on this run.  Blue Rodeo blaring from my cell phone.  My rock smashing into my multi-tool whenever I approached a blind corner.

I made noise, and scared a lot of birds, who flew off as I approached. 

I don’t know if I scared any bears, or cougars.  I certainly didn’t see any.

But I smelled death.  The unmistakeable odour of decomposing flesh hit me hard.  Twice.  The rotting carcasses must have been just meters off the main path that took me further and further out. 

Further and further out to the side trail, which ended with scattered bones and an awful death.

An awful death and a necessary run.

A run that replaced fear with confidence.

A run that reminded me of why I was scared in the first place.

• 

• 

Silence

Silence is rare in our home.

My wife is exuberant.

Our daughter is not a dud.  She rarely stops moving.  Or speaking. 

I’m quieter.  Not talking is my default. 

When I fly across the country to visit my parents after not seeing them for months, I often sit in the living room and read.  It must frustrate my poor mom as she regales me with stories, and I do not respond.  Instead, I’m mute, poring over the local newspaper.

Last week, after Covid restrictions loosened, we visited with my wife’s parents and sister for the first time in forever.  They are a passionate family – interested in everything – lulls in the conversation are rare.  We sat outside on their patio, which offers a spectacular view of the ocean. 

True to form, I said almost nothing.  I sat.  I gazed at the water and Mount Baker in the distance. 

I must appear disengaged.  Lost in my own world.

Yet that’s not the case.  In those situations, nothing is more precious to me than my family.  Being surrounded by those I love means more to me than anything. It is where I want to be.  It is my comfort zone. 

Talking isn’t. 

My wife and I joke that I “bury it deep.”  Why speak aloud what can safely be tucked away inside? 

I could do better.  I could talk more.  I do believe we should all push beyond our comfort zones.

Yet, we have comfort zones for a reason.  Water finds it level.  We do too.  Learning to accept who and what we are – those things that are intrinsic to our personalities, and fundamental to our beings, is essential. 

I don’t actually bury it deep.  If I did, this blog wouldn’t exist.  On it, I share some of my innermost thoughts.  Things I wouldn’t say over coffee with my family, friends, or co-workers, I write down for the world to see.  I can’t explain it. It just feels right. 

Like silence.

As we sat on my in-law’s patio, and they talked, I spotted two Orcas, no more than a hundred meters offshore.  The fins of these killer whales cut through the water with grace and precision.  It was a spectacular sight.

Silence has its rewards.

Top of the Hat

Deadly car crashes.

Endless road work.

Traffic congestion.

Incredible views.

All synonymous with ‘the Malahat’ – both an 1100-foot mountain and a twisting highway on Vancouver Island.

When conditions aren’t ideal it’s awful to drive – no lights illuminate the road, few barriers separate speeding cars from massive trucks, and rain, fog, and snow slicken the pavement and obscure already obstructed views.

Oh, but the view from the summit is extraordinary. 

Just hundreds of meters away from the congested highway is a mostly deserted trail.  Last weekend I ran to the summit.  In two-hours I saw two dirt-bikers and no one else.  On an island of several hundred thousand people, I was alone.

The trail to the summit was mostly satisfying – hard-packed dirt and gradual elevation.  Closer to the top, a rocky pathway replaced the earthen trail.  Running slowed to a jog, every step a potential twisted ankle or inglorious fall.

Soon after, running ceased altogether when I chose the direct route to the top.  Straight up a gully that must be a continual stream of water from November through spring.  But last weekend, on a hot dry day with summer on the horizon it was dry and completely accessible.  I grabbed a broken branch and used it as a walking stick to help as I scrambled my way up.

The scramble was worth it.

Oh, that view.

Blue sky, bluer ocean, distant mountains, a forest canopy, and an international airport as small as a postage stamp.

Travellers from across the country and around the world drive up the Malahat highway, exit at the scenic viewpoints, and revel at the glorious view.  Thousands – tens of thousands – do it every year.

Far fewer take the trail to the top.  Dozens.  Hundreds.  Runners like me.  Hikers, mountain-bikers and quad-riders.

We are drawn by the same thing.  Beauty.  Magnificence.  Nature’s wonders.

The attraction is so understandable.  The destination is worth the journey.

Which makes the next part so hard for me to understand. 

Garbage at the top.  Beer cans.  Plastic.  Paper.

Lucky lager cans tucked into the base of a hydro tower. A fire pit filled with garbage.

Who does that?  Who makes the effort to get to the top precisely because it is beautiful and then purposely despoils that beauty?  The beer cans tucked into the hydro-tower.  More cans, paper, and plastic left almost lovingly behind in the pit.

I don’t have the answer.  My gut reaction is that anyone who does that is an asshole.  I hate using that language in my writing, but it’s hard to feel otherwise.

But maybe that’s not fair.  Maybe the person who makes the effort to get to the top and then discards their trash for others to clean is me on a bad day.  Maybe it’s you.  Those people are someone’s neighbours.  They’re the people we see at the grocery store.  People we hire, work with, or work for.  Maybe our friends.  Whoever they are, they walk among us.

I try and understand.  Try to be sympathetic.  Usually, my anger and disgust overpower empathy. 

How are we supposed to understand people who clearly appreciate beauty, yet are so reckless in making the very place they worked so hard to arrive at, less beautiful?

There may be a million answers to that question. Philosophical, spiritual, practical.  There may be no answers.

I’ve given up trying to understand.  I find great wisdom in the words of Lee Child.  Author of the massively best-selling Jack Reacher series, something he wrote several books back has stuck with me ever since – “People are complicated.”

I’m not sure truer words have ever been spoken, and I don’t think a philosopher, or a Nobel laureate could say it any better than that.

People are complicated.  

Even at the top of the Malahat.

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