‘Don’t sweat the small stuff; and it’s all small stuff.’ – Richard Carlson Our team at work recently had Justin Langlois join us as an artist-in-residence for a year to provide artistic input on our sustainability initiatives. As icing on the cake, his final project was a new public art piece in False Creek: Personally I love the sign. There’s certainly plenty to…
Today we’re going to talk about space. Not all that crazy, incomprehensible black stuff out there in the cosmos, but the space right there. And there, and that little space just in the corner over there. Take a close look. Do you notice something about them? I do: they’re most always full. We homo sapiens seem generally…
The online comments section. More than ever it feels to me like a modern day black hole of arguments, negativity and non-productivity. Some sites are less frightening as others, but if I was going to make a belated New Years resolution, it would be to take a much needed break from reading online comments. The most…
“Life is what happens when you’re busy playing Angry Birds” – John Lennon (paraphrased) Our brains don’t like to stop. It doesn’t have to be fast, but it craves a sort of minimum speed, just enough to give it something to process. Do you notice this when you’re driving? When the car is in motion, the simple bits…
In a previous post I summed up the revolutionary getting-rid-of-stuff book by Marie Kondo, ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up.‘ I didn’t think I owned much before, but after I read the book I still ended up compiling a few sizeable bags of clothes, books and random things and dropped them off at the thrift store. That felt great,…
It’s official, I’m old: I’ve become addicted to tidying. And the clever Japanese lady behind my newest addiction goes by the name Marie Kondo. If you haven’t heard of Ms. Kondo and her two books that teach her innovative ‘konmari’ tidying method, I would highly recommend checking them out. They’re short and an easy read….
A few years ago Andrea and I took a Transcendental Meditation (TM) course. We didn’t know anything about meditation, and to me it always sounded very hippy-dippy and felt somewhat intimiting. But we couldn’t help but be intrigued by the proclaimed countless benefits of practicing it daily. The price tag for the four day course was steep…
“[Avoid being] uncompromisingly set on anything for your future. Some of the happiest and best adjusted people are the ones who can make any situation an ideal, who are too immersed in the moment to intricately plan and decidedly commit to any one specific outcome.” -Brienna Wiest from the Thought Catalog I’ve moved a lot in the last 10…
Every year we go to Naramata, B.C. to take part in a week-long summer camp run by the United Church. It’s an amazingly beautiful place: surrounded one one side by the vineyards of the Naramata Wine Bench and the pristine Okanagan Lake on the other. I’m not a church go-er, but this place is great…
Most of us have a pretty standard daily routine: 9 to 5, wake up, brush teeth, drive to work, etc. After a while it doesn’t even require a lot of conscious effort to do all these tasks, they simply become mindless habits. We multitask as much as possible to check off our full list of…
It would require a lot of space to write down all the profound ideas and lessons that Mitch Albom quotes from his old University Professor, Morrie Schwartz in his book “Tuesdays with Morrie.” There’s been countless plays and even a full-length movie made of it. The book in short is about Morrie Schwartz, who is…