More With Less

Every weekday morning I have a regular and somewhat mundane routine I perform upon my arrival at the office which pretty much sets me up for being able to effectively and efficiently address anything that presents itself during the day.  The exact routine is unimportant, but in a nutshell my first priority is to take care of old business so that I can better focus on new business.

Once the old business is out of the way and I am waiting for new business to present itself I will typically stop by the blog of my friend Chris Wondra (If I wasn’t so technologically dysfunctional this would be the part where Chris’ name would be underlined in blue and if you clicked on it you would be linked to his site ChrisWondra.com) to see if he has any recent insights or entertaining stories that just make me feel good.

This morning he posted a piece about looking for his ‘childhood mind’.  I strongly suggest you read it, but basically he says that he used to be a lot more happy than he is now and he’s looking for a way to get back there.  This kind of made me sad as it seemed inconceivable a fellow who inspires such creativity and goodwill in others could be struggling so with his own happiness.  Coincidentally I had just spent the drive to work discsussing with my fiancee that I am really struggling with my resentment over some people who I perceived to have done us wrong.  Although I know that every second I spend fretting on it is another second stolen from my potential happiness, I’m having a really tough time letting it go. 

 It was then that my mind made a connection of seemingly random and unrelated events (If you continue to read my ramblings you will find this periodically happens).  Just last night we were watching a National Geographic program on Buddhism, mostly due to lack of anything on Prime Time network TV as a result of the writers’ strike.

I admit to having known very little about Buddhism prior to watching this program, and what I thought I knew in truth was way off base.  Buddhism had always seemed so far off, exotic, and to be honest freaky to pay much attention to, but in watching the program I realized that with the mysticism and ritualism stripped away the core belief system seems not only relatively simple to understand but to really make sense as well.

Obviously I am not qualified to provide commentary on Buddhism after watching one program, but a metaphor that was presented stuck with me and is easy to recall.  The idea is that the mind is like a lake on a windy day.  The water is as clear as gin and if it were still one would have no trouble seeing all the way to the bottom.  The problem is that the wind is constantly blowing at different velocities and from different directions, causing everything from minor ripples to large waves which obscure the view through the water.

Back to my friend Chris and the dilemma which presented itself this morning.  Everyone has childhood memories of when they were so happy, and many of us long to be that happy again.  No big surprise, but how many of us ask ourselves why we were seemingly so happy then as opposed to now?

Could it be that at that tender and innocent age we didn’t worry about money?  Possibly, but I think the answer is more accurately that money, possessions or most anything else didn’t mean anything to us.  We didn’t need to look outward into the world in order to be happy.  We just were.

As the years passed and the innocence of adolescence faded, the more jaded we became by the ‘reality’ of the big, bad world and developed ideas about what we believe it took to get by and eventually be happy in it.  We started to view happiness as something that was lost and must now be sought out.

As I see it, the whole problem is that we have been looking for something that can’t be found as it was never lost to begin with.  To make matters worse, each time we try to seek happiness outside ourselves we create more distractions, problems, fantasies, avarice, etc. which keep us from seeing the happiness that has always been there.  We create our own wind and consequently the troublesome waves which keep us from seeing through the water.

I’m not completely selfless here -  I want to be happy.  I also want Chris to be happy and I want you to be happy.  Hopefully if we can all take a bit more time to look inward for that happiness instead of outward we can all play a role in reducing some wind velocity and clearing up some of the waves, helping us all see through the water a little easier.

I have recently rediscovered a love for the game of chess.  I first took it up in grade school and started playing as regularly as I could.  I enjoyed every minute spent playing the game with my friends, became one of the first to sign up when a teacher graciously offered to start a lunch-hour chess club, and during a family vacation in Mexico begged and cajoled my parents into spending way more than my allotted souvenir budget on a Mayan-design Chess set made of Malachite.

By the end of my first high school year my interest in Chess had waned.  I could come up with many reasons this was so - I was getting older, I had more schoolwork to consider, my interests had changed, my circle of friends had changed, etc.  The truth of the matter is that it was just too darned hard.

As is true for anyone who takes up a new interest, I wanted to improve.  Actually, I didn’t just want to improve - I wanted to be great!  I had daydreams of going to big tournaments where people would know my name or playing Postcard Chess with Russian prodigy pen-pals.  Like the research junkie I have always been, I started checking out books from the library and regularly reading the Chess column in the weekend newspaper.  I was on my way to greatness!

The problems arose when it came time to start applying my research into actually playing.  All of those classic openings and strategies I thought I had memorized cold were hard to remember, and frequently I would end up losing a key piece I hadn’t counted on while too fully embroiled in my strategy for an effective retreat.  I started to lose regularly and painfully, and eventually decided that it was easier to decide Chess sucked than to waste any more effort on something I wasn’t going to be great at.

 Fast forward to 2007.  Our youngest boy started taking an interest in Chess, pulled out a set that we had around the house from one of those ‘20 family games in one’ sets and asked if I wanted to play.  As a Dad who admittedly doesn’t understand the appeal of Japanese cartoons and finds most modern video games way too complicated, I am thrilled anytime I can find some common ground on which to spend time with my kids, so we started playing a few nights a week.

Each time we sat down to play I would remind myself that he was just learning, yet all of those openings and strategies I had memorized so long ago remarkably started resurfacing.  I told myself “this is great!  I’ll be able to teach him so much and give him a real jump start in learning the intricacies of the game”.  As it turned out I was the one who was in for some learning.

A couple of important remarks on our youngest.  At just shy of 11 he is enthusiastic and he is a total character.  In between asking spontaneous and remarkable questions about life or the world, he can frequently be expected to break into one of his crazy voices, sing an offbeat song, or reinvent some corny comedy bit he has recently seen on TV or in a movie. 

Back to the chess.  I decided the best way to proceed without inundating him with info was just to play and let him know he could ask questions or take a move back any time he wanted.  I would start to unwind my opening and carefully plan my strategy, expecting the questions as to why I was doing what I was doing to start flowing.

He never once felt the need to ask a question about my strategy.  He would make a seemingly spontaneous move, then proceed to entertain himself with one of his voices or comedy bits while I pondered and pondered every step of my strategy before carefully making my own.  He would then look at the board, sometimes make a comment like “Oh!”, and make his next seemingly spontaneous move within seconds!  I started to get frustrated thinking that he wasn’t taking things seriously, but I realized the true reason I was frustrated was that he had me on the run from the get-go!  All of my cherished strategies were seemingly useless and he would beat me about 80% of the time.

Of course if this was an adult friend I had recently started playing with I would have likely made up some excuse about not having the time for chess and stopped playing again.  Thankfully in this case I realized that the most important part of the whole exercise was to spend some time with him, so instead of chucking it all I decided to keep playing and try to determine what his secret strategy was.

It didn’t take more than a few games with renewed perception to realize that his strategy was the fact that he didn’t have a strategy and was no secret at all.  When would first sit down I could easily see he hadn’t once thought about how the game was going to go - he was happy just to be playing, better yet he was happy to be playing with me!  How great is that? 

As the game progressed he never once agonized over a previous move which cost him a piece, nor was he thinking about how his plan would unfold.  He was simply sitting there and enjoying himself while I pondered and fretted, not thinking once about how he was going to proceed until after I had finally made my move.  It was only then that he would survey the board and decided what seemed to be the best move for him at that time.

And it worked!  Man, did it work - Not only did he enjoy every second of the game, he was playing competitively because it was near impossible for me to predict what his next move would be.  It was brilliant in its simplicity and it made sense.  I have always had a love for simple things that make sense so I adopted the same style of play and it has been fantastic.  We still play several nights a week, we are now about evenly matched, and although I have no idea if he will keep up his interest and perhaps with better instruction move to the higher levels of competitive Chess, I know for sure that we both enjoy every second we spend playing together.  I will cherish those moments as long as I live.

Here’s the interesting part - Is this not a metaphor for life itself?  Every second that we crowd our mind with angst about a past decision or futilely planning for a future that will always be unpredictable, aren’t we missing the opportunity to survey the board as it is RIGHT NOW and make our move accordingly, leaving us much more time to just enjoy the opportunity to play and the company along the way?

I am a self-confessed news/political junkie.  At least I was until recently. 

After a tremendous week long vacation and the best Christmas holiday in memory, I sat down this week to enjoy our small-town newspaper’s  2007 ‘Year In Review’ issue. While flipping the pages  I found myself pausing at what is arguably our biggest local news story of the year - protests and illegal blockades by a group of local Mohawk Natives and the subsequent arrest of their leader.  Being adjacent to a reserve, Native disputes and the resulting conflict are a particularly sensitive issue in this region, as they are in similar communities across Canada and the U.S.  This is not a commentary on these issues, although I am grateful for the moment of reflection perpetuated by the story.

While reading the recollection of the events I could feel the lifelong opinions that I have held on the matter rising in my mind. Many fragments of ‘fact’ that I have gathered and formed into an opinion and so many arguments (completely valid in my mind) as to why my opinion is ‘right’. I now realize that although I may not always speak aloud on such matters, the very fact I form these opinions at all only perpetuates the conflict.

Everyone exposed to matters of conflict, be it directly or indirectly is being asked to form an opinion, and our nature directs us to seek out reasons to validate why we are ‘right’ and by definition why a differing opinion is ‘wrong’. In some cases the need to be right is fueled by multi-generational opinions, the pile of rationalizations (and consequently the conflict itself) growing as each generation picks up the torch of defending their need to be right.

What if we took right and wrong completely out of the picture? What if everyone on both sides of a conflict, any conflict, took the time to forget everything they know (or more accurately think they know) about the matter and concentrated on what can be done to end the conflict right NOW without the interference of past ideology and learning? I believe most people may refer to it as Peace.

I have admittedly and ashamedly spent the majority of my adult life carrying habitual resentment toward so many situations and people - thousands of rationalizations as to why I am right and someone else is wrong. I have never been one for New Year’s resolutions, but I hope to venture into 2008 and indeed the rest of my life with renewed perception free of the need to be ‘right’.