BookCrossing

Today I was walking along the street with my friend Jesse on our way to sign for our new apartment, when I saw a book on a bus stop bench. I thought, "someone left a book here by accident." After reading the note taped to the cover, I realized that someone left the book there by design. The book is part of a phenomenon called "bookcrossing" that is defined in the following way:

bookcrossing n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

The definition was added to the OED in 2004, a fact that seems to be a source of great pride for the BookCrossing people. There is a website.

The book I found was A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence. It's short, so I'll read it quickly and "release" it again. Doing that is apparently pretty decent karma.

It's a little bit like the library, but with a greater measure of forced serendipity.

Challenging Conversations

I think that challenging conversations are an important part of life for people who don't want to stop learning or growing. The things we say can be divided into three categories:

1) Communication of facts
2) Genuine expression of love or kindness that is gratuitous to bare physical existence but not directly challenging.
3) Challenging conversation
4) Bullshit

A certain amount of (1) is necessary. This would include things like "we ran out of milk," or "the cat barfed on the rug."

I sometimes have a hard time with (2), and I suspect that others do as well. It could range from "thanks" to "girl you look so pretty to me, not unlike the Spanish city to me." Sometimes (2) feels like (4). I think a good litmus test is, if it feels obligatory, it's bullshit.

By "challenging conversation" I mean questions or arguments that force someone to defend their actions or opinions, or at least to think about them more closely. This kind of talk bugs some people all the time and all people some of the time. First, you have to think. Second, you may be placed in the awkward position of realizng that your deeds or opinions are stupid, and nobody likes that. Also, it can seem confrontational--it often is confrontational, especially when the person doing the challenging is not open to being challenged.

A certain amount of (4) is necessary as well. I include everything commonly referred to as "small talk" in this category. I accept that some amount of meaningless conversation is necessary to build rapport and make friends. What makes my day, though, is the unexpected challenge that brings a converstaion out of the realm of (4) and into (3). For example, imagine this hypothetical conversation where someone returns from working overseas and sees old acquantances for the first time:

A: When did you get back?
B: Last month.
A: How was the experience?
B: Good.
A: (pause)

In general, an awkward pause after a short, uninformative answer like "good" is a good sign that your conversation is deep into (4) territory.

B: It was a good experience. I learned a lot.

A (option 1): Good!

A (option 2): Why was it good? What did you learn?

If A goes with option 1, there is no harm done (unless we count wasted time as harm, which we should.) If A goes with option 2, we have created a challenging conversation. B will have to think before answering, and reflect on why the experience was "good" and what he or she learned. If B was just shovelling out (4) and hoping to continue in that vein, the transition into a challenging conversation will be like a slap in the eyes.

The other day Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door while I was painting. They got right into challenging conversation, by asking me what I thought of all the pain and suffering in the world. I gave my thoughts, basically that it's a necessary corrolary of having freedom, that without it we'd have nothing to do, and that an honest look at the world we live in suggests God may be a little more "Old Testament" than we'd prefer to think. Then I had to defend my ideas, and also defend why my beliefs about the Jesus, prophecies and the Bible did not line up with those of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Honestly, I didn't mind. If I can't even articulate my beliefs about these important issues and defend myself against Jehovah's Witnesses, then maybe I should convert. (I didn't convert.)

The only problem with those types is that they are usually there to challenge, not to learn or be challenged. I read in the paper once that the problem with the evangelical religions is that it changes people from students and observers of the world into "fixers"--that at the age of 5 they already have the answers to all of life's deepest questions. At the age of 5 I had all the answers, too. I wonder what happened in the interrim to make me so much dumber. Anyway, as long as I'm in a good mood I like to talk to missionaries as long as possible, because I figure most people like them less than I do and if they're talking to me they're not talking to anyone else. It's a service to the community.

I usually enjoy it when someone asks me a challenging question, or responds well to my challenging question. I agree that it may be uncomfortable, but I suspect the secret to a meaningful life is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and to limit times of comfort to a minimum, like the breaks in between boxing rounds. This is, of course, easier said than meant.
Am I really prepared to live that way? By all means, challenge me on it.

25

There is no special song for 25, like there was for 24. I suppose I could write one, but it wouldn't be the same. Song or no song, that's how old I am now.

Not too long ago, I figured that by the age of 25, most people should have a pretty good idea of who they are and where they're going. Did that pan out in my case? I suppose it depends on how good an idea has to be to qualify as pretty good. If you set the bar at 14%, I think I'm almost there. The last month or so has been a real exercise in waiting, listening, and finding a path. When I came back from Mexico, there was no option that didn't attract me on some level. More international work, living in Montreal, travelling in Europe, working on a farm, working for a big engineering firm, these were all options that I turned away from only after much agonizing and a genuine sense of loss.

Earlier this week I decided I had found the job I wanted, and today it was offered to me. It's at a firm called Neegan Burnside. They are small, just 10 people, and they do small projects, and inspect water plants, almost exclusively up north. I would still be based in Winnipeg, but there will be a fair amount of travel. I'll be starting there soon--perhaps in a week or so. This means that the time of dabbling has been abandoned to the oblivion of future plans that never see the light of actuality. At the interview for this job, they were saying that they really need someone to start right away, and my intuition told me it was the way to go. So, finally I have a job, a plan, a direction, a sense of being on my way, where I should be--whatever that means--just in time for 25.

It may be noted that I am batting .500 for resolutions to major life questions today. While I polished off "where will I work?" quite soundly, I didn't fare so well with "where will I live?". See, there was this place that I was looking at, with my buddy Jesse, and damn, it was the kind of apartment that makes you say, "I like this apartment and would like to live in it." Ai, like Tantalus, stooping low to slake his thirst with the waters in which he is forever condemned to wade, I laid my claim to the apartment, only to find that it was already off the market. The view from the balcony was legendary. Kingdoms have fallen for meaner things. But the search will go on, for time will not suffer to wait.

I hope this will be the last post for a while focused on me and figuring out my life. Since I'm 25, and have the questions of who I am and where I am going more or less licked (right...), I can focus on other people and the stories waiting to be told from the lives and environment around me. We'll see, but I do know that there is something liberating about focusing on the journey rather than worrying about gaining ground on any particular destination.

These are my last days at the Langside Ecological House. It's been a good run. More on this house later, I should think.

Dabbling and Settling

That’s right, I’ve decided to open up the blog again. Now each person can stay on top of my deeds and thoughts at his or her own discretion, or use that very same discretion to not read my web page and go get ice cream. Which reminds me, the other day I went to get ice cream at the BDI, which is pretty much the greatest place to get ice cream. The last night before I left for Mexico a year ago, and the first day that I got back to Winnipeg, I went to the BDI. Now I like the BDI and all, but it seems strange that I would have accorded it with such honour more typically reserved for a lover, best friend, or favoured horse. There was an ice cream place in Mexico called Tepoznieves that had very tasty ice cream and a full roster of flavours, including many named after gods and prayers.

I am back in Winnipeg now, in fact I have been for about a month now. Right now I am job hunting and looking for some way to settle down and make an honest living for a while. There is a lot of demand for people who do what I want to do—water & sanitation engineering—so it’s essentially a job hunt in the same way that buying pork chops at the grocery store is a wild boar hunt. However, I love mulling over options and I hate making decisions, so I’m really taking my time and going to a lot of job interviews, looking for something that is pointed in more or less the right direction. In the meantime, I did something smart and made a wise decision.

That decision was to work, here in downtown Winnipeg, at a house that was advertising in the WWOOF book. The house is an experiment in sustainable urban living, in that they are fixing up an abandoned house to be energy efficient, using salvaged or recycled material, and living in it, well, sustainably. “They” is a group of students, although only one is actually using the house as her Master’s thesis, and the others just live there. Now, I live there too. In fact, I work there in exchange for room and board, which is the perfect arrangement for a job hunter. I am working on assorted renovation projects; as an example, today I put rain barrels on the roof of a shed just like people do in Mexico. What the job lacks in the pay scale department, it makes up for in flexibility, and the overall grooviness of living with hippies.

If the term WWOOF in the above paragraph threw you for a loop, it is an acronym for “World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms” or something to that effect. A house downtown isn’t an organic farm, but for some reason it was listed in the book. The mysteries of life.

I got the WWOOF book because I wanted to work on an actual organic farm, and I still plan to, most likely after Folk Fest in early July. Folk Fest is this festival dedicated to folk music that happens every July. I’ve never been, but I won’t let that stop me. The hope is to have figured out where I will work as an engineer by that time, and peg a starting date. Then between now and that start date, there will be a certain, defined time that you might call “the time of dabbling”. During the time of dabbling, I will dabble in one or more very short-term projects before settling down to make an honest living.

In many ways, I am already into the time of dabbling. This job at the eco-friendly house will be about a month. Before that, right after I got back to Canada, I was in Calgary a couple days, then Cranbrook, and then Vancouver, and the other weekend my whole family went to Regina on account of my cousin Lester’s wedding. Future possible plans for the time of dabbling include, working on a farm in Quebec, going to Panama to build a dry toilet and rainwater collection system for my uncle and his family, or going to Italy and having me a butcher’s at the statues and old buildings, and maybe do some WWOOFing there too.

The dilemma is this: I am damn tired of moving around all the time, all breadth of experience and no depth, a spread footing where soil conditions call for an 8” hex pile. However, I would feel like a damn fool for not taking a free trip to Panama, and after I start working none of this will even be an option. Kind of, “now or never”. And by “never” I mean a couple years. What it comes down to is, too much freedom and not enough decisiveness. Because as much as we all love Braveheart, both for the guy who gets an arrow in his ass and for the inspiration of William Wallace and his fight for freedom, too much wide-open freedom can make a guy go nuts.

Maybe what I really mean is that freedom has to be held in check by a set of mostly arbitrary boundary conditions. Some people probably never give much of a thought to their boundary conditions. After graduating from, say, medical school, there would be nothing stopping a guy from being a janitor. It would only be outside his self-imposed boundary conditions, which would most likely have narrowed to cover only some kind of future as a doctor. A lot of these boundary conditions make good sense—for example, limiting oneself to driving straight ahead while crossing a bridge—but a lot of them are purely arbitrary. What’s really stopping you from selling everything and starting a new life in Morocco? When we say freedom, I think what we really mean is being in control and mindful of our boundary conditions.

That’s all to say nothing of the loss of freedom that comes when others choose your boundary conditions for you. And also to say nothing of responsibility, which is probably at the heart of most people’s answer to the Morocco question. For people who live in Morocco, the answer to the Morocco question is pure pragmatics.

So that’s basically where I am, and a gross over-simplification of why I’m having the devil of a time figuring out where to go next.


Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
-Lao-Tzu (from the Tao-te-Ching)

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