The Pits and Pieces

  Ever have one of those weeks when everything you hear, read or watch seems to be connected in some way? Like there’s an invisible thread linking things together. This week: What I heard : Large workplace meetings can be excruciatingly boring. You know those ones where they update you on what has been achieved (rah rah) and plans for what is to come (yawn). But at one such meeting this week they played a clip from a Ted Talk by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I was riveted. She spoke about the dangers of a single story. How, when a single story about a people, a country, a race, is fed to us over and over again, it becomes what we believe. This is what creates stereotypes. We may see the whole continent of Africa and its people as poor and illiterate. We may view Africa as a dangerous place. And when we meet someone who comes from there, our opinions have already been formed. We look upon the person with pity, with a patronizing, western view. One single story tol...

  There’s an old saying that goes: Familiarity Breeds Contempt. I’m not sure how it originated or what it was trying to say. Yes, I can google it, but I prefer not to. I would rather imagine my own interpretations. I assume it implied that once you got to know someone too well, all their foibles and idiosyncrasies, saw them in their daily domestic chaos, you would tire of them. Once they become familiar, not only would you stop caring about them, you would look upon them with disdain. If this was indeed the intention and meaning of the saying, then it portrays a special kind of bleakness. Because shouldn’t caring be the exact opposite of that? Once someone becomes familiar to you, then they become dearer. Familiarity breaks down barriers. It increases your empathy when you see someone for who they are, warts and all, someone like you. The reason I’ve been thinking these thoughts are several, but here’s one in particular: These two recent reads that I enjoyed, both writt...

  Some Mid-March Thoughts around Playfulness and Creativity: 1. The body feels different in the water, freer and more playful. One of my favourite movements in the pool is to lie on my back, arms outstretched and swish my body from side to side. I dare you to try that and not feel like a playful, cavorting, sea lion. As adults, we’ve lost our sense of play. Remember playing as a child? No rules (almost) or lines or time restrictions. No umpires or referees. No self-consciousness or expectations. Just pure enjoyment. At least, that’s how my playtime as a child was. I know that nowadays children’s playtime is more organized and restricted. I think as adults, we tend to see play as fruitless, a waste of time. These days, when I say I’m ‘playing’, I mean tennis or pickleball, and yes there are rules and lines and the desire to win a point. Once the game is done, all thoughts of having won or lost disappear. It’s the satisfaction of having hit the sweet spot, having made a shot th...

There were a few things rumbling around in my head as we slid into March, when my phone popped up with an unsolicited message: “You averaged fewer steps over the last four weeks…” Like I said, I wasn’t asking for its input. I don’t need my phone to tell me how much I’ve walked or haven’t walked. Does my phone know that the sidewalks have been icy, the winds bitter and blustery? It should! It seems to know everything else. Why then can it not send me a gentler message: “It’s icy out there. Be careful. Might be a good day for a swim instead of a walk.” But no, it insists on making me feel that I’m lacking in some way; that I’ve slipped up (not literally); that I need to up my game. We’ve become so attached to our phones that they are another appendage now. And this dependency is not isolated to the younger generations. We boomers are guilty of the same, although we may be less reliant on or crave things like Tik-Tok. But news feeds, Scrabble, Wordle, Instagram, 23 Hilarious Things...