The Pits and Pieces

I’ve just returned from a week spent in Amsterdam. The notoriously fickle Dutch weather put on a splendid display for me while I was there – sunny, temps in the mid to high teens (going up to 21C a couple of days). Arriving sleepless and tired after an overnight flight, I took a train to my hotel. Let me say here how great the transportation is in Amsterdam and the Netherlands. Trains every few minutes into the city centre; trains that will get you anywhere and everywhere; and plenty of methods of public transportation around the city. You don’t even need to purchase a ticket/OV card, just tap your debit/credit card in and out. Seamless, easy. Whenever I travel to Europe I always marvel at: a)     Their public transportation b)     How Europeans speak two or more languages (sometimes four or five) with such ease, sometimes switching fluidly from one language to the next in the same breath. I travelled solo (as I frequently do) and, if you’ve followed ...

  Dear Blog Readers I don’t know who the majority of you out there are, but I know there are people in various parts of the world reading my blog posts. Maybe some of you are new readers, and some, hopefully, are regular ones. Thank you for reading. My blog posts have diminished in the past little while. At first, I used to blog weekly, and now it seems to have dropped to twice a month or so. I’ve been asking myself (as well as discussing with a few other bloggers), what is it that keeps us/me blogging? During the COVID years, when I walked for hours, thoughts would arise and I would return home, flip open my laptop and bang out a blog post. Or a book I’d read would send me off on another tangent of thoughts that I felt I HAD to tell you about. Now, the urge to blog seems less urgent. And I’m wondering why. Is it because I have nothing to say? Have my thoughts dried up? Or has the world at large been so filled with a bombardment of news that it’s become too much to decipher and...

  There are nine squares of faces on my screen, one of those faces mine. We’re talking about being present, about what we might be holding onto that no longer serves us. One of the women in the squares asks the question: What keeps you awake at night? Another wonders what she needs to let go of to live her best life. Another speaks of meditation grounding her in her daily tasks. I look at the squares, the notes I’ve written in my notebook, as I listen to these wise women who refuse to claim their wisdom. And I think, not for the first time, who am I to be here? I cannot speak as eloquently as these women do, I cannot articulate my thoughts and emotions and experiences into such stirring statements as “ the future is the result of what we do right now ” (Pema Chodron). Or “ Our life is a path of learning to wake up before we die” (Natalie Goldberg).   I am an imposter, in my elder years but lacking the accompanying wisdom. What am I holding on to? Why do I grasp so tightly t...

  I watched a movie recently, The Life List, about a dying mother who, instead of leaving her thriving business to her daughter, leaves her a series of DVDs and the life list her daughter wrote when she was 13 about things she wanted to do with her life. In the video messages, the mother encourages her now young adult daughter to go after these dreams. Do we relinquish the dreams of our youth, or do we set them aside, intending to pick them up one day. But the days go by, weeks, months, years turn into decades. And one day we find ourselves . . . old, but not old. Because, in our hearts and minds, we are still the youth we once were. Except, so much has changed, and are those same dreams the ones we want to chase now? Or have they shifted, evaporated, been replaced by something new. But what exactly? The new dreams are shrouded in mist, and we cannot quite discern the shapes, the textures. We only know that there is still something, something we must do. We begin to pay attenti...

  This week marked five years since the WHO declared the pandemic. I looked back at some of my writing at the time, my thoughts, my routines. How was I feeling then and what has changed since? Here is something I wrote then about my daily early morning walks:      I began to recognize the regular morning walkers on the trails in my neighbourhood. At first, the black woman in the baseball cap who frequented the same trails was just someone I saw often. Then, on the mornings I didn’t see her, I wondered where she was, if she was okay. We progressed from nodding to each other, to saying hello, to even a slight wave if we were on opposite sides of the street. All our gestures of acknowledgment were subdued and quiet. No loud, cheery hellos, no flamboyant hand-waving. We recognized the need for hush in the early morning hours. This is in such stark contrast to the clamouring of voices we hear today. The world seems to have turned up its volume considerably. An online frie...

  Two medical appointments this past Monday consumed the better part of my day, leaving me with a little something extra inside. Both appointments were at a nearby hospital (with outrageous parking rates). At the first appointment, I was injected with a small amount of a radioactive nuclear tracer, followed by a relatively quick body scan. The waiting in the waiting room was longer than the procedure itself. The body scanning machine was large and very impressive. On the ceiling, there were four light panels, two of them the ordinary kind, the other two featuring lovely blue sky with fluffy white clouds. A nice touch, I thought, but I wasn’t on my back long enough to appreciate them. I didn’t know then how much more I’d appreciate them during my second appointment, two hours later. The radioactive tracer now had to be given time to work its way through my body and into my bones. I left the hospital to do a few groceries and have lunch at a plaza nearby. The hospital itself has a lo...

  It’s hard to know what to write about these days, given the state of the world. I hung my Canadian flags inside my window on Flag Day on Feb. 15 th , the 60 th anniversary of the Maple Leaf flag. Canadian patriotism has been on the upswing, and I am here for it. A writing friend was cautioning on the dangers of patriotism veering towards nationalism. She explained it this way: “ patriotism is a feeling of love and loyalty for one's country; nationalism, on the other hand seems to emphasize disdain or even hatred for other countries and a feeling of superiority for one’s own ”. My thoughts are that what Canadians are feeling right now is patriotism, and in general (and I admit this is a generality), Canadians don’t have it in them to be nationalistic. (However, the truck convoys come to mind and I am glad we’ve been able to take back our flag). We’re not overtly patriotic enough to segue into nationalism. And besides, given the recent weather, it’s just too darn cold and snowy....

  January 2025 felt like the longest January ever. We had extreme cold, snow, the inauguration south of us, threats of tariffs, a mid-air collision followed by the most appalling comments, LA fires. The month went on and on, finally coming to an end with one more blast of winter. Birch Trees On the personal front: Creativity :   I took four watercolour in-person painting classes at my local community centre and how I love watercolours. Painting with watercolours is so different from acrylics. The water does its own thing, running off in a different direction, creating unexpected patterns. Sometimes you just have to sit back and see what emerges. I am including some of my watercolour paintings in today’s post. Health: When people say things like ‘age is just a number’ – what the heck does that even mean? I’m the kind of person who silently cringes and rolls their eyes when platitudes are offered up as wisdom. Is this saying supposed to make you feel less bad about your a...

  Waiting Room Thoughts : The other day I was in a medical waiting room. Anticipating a long wait, I took a book with me and settled in for a read. The room was full of people, shifting and shuffling in their chairs, every one of them on their phones, even the toddler, who abandoned his screaming as soon as his mom handed him her phone. Couldn’t blame her, I’d likely have done the same; trying to tame toddlers in a public space is no easy feat.  There was a BIG sign on the wall to turn cellphone volumes off as a courtesy to others. But, as people were called in for their procedures, and others took their place on the seats beside me, four of them were watching something on their phones, volumes on, no earphones. Okay now don’t get me started on people who have their phone volumes on in public places like waiting rooms and trains where we’re in a confined space with no escape. I don’t want to be one of those older people who complain about the rude behaviour of others, but ...