I have moved myself away from the highly selective dissemination of information, curated by state institutions and private companies, called “news”. As a city dweller who uses a phone and a computer, it’s impossible to be entirely news free, however it’s surprising how much information about current events I’ve been able to eliminate by simply not seeking it out.

But whenever something happens that really gets people talking, I find out about it. Like finding out about the shooting of Charlie Kirk. It was my 16 year old son - who gets his news from social media (first) and school (second) - who told me about it just before bedtime last night. I had only a vague idea of who Charlie was, the words “controversial speaker” pretty much summed up my state of knowledge. This essay is not about the man, I leave the commentary on the passing of this human being to his family and those that have an actual connection to him.

I write instead about the role of the world of the news. Today, I peeked into my phone’s news feed to get a sense of what was happening according to major media.

What I saw was the lifting up and broadcasting of hostile words, angry sentiments, blame and threats of crushing the enemy. What I saw was chaos and exaggeration, hyperbole and fear.

What I did not see was simple grief, or the allowance of time for shock at a sudden and violent event of this one. What I did not see was stillness, quiet or thoughtful reflection on the unpredictability of life, on mortality and what it means for us all to be touched by an unexpected death.

For me, the news is a projection of the human ego. When I as a human am hurt, shocked or humiliated by something, my mind will quickly fill with stories. My mind will demand revenge. My mind will look for who to blame. That’s what my mind does.

Similarly, when something big happens in the world that news agencies know, they react with stories. They yell out for attention, with the scariest headlines, the most egregious quotes, the story of good and evil and coming war.

This is all very natural. And though I’m tempted to rail against and criticize the news for the polarization I see within it, that just fuels more war. It feels much better to accept that telling stories is what the news does. That is its role.

When we are shocked and reeling, from something personal or something political, the tendency is to jump into war. The news reflects what we feel within ourselves about the world. It’s a mirror that helps us see ourselves, even when it’s painful. The hatred we see in the news, if it inflames us, is a mirror for the hatred within us. Similarly with fear, grief and shame.

The mirror I see when I look at the news is the desire to point fingers at others, and the fear that doom is facing me. When I read the news I want to attack those who live differently than me, to blame those who I hold responsible for what I don’t like, to argue those who don’t think I’m right. When I read the news I want to rail against the news agencies themselves, to hate them and wish their downfall.

For me, there is no good action that comes from getting carried away by the stories in the news, or the stories in my mind. So rather than trying to change the news agencies or the people reported on or quoted in the news, I want to come back to myself, notice the temptation to point fingers or give in to fear, and choose a kinder path.

I want to remember that the news is not a true depiction of reality. Nor are the voices in my mind. Let the news tell its stories. Let the mind shout its fear and anger. What I seek is the calm in the eye of the storm. I seek to turn my attention away from stories, and connect to what is real instead.

What is real is my breath. What is real is my experience of the wind, the warmth of the sun or the coolness of the rain, the touch of another human being. And what is real are my feelings - I feel them, so they exist, and they don’t need to be explained or changed, only experienced.

Sometimes I question whether I am being irresponsible for avoiding the news. But in times like this, when I dip my toe in, I see that there is nothing for me there. I will continue to trust that, if something is important enough for me to notice, it will come into my daily life. If something is interesting or relevant to my life, I can research to learn more through a variety of sources. And if I turn off the screen, put down the paper, turn down the radio, and open my eyes to what is around, and within me, I’ll find the peace, happiness and beauty that was there all along.

Being a person who both avoids the doctor unless absolutely necessary, as well as someone who has taken the less medicated road to parenting, I felt personally attacked by the song.

My commitment to free speech, my values of acceptance, and my embracing of all points of view flew, or rather were catapulted violently out the window as the rage within me erupted.

At first, I wanted to boo the actors. I barely contained my emotions, and they stewed inside a cauldron of boiling acid in my stomach. I stopped myself from booing during the performance by promising myself I would take the stage and scream at everyone once the play was done. Then I downgraded that action to a fantasy of yelling at everyone on the street as they exited the theatre. As my rage further cooled, I decided I’d just write a letter to the director. But finally, with fifteen minutes left in the performance, I decided the kindest action I could take for myself was to leave.

Today, I decided to use the spiritual practice of self inquiry to identify some of the stressful thoughts that I was having during the performance. This one emerged as the strongest “They think unvaccinated people should die”. It was a “Memories of COVID” experience that I would rather have done without. But since it came to me unbeckoned and uninvited, I decided to learn from the thought.

I asked myself if I could absolutely know it’s true that “they (the audience, the actors, the writer) think unvaccinated people should die”. And I saw that there’s no way I can know that it’s true.

The next question in self inquiry is “How do you react when you believe it’s true” - and, as you saw in the above paragraphs of this essay. I was hurt, furious, betrayed, and thrust into my feelings of abandonment, betrayal and exclusion of the past. I felt alone and I attacked myself, for not being articulate enough to change people’s minds, for looking like an idiot, for being small and a troll - I saw myself as I imagined the actors and laughing audience saw me and it felt terrible.

So then came the challenge question. “Who would I be without the thought that they think unvaccinated people should die”?

It took me a moment, but I was able to see that, if I didn’t believe the thought, if I didn’t try to read people’s minds and make assumptions about how they felt, I would feel calm. I would see this play as an embodiment of principles I hold dear. The freedom to speak about your political opinion. The freedom to make comedy out of dissent. The freedom to make art to protest or comment on political conditions. And the freedom to make fun of what you don’t understand. I feel that if we were all free to express ourselves without fear of punishment, to people who wish to hear us, the world would naturally become a more tolerant place. I disagree with those who suggest that some things should not be said aloud, that dissent should be hidden, that comedy should be “pure” and never hurt anyone’s feelings. It’s just that, when it felt directed at me, I threw all my principles out the window. Which helps me understand why some people want to shut down expression of ideas they think are harmful. But it’s not where I want to land. So without the thought, I am calm, witnessing someone else’s political views, someone else’s comedy, it’s not for me, so I don’t have to stay if I don’t want to. I also get to appreciate the music, the thriving arts scene, the audience who is willing to come see untested and low production creative output that comes from the sweat, blood and tears of artists committed to their craft.

Without the thought, I also realized, I’m not alone in my own political views. I sit figuratively next to prominent and influential scientists like John Ioanaddis, highly praised for his critiques of science and then vilified as an enemy of it during COVID, or Canadian comedian Cathy Jones much loved on This Hour has 22 Minutes and then kicked to the curb in 2021 for her medical decisions. I sit next to successful filmmaker and musician friends, to environmentalists and community advocates, to business people and indigenous activists alike, all of whom ran afoul of the accepted societal view during those polarizing years. I draw comfort when I remember that I’m not alone, that not everyone thinks I’m wrong, dangerous or stupid. And I don’t even know that the audience, actors or playwright think that either.

In self inquiry, there is something called “Turnarounds”, where we take our original stressful thought and turn it around - trying on opposite points of view to our original one in case there are any insights to be found. Here are my turnarounds:

“I think the vaccinated should die”. A harsh statement, and not one I would agree with in my wise mind. But if I consult my reptilian brain - the one who values supremacy over others to the death, I see some uncomfortable truths.

That part of me says, “yes, if they all died, finally those bastards would see I’m right”. Who cares that “those bastards” would include most of my family and friends - the reptile doesn’t care about that. The reptile cares about being right, and other people knowing that I’m right. That part of me says “there are too many people in the world, too much stuff I disagree with - let’s wipe the slate clean and start again”, ignoring the benefits I get from modern medicine, the government, the society to which I’m a member. That part of me says “people need to pay for what they did to me” (or more accurately what I say they did to me) - revenge is the most important thing in the world. So if my reptilian brain can have these kinds of thoughts when it’s in distress, why should I be surprised that others might share those same kinds of thoughts towards “the unvaccinated” or any group that I might identify with?

The second turnaround I saw was “I believe I should die”. This isn’t the reptile who’s speaking, it’s the scared child.

When I am believing that I’m an unwanted member of society, I am believing I should die. I’m believing I don’t belong, that I can’t evolve with whatever new direction this world is taking. I’m believing I should die for being so incapable of speaking clearly. I should die to escape the pain of public humiliation and castigation. I should die so I no longer have to feel so alone. During COVID, while I blamed the rest of the world, it was really my unconscious self who was inflicting most of the pain, repeating over and over again that I was hated, I was reviled, I was untouchable, disgusting to others, rejected by the tribe. I don’t think anyone ever spoke such unkind words directly to me. But I repeated them to myself over and over again, and it really hurt.

The final turnaround is “They don’t think the unvaccinated should die”. If I look at the reality of the play, what was happening was, the playwright was expressing her own bias. The song was about all the people “we” - her audience - get irritated by. Yes there were some jabs at people who “don’t believe in science”, but the other people on the chopping block were drivers who text, drivers who put lipstick on at a stop sign, and a bunch of other people with annoying habits. I am pretty sure that the people in the theatre didn’t actually want to go and kill, or subject to death, the people in the song. It’s just a powerful way to express annoyance and confusion. Comedy is often about making outrageous statements. I was taking it so seriously but it wasn’t really that serious. Furthermore, based on what I saw during COVID, most people had a friend or family member that didn’t “get with the program”. And while plenty of estrangements occurred, I know that most people did not genuinely wish death on their family members. If anything, a lot of people were simply worried, afraid, not just for themselves, but for those in their lives - they genuinely feared that without the vaccination, their loved ones were at risk. And their words and efforts came from that place of fear, not a place of desiring to hurt. Finally, I was not at risk in that theatre. In that moment, people were there to watch a play. My nervous system and inner reptile thought we were in grave danger because of that stressful thought. But the reality was, I was safe. And when I finally realized it, I decided not to subject myself to any more jokes I wasn’t in the mood for, and so walked quietly out of the theater. I saved myself, instead of waiting for them to stop hurting me.

I have come to realize that, when these hot bursts of emotion overtake me, there is something I can learn. It takes me awhile to process the emotion, but when I come out the other side of the storm, there really is a rainbow waiting for me.

My righteous indignation began to drain away when I went to a municipal hearing in 2018 about the proposed bike lanes at Bloor and Bathurst. Some of the local business people attended to say that they didn’t want the lanes. Some of the cyclists threatened boycotts of said businesses. And suddenly I got confused. Didn’t we cyclists want local businesses to thrive? And the businesses weren’t against bikes per se - they were just afraid of how it would affect their livelihood or their own commute to work. I felt certain there must be a way of bringing both groups together to forge a common solution.

Eventually proponents of the bike lane prevailed, and for a few short years, we had an uneasy truce between those who didn’t like the lane, and those who supported it - with countless two-wheelers enthusiastically using it.

Enter 2024, when the bike lane expanded west into car-loving Etobicoke. It’s unfriendly territory for bicycles, as well as the home of Premier Doug Ford - and a lot of his supporters. While there was indeed some local support, and a strong argument to be made that if you build it, the cyclists will come (and leave their cars at home), it was the last straw for bike lane opponents.

Now the backlash is huge. Major arterial bike lanes are to be ripped up and no new ones allowed without provincial approval. And with a provincial government that has seemingly unlimited power over municipalities to impose its will, there seems little to do in the face of it except organize protests, write angry op-eds, and cry over the injustice. The topic of bike lanes has become incendiary among some - one friend told me the topic was verboten at the family Thanksgiving lest it destroy the occasion.

Part of me shares in the city’s angst. I love cycling, and I love the safety of being able to ride down University, Yonge and across Bloor. The city has come so far in its relationship with the bicycle since my early twenties, and I’ll mourn the loss of these lanes should it come to pass.

Yet I also see the reality. This city can not accommodate more cars. So we can remove the bike lanes, and traffic will stay the same or slightly increase, but ultimately, without finding alternative ways for people to move around - like good transit, safe and accessible walking routes, and yes, good bicycle infrastucture, we’ll be left with the problem of gridlock. And so the need for solutions will arise again and again, until we are finally ready for the transformation that will give us the freedom of mobility we all want.

Until then, it makes no sense to fight over the issue. Having been on the wrong side of public debate, I know what it’s like to be seen as the enemy. I know what it’s like to be shut down, ignored, accused of evil motives or stupidity. And I see that is what those of us on the pro cycling side of the issue are doing to the drivers opposed to the lanes, and to the premier. It’s not a winning strategy - and it doesn’t feel good.

There are a million ways to increase cycling, improve safety and enhance the city. There are a million ways for city residents, city government, and city staff, to adapt to the premier’s political power and flow around it. But by focussing on the battle, we lose sight of what else is possible. So let’s lay down our arms, value the opinions of those who don’t want the bikes and are wielding the power right now, and really listen to them. We might just find some common ground. And if we can’t, we then find our own power, and exercise it where we can.

War is never won by might - such peace is fragile and easily overthrown. I feel no fear that that bikes will be forever banished in this city - this too shall pass. And in the meantime, we’ll travel much further if we focus on what we love instead of what we don’t.

Okay, so that title is click bait. While I wouldn’t label myself a left winger, I wouldn’t label myself a right winger either. And I admit, it really scares me to use the title on this essay, where it may be seen by friends and family on Facebook (that is, if my posting about it doesn’t disappear into the giant maw of social media which is probably more likely).

Most of my friends and family think of themselves as not right wing (at least that’s what I imagine they think). And, living in liberal-minded Toronto, in a country that, even when it votes conservative, is seldom as right wing in discourse as our American counterparts, it’s common to hear people refer pejoratively to Republican voters, to Trump, to right wing policies. While I used to vocally and enthusiastically contribute in agreement to those conversations, that changed for me over the last several years.

Now, when I hear those kinds of remarks, I get a pain in my back, my shoulders slump, I don’t feel good. I mostly stay quiet. And I either feel angry at people for their views, or ashamed to have my own.

With the most recent US election, I’m hearing a little more talk of politics in my circles, and while a few friends feel optimism or enthusiasm about the election, most find it really troubling. The conversations I hear are making me question whether or not to use my voice. So just for today, I decided to speak my truth, without insisting it is THE truth.

I’m not unhappy that Trump is president. I’m not appalled and confused by Trump’s election. I think RFK Jr is exciting. My friends who want us to leave industrialized agriculture tell me that there are new and exciting developments possible with some of Trump’s planned appointments. And the part of me that gets annoyed by Democrats and in Canada, left wing devotees who I felt betrayed by during COVID, feels a little “revenge” gladness at Trump’s election and the gnashing of teeth that has accompanied it.

My truth about this US election is that it’s not that bad. Trump is one person. There are 542 US federal politicians according to Google. There are over two million employees in the federal government. There are even more state, city and town politicians and employees. There are 350 million people living in the United States. Yes the president can make rules, but each member of the government, each member of the population, has the choice to implement or not implement, listen or not listen, and obey or not obey. There is a tremendous amount of power in the population, in each one of us. No matter who is in office, there are always checks and balances to political power.

I think the Democrats made a lot of mistakes in the past four years. I think Trump made a lot of mistakes in his four years before that. I disagree with policies on the left, I disagree with policies on the right. So I’m not alarmed that Trump won. In some ways I don’t think he can do a worse job than Biden did, and, crazy as it might sound to those of you who disagree, I think he might do better.

If I’m alarmed about anything, it’s about the “military industrial complex”. It’s about the separation of our hearts from our minds. It’s about the enmity of people seeing each other as wrong and bad. As long as we accept our existing political and economic structures, I don’t think who the president is makes a big difference.

But more true than my opinions, is my feelings as I write. I feel so much fear inside me saying these things. I fear people will apply the labels they use for Trump on me. I don’t want anyone to think anything bad about me, ever. This audience on Substack is pretty friendly - most of my regular readers have come to me through my writings on COVID and my opinion is likely not a shock. But I picture some of you reading this as being upset. What I have to remember is, those pictures in my mind of your reactions as you read are created by my imagination - the pictures aren’t reality. And if or when you don’t like what I write, your opinions belong to you, not me.

Unlike many times in the past, I have been listening a little more closely to people who disagree with my political perspective. And, as I work to open my mind, to find where my judgements aren’t serving me, I realize that there is genuine pain, fear and despair. That people genuinely believe Trump’s election is a sign of the apocalypse, deterioration of the country, loss of goodness in the world. I don’t agree with them, but I can absolutely connect to feeling pain, fear and despair about the future of the world. I picture the threats coming from somewhere different, but at root, the fear is the same - fear of loss of the planet, fear of nuclear war, fear of suppression of human rights, fear of an increase in human suffering in our world.

So I think it’s so important that we connect with each other on that feeling level if possible, before talking at the political one. Having done that, I’ve discovered that some Democrats share opinions that I thought only the right wing had - and vice versa. In many ways, a lot of us might be closer than we might think - if we listen, we’re going to find so much common ground.

When I legitimize people’s right to have different views than mine, and listen with open ears, I don’t necessarily change my opinions. And I definitely don’t change my values. But I get really curious so I can find out what is working, and what is not.

If I don’t listen, I might plow full steam ahead with my way of doing things, only to end up in the wrong place. This is what I’m seeing with so many political efforts. Action gets taken to try and do something good, but without calm, reasoned consideration, without throwing open the doors of discussion to everyone, not just people who feel the same way, political action can end up either unsuccessful or worse, exacerbating the problem it meant to solve.

For the past year - since the last election I ran in - I’ve been silencing myself on political topics most of the time. Partially due to frustration or my inability to stay calm when talking about things I cared about, partially because through my self inquiries I feel less strongly, with less certainty about politics, and partially because I’ve been under the impression, misguided I think, that to be enlightened means staying quiet.

This election has reminded me I like to use my voice to share my opinion - at least sometimes.

If I can honour my fear that people will dislike me for my opinion, and question my need to be liked, I can speak up when I want instead of saying silent.

If I stop believing no one wants to hear me, I can find out where my voice is welcome, and use it there, instead of banging my head against the wall in the wrong places.

If I can drop the idea that I’m right - or that I need to convince other people that I am - I can speak with clarity instead of anger or condescension.

And most importantly, if I can remember that other people care about the same things as I do - that they want peace, love, a beautiful planet - I can listen compassionately and stay connected throughout disagreement. Because if I’m ready to speak up, I better get ready to listen at the same time.

I would love to get to a place where we could talk politics without freaking out at each other - externally or internally. When we discuss movies, hobbies or any neutral topic, we are all perfectly capable of disagreeing while still respecting the person - even if they like/don’t like to knit, or snowboard, or to watch the latest blockbuster movie. It doesn’t have to be different when it comes to politics.

I don’t know if “we” can all get to that place. But I’m hoping I can. And I’m glad we’re here together.

In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been devoting myself full time to the practice called The Work. Most of my writing has been in the form of worksheets, where I question stressful beliefs I’ve been carrying around with me for years! So I haven’t been here too often - and I’m not sure I’ll stay. But I have to say that it does feel good to be back. And I love that you’re still with me!

Unless we are dropped by a stork into the forest and raised by wolves, from the moment we are born, human language shapes our understanding of the world. Our experience is described for us by those who raise us (and whose experience in turn was described by those who raised them). We are given labels and names for everything from our teeny tiny toes to the stars in the skies. 

Through language we learn the stories of others and formulate our own. And every single thing about the world that we believe - whether it’s the name of that shining orb in the sky or the story of the speed of light - we only know because someone has spoken it into existence. As linguist and author Steven Roger Fischer points out in his book, A History of Language (the source of most of the historical information in this essay), “More than any other of life’s faculties, it is language that tells us who we are, what we mean and where we are going. 

Because of how intrinsically our use of language is linked to both our brain and our social development, language is not just a communication tool. It actively creates our experience of reality. And in today’s digital realm where words inform every aspect of our personal, professional and social lives, it's important to realize that relying on it exclusively has the potential to constrain, skew or otherwise hamper our understanding of the world.

Language - the medium of information exchange - is neither a recent nor human creation. Earth’s earliest organisms used chemo-communication as the language that helped them find others of the same species and procreate with them. Everything from ants to elephants use highly sophisticated languages, be they chemical, kinetic or acoustic. The infrasound emitted by crocodiles, elephants and ocean waves and the ultrasound above our hearing range used by insects, bats and dolphins convey reams of information, the importance of whose contents we are oblivious to. Many languages still await our discovery of them, like that of the whalesong only heard once electronic sensing devices in the 1950s detected their existence.

While human syntax dates back a million years or more, language as we know it evolved only in the past couple hundred thousand years. Prior to the development of the breathing apparatus and neural pathways that allow our current use of language, humans had highly functioning cerebral systems, and while language was a gift that enabled the organizational abilities to undertake vast sea crossings and complex hunts in harsh climates, it came with a cost. It reduced our ability to communicate through chemical and body signals, limiting our perception of and interaction with our surroundings.

As our language evolved, we moved from only using words like fish, fire, fingers which were directly associated with the world around us to a higher order vocabulary entirely disconnected from it - words like to, which, because and why.  Further limitations developed around twelve thousand years ago with the practice of permanent agriculture, which bound language to geographical origin. And the advent of the graphic expression of human speech in the last few thousand years removed humans even more from each other by making it possible to convey information without requiring direct interaction, thus eliminating the non verbal cues that convey (and some might say are necessary to understand) meaning.

As our use of language grew, so too did the domination of certain forms of it and further losses in understanding. The widespread acceptance of the Greek alphabet meant the erasure of other writing methods, each with their own unique abilities to describe local conditions. As regional dialects became subsumed by more “successful” forms of language, intricate meanings were lost. Kummerspeck, gigil. and my favourite, greng-jai require cumbersome and lengthy translation attempts that still can’t quite capture the meaning conveyed in the origin language, and were German, Tagalog, and Thai to fall into disuse as countless other languages have, such concepts would be lost completely. When we lost Yaghan we lost mamihiapinatapai - a word awkwardly translated into English as a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin. 

Language became able to do far more than communicate necessary data about for our survival. It also developed into a powerful tool of persuasion. Gilgamesh of Sumeria used it to spread his name in an act of self promotion not unlike those of today’s social media influencers. Ancient rulers in 200 BC used it so pervasively that one account describes “officialese” as contaminating nearly all ancient Egyptian and Mayan texts.  And widespread disinformation (the label to which it is applied always based on the perspective of the labeller) shows us that language can be used to obfuscate or mislead as often as it is to inform.

In today’s world, language can separate us from each other in many ways. Communication between older generations and younger ones gets hampered due to evolving vernacular that renders each hard to understand by the other. Everyone from online gamers to street gangs use slang or coded language with fellow insiders. And even when we do speak the same language, we dramatically overestimate our ability to correctly interpret what others are saying. Each of us uses language our own way, with our own particular expressions and nuances. The phrase “What did I say?!” has been uttered with exasperation many times when we don’t understand why someone else was upset by our words, because we regularly infer and deduce meaning during our conversations far beyond the literal words we are presented with. Misunderstandings that arise from our assumptions can be hilarious in the right setting of a television show, comedy bit like The Three Stooges “Who’s On First”, or in our own lives - if quickly exposed. Too often though they are cleared up too little, too late, or not at all, causing either temporary or lasting damage to political, business and personal relationships. 

It’s not just interpersonal relationships that can be affected by believing language represents truth. Some research even suggests that words are physically harmful to health. Inequalities may be created, exacerbated and perpetuated by language when used to prevent those with low literacy levels from attaining positions of power and wealth. Even one’s accent in their native tongue has been used to discriminate, especially in places like the United Kingdom, where George Bernard Shaw in his 1916 play Pygmalion opined in that “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him“. 

Widespread deployment of euphemisms in the military context means language can be used to desensitize people to violence. Terms like collateral damage, friendly fire or impaired combat personnel, the latter railed against by Winston Churchill during a military briefing, are common in descriptions of war. What is called an invasion instead of a liberation, or vice versa, is determined by the side using the term. Even using the word conflict to describe a military action disguises the violence of the battlefield. 

Finally, language can be weaponized to dehumanize people so as to spread the fear that leads to violence or hatred as happened to the most extreme degree in Nazi Germany and Rwanda yet exists in subtler forms around the world - like during political campaigns in Western democracies. 

When we read too much into language, we literally begin war. The ancient association of one’s family with one’s language has given rise to countless wars and less violent yet harmfully divisive conflicts over language here in Canada (English and French) as well as southern neighbour United States (Spanish and English). Wars are fought by those who have countless similarities, but almost universally lack a common language as a unifying feature between them.

All of what I have just presented is a cautionary observation of language, not an indictment. Language is merely a tool that can be wielded many ways. It can create beauty, forge bonds, lead to a deep feeling of being understanding, and allow the story-telling that both defines and brings us together as a species. And when used in song and games in 1914 in the trenches of Belgium and France, it briefly stopped a war and turned enemies into friends.

So powerful is language that it is considered a divine intervention, bestowed on us by God or Gods in countless cultures around the world, including the Judeo-Christian one. In Genesis God is said to have given Adam the ability to speak and communicate, and some native cultures describe even more fascinating origins. I find particularly applicable the story of the Iroquois confederacy, which involves Sky woman - the divine being who fell from the sky and landed on the back of the turtle. The twins who she birthed, Good Mind and Bad Mind, argued over whether humans should be given the gift of speech. Flint, the Bad Mind, argues against it, but Good Mind prevails and thus speech is bestowed, and perhaps in some ways, Bad Mind has been using language alongside Good Mind ever since.

As we enter a new era of communication through AI, it becomes more important to see language not as a medium of truth but a descriptor of a perspective. We want language to be a useful tool for connection and problem solving instead of an impenetrable boundary that limits our exchange with the world. And we don’t need to mistake language for truth. The world was talking long before Homo erectus, and when we fail to speak or listen to non human languages, whether due to biology, necessity or mere ignorance, we get a severely limited picture of the world in which we live.

Relying solely on language to communicate with the world is akin to speaking more loudly to a foreign language speaker in order to get them to understand your own. Sometimes it’s simply not the right tool for the moment.

I used to think language could tell me what things were, and as I finish this essay my gaze happens upon a tall green thing outside my window. I speak English so I’ve been taught that it’s a tree. If I’d been raised with Arabic I’d call it a شجرة (shojra), or an arvore if I was born in Portugal. Now I consider that language is not the whole truth, and that perhaps it’s more accurate to say what I see has no objective label at all. And at this moment my job is not to box it with preconceived labels, but simply gaze upon its vibrant colour and movement in the wind, inhale the fragrance from its leaves, and take respite in the shade from its boughs.

With the news that the US Centre for Disease Control has officially decided to treat COVID like the flu, it feels particularly apt to turn back to the time when I first wanted them to do that - which was right at the begining of March 2020.

If you don’t want to return to memories of when the world turned upside down, you might want to skip this essay, which primarily consists of entries from my journal at three moments between March and June 2020.

I came across the already yellowed and creased pages (I don’t treat my notebooks well), ready to discard them in my ongoing mission to declutter. But after reading through them I decided I’d like to both save and share them. Not because they are a record of my past (I have easily discarded many of my early journals which cover important topics like what food I ate that day and which boy I liked), but because they tell a different story than the one I remember.

In general, I remember that time as traumatic, isolating, enraging and full of despair. While I know intellectually that good things happened in my life during those months, the emotional feelings I associate with it are painful.

The physiology of our brain means that painful experiences, both physical and emotional, are more firmly encoded in our memories, such that negative memories are more salient and accessible than pleasant ones. Moreover, there is something called mood-congruent memory that means, when we are in a depressed, angry or grieving state, we only recall an unpleasant past. That’s why my overall memory of that time is coloured with a darker shade, and why it makes sense that when I get angry or upset about a current headline or emotional trigger, I only remember the negatives of the past.

Reading my journal, there is a different account of how I felt. No question I had moments where those painful feelings dominated. But they weren’t always present. And keeping a record of this reminds me of the alternative reality to the one in my emotional memory.

One other reason I’m keeping this, is that it reminds me that when I’m afraid or angry I can’t communicate well. Reading what I wrote down calmly in my journal in the first two paragraphs of my March entry still holds true for me, and sounds eminently reasonable (to my ears). I recognize not everyone agrees, but I’m not afraid of that today. I was at the time though, and as a result my communication with those who didn’t agree was defensive and reactive.

I’m glad to share these memories with you below, and ask, is there anything you are forgetting? And how have you changed?

******

March 30, 2020

We’re in a time unlike any I’ve been before, perhaps unlike any that Western civilization has had. We are behaving, as a society (almost every other country except perhaps Sweden) as if we are under a massive threat that could end civilization.

But my perspective (shared by not many, but my cousin and maybe my husband to a lesser degree) is that we are not under threat at all. That we have an unusually but not exceptionally higher number of deaths headed for us, due to the corona virus, and that our current approach to life, death and health meants that we can both expect higher than necessary deaths but also that we are unable to philosophically accept the fact that people died - that we all die - especially those who have poor health to begin with. And my perspective is also that the measures the world is taking to address this “threat” are themselves a potential threat to freedom, to society and to civilization.

I had many moments of anger and frustration when trips were cancelled, the schools were locked down, and gatherings of any sort were banned. But I broke through to the other side of what felt like despair, and am now in a state of general acceptance [ed note - ha! so much non acceptance to come later], punctuated by mini mental battles when new restrictions pop up (security guards at the grocery store, playgrounds closed) or comments by people I know or those on social media (the devil!) rile me.

I’m trying to focus on the present and the positive. The negatives right now are the inconvenience of not being able to use public facilities like libraries, enjoy gatherings with friends in restaurants or go to the movies. The other negatives are all the things that so far do not affect my daily life, and that may or may not affect me in the future depending on the severity of the repercussions.

My mind can come up with all sorts of turbulent and disastrous scenarios, but if I live in the moment and not the mind then I’m not touched by the negatives. The positives that I’m experiencing are in fact immense.

I am truly living in the present, because I go crazy if I try to live in the future. I’m still not enlightened of course, but I do feel I’m more relaxed, content and going with the flow. When the fight against reality is so obvious, it’s easy to give up the fight.

The other positives are my renewed appreciation for the outdoors and exercise, and for interactions with other people. I’m baking, cooking and reading much more, and I’m getting along well with my husband and kids.

But my favourite part by far is the dinners with all five of us, sitting and eating together, laughing and telling stories, and often playing games. And on a mercenary level, the government benefits due to the economic blow to the event industry and other economically precarious workers to which I belong (having been working freelance for a catering company) mean that I am likely to receive as much money for not working as I would have for working. And Paul gets paid just the same since he can do his job online.

I like home schooling, I love being home with my kids ( most of the time!), and the fact that everyone is housebound means huge (albeit most likely temporary) gains for the environment - dolphins in the canals in Venice [ed note - I fell for the fake dolphins story], smog free horizon in LA, fewer cars on the road.

So in many ways this is like a dream for me, even though I’m against this approach, I’m for those effects of it! It is a strange time, but also normal feeling - showing how adaptable we are to change (though it’s not that much of a change since many of us still have the comforts of home and the necessities and more of life).

***

April 14, 2020

Two weeks later - even more confined, since our temporary basement tenant tested positive for COVID (she went to the hospital for cancer treatment and they tested her there) which means our family has to go on two week house arrest. In some ways it’s been hard because no walks or runs, other times it’s easy to just go on holiday lazy mode.

Most notable positive aspects of this time (plenty of negative which I dwell on for too much time normally) is our family dinners. We have had a dance party, lots of family board games, a stand-up comedy night, mood chart night, and lots of talking and laughing.

My mood range is ridiculous. For a lot of today I was sad, tired, lethargic and wanting this all to be over, but after our dinner together I was in an ecstatic mood, truly relishing the prospect of having a family dinner together every single night.

It’s not just the fact that we sit down and eat together, it’s the pacing of it. We don’t rush off to do other things, we just stay and chat for an hour, longer if we play a game. I need to figure out how to continue this if/when things get back to normal.

****

June 7, 2020

Wow, time has completely flown by. It crawled in March when everything was changing so fast, but then we settled into the new normal (ugh hate that term and all the connotations) and the daily routine just sped up.

Things that are good: we still have family dinner together every night (though have had take-out a couple of times, or let Tom leave the table early to watch a movie, or started without Paul with him working). We take walks multiple times a day. One new habit of the past four weeks has been doing a daily 7 am walk or run with my neighbour Amanda which has been so great for me. Getting up in the morning feels so good, and having the fresh air and social contact also sets me up for a better feeling first thing.

Things I don’t like in society - half the people wearing masks, both inside and out. The idea that things will not, maybe ever, go back to the way they were before - crowded restaurants and bars seem to be a thing of the past, same with school (more or all online), workplace and music concerts/sports.

I think different countries, provinces and states are starting to diverge - we were all on uniform lockdown before - in how they are functioning. That may help people to bust slightly out of group think and their perception of how necessary and how strict everything needs to be.

Stores now all have plexiglas keeping everyone apart from each other, which I don’t like and think is unnecessary, but even if I did believe it was necessary, it is inneffective. At the bank the associate I was meeting with kept coming around the plexiglas to get me to sign things instead of passing the paper through the slot.

*****

Today, March 4, 2024

My journal entries end there - documenting those times was a temporary and sporadic project so I only have a record of those three days.

It would be easy for my ego to argue that the happy moments then were only the lull before things got worse with the vaccine mandates, travel bans, increased polarization of society. But I know that there were plenty of happy times later as well - I just didn’t record them and so I have to look harder for them in my memory. There was the wonderful feeling of being part of a secret undergound, filled with amazing people including communities I had previously ignored or misunderstood. There was the way I learned I could live through the worst rejections and emerge all the stronger. There was the amount of money we saved because we couldn’t go out and spend it, and the critical education my children received about how it feels to be treated as an outcast so they won’t do that themselves to others.

I am grateful to the Sarah that decided to write down both her positive feelings along with the negative, so that the Sarah I am today can remember there is always another side to all stories, even mine.

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Postscript: I published this essay and was about to recycle the now transcribed paper document, but then I read the bullet points on the remainder of the final page (the rest of the journal pages had been torn out and recycled long ago, having been used for other purposes like lists and doodles). They were all to do with emergency preparedness - “prepping” - a stage I went through in summer 2021 in response to the turmoil I felt. One sentence stands out in the list - a quote from a survivalist called Selco who said “your perception of your ability to survive is worse than reality”. I love how that message returns to me time and time again.

Before you read this, please note there’s some housekeeping at the bottom of this essay that I’d like you to read to ensure you are getting the right amount of emails from me (ie, not too many). But you’re free not to read it… which nicely segues into my essay…

Last night I went to see Footloose, a musical put on by my local community theatre. The acting, singing and dancing were terrific. But my enjoyment of the evening was significantly dampened by a line near the end of the first act. The lead character, speaking about the unfairness of the town’s religious-based rules against dancing, yelled out “we want freedom” as the other actors cheered.

I instantly got angry.

In that moment, based on my assumptions about the political views of the Toronto arts world and my local community (assumptions that, I admit, came into the theatre with me from the start), my mind decided to create a show of its own that crowded out the light-hearted musical I was right in front of.

The moviemaker in my mind recreated the experiences, and the feeling, of rejection during the restrictions and vaccine mandates that started in 2020. My mental VR headset showed me the front page hurtful news headlines about the unvaccinated and the derisive comments of pundits in the news and people on Twitter. My internal furnace generated the fires of injustice. And the director in my mind decided to put every person in the cast, crew and audience as part of an angry mob intent on, and even deriving joy from, hurting me. She didn’t even bother to distinguish the difference between real people talking and the lines said by an actor, written by someone else. All of this happened in a flash.

The dominant feeling that emerged within me was an urge to shout everyone down for their hypocrisy. I believed they had no right to claim support for freedom, that they only wanted freedom for themselves, not for people they disagreed with.

At the intermission I cooled down a little and was able to watch the rest of the show without the urge to bolt from my seat. But my discomfort and residual anger remained.

Today, I sat down with a pen and paper and examined that feeling. I questioned my assumptions and I saw what had happened.

The hypocrite, in that moment, was me. I didn’t mean to be a hypocrite, but I was. And I don’t blame myself for it. Hypocrisy is part of having a human ego. I’m just glad to see it now.

Where am I a hypocrite?

I want freedom to have my own opinion about political issues, like the Covid mandates, but I don’t want to give others the freedom to have the polar opposite opinion of me - there’s still part of me that is desperate to change their opinion.

I want freedom to speak out loud about what I think, but I didn’t want to give the freedom to those actors to say the words “we want freedom”. I regularly turn off the news specifically so I won’t hear people say things I disagree with.

I want freedom from judgement of my past actions. I have lost my temper, been unkind, and excluded people in the past, but I never want people to judge me according to those mistakes, I want them to see me as a whole, multidimensional human. Yet I don’t want to free people from the actions they took and the things they said in the past, I just lock them in the category of enemies and that’s that.

Finally, I want freedom from other people’s assumptions. I hated it when others assumed I was part of an evil, science-disdaining mob, neatly summed up with some kind of perjorative label. Yet I don’t want to give people freedom to be individuals, with very diverse ways of looking at life and politics. Instead of realizing each person in that audience, cast and crew was a unique individual whose views on life, politics, and religion, including as it related to Covid, varied widely, I lumped them all into the same assumption-filled basket.

Once I saw all of this, I felt so much lighter. I see how my grasping for something I can’t have - control over what other people say, think and do - is exhausting and painful. I see how my assumptions weigh me down and keep me imprisoned in the past. And once I see what my mind is doing, I have the ability to stop doing it.

As I mentally released everyone from the angry mob I’d put them in, as I released their present selves from the actions of their past selves (just as the me today might like to undo my past mistakes but can’t), and as I released other people from the need to think like me, I felt lighter with each moment.

I still have a long way to go to freeing myself and others from the assumptions, resentments and hurts that I’m still holding on to. But I approach that journey with a renewed commitment to freedom. And I trust life will continue to point out to me when I’m hypocritical about it, since every time it does, I experience more of that amazing light.

Now for the housekeeping - I have two separate email lists. One is for a newsletter to those interested in my emotional coaching practice, where I see clients one on one and offer workshops. The other is this one - for Substack, where I simply write about my thoughts. Sometimes I use the Substack newsletter content for my coaching one, and vice versa. If you don’t want to get the coaching newsletter, please unsubscribe and you’ll just get this Substack one. You’ll be able to tell which is the coaching newsletter because it’s shorter, and it ends with a picture of me. And it doesn’t have the words Substack at the end :)

I used to have a lot of opinions. I knew I was right, about all of them. I had a tiny bit of space open to hearing other viewpoints, and changing my mind could and did happen from time to time, but in general, once I had an opinion, it was pretty fixed and it went something like this.

The (insert latest thing) is terrible. I think (insert the side I oppose) is being unfair, unreasonable, or evil and the (position I oppose) is unjustified and/or stupid. The (side I support) is being ignored, unfairly vilified, lied about and the (position I support) is smart, just and obviously the best one.

What I finally realized, after a lifetime of taking sides, is that taking a side creates war. But only always.

It’s so tempting to move to a side though. Taking a side gives me a hit of self righteousness. It makes me feel like I’m taking action, not just standing by the sidelines. It makes me feel like I’m standing in the way of injustice and I’m part of the force for good.

But what does taking a side really do?

Well, sometimes there is action involved in taking a side. I’ve used my fervour in favour of one side to write letters, give talks to city council, go to protests, participate in boycotts and engage in civil disobedience (or rather civil disobecience lite - I’m either a chicken or a pragmatist depending on your viewpoint). Yet it seems to me that when actions are driven by the self-righteous certainty that taking a side tends to entail. they do not accomplish their goal, at least not in the long term. In my own past when I saw the other side as wrong, my activism involved anger, accusations, a lack of listening, and tunnel vision - it was my way or the highway. My energy was focussed on the problem and who was to blame for it, which drove people away and closed their ears to what I had to offer. It also created winners and losers and even when I won, I lost access to the practical knowledge, creativity and vision that those on the other side could have offered towards solution building.

Usually though, taking a side involves zero action. Most of our opinions are simply exchanged in conversation, whether that’s irl or on social media. We take sides even as we sit far away, in distance, circumstance or time, from the actual issue we are talking about. Our opinions don’t do anything particularly useful. They don’t build anything. They don’t solve problems. They don’t reduce hunger, right past wrongs, clean up pollution, or create peace accords.

What those heated opinions at the dinner table or on Facebook can do is fuel war. Arguments create war between friends and family - I remember leaving the table crying at Thanksgiving over a political argument long before any of the current things. And taking a side in those arguments can also create internal war in our own bodies as our stomach churns and we lose sleep over what we believe the other side is doing wrong. It may be woo-woo of me, but I truly feel our micro wars of opinion add to the conflict in the world. If we speak with curiosity instead of certainty, we can find potential allies everywhere and be open to solutions coming from unexpected places.

As I’ve learned to question my opinions I have found a lot of freedom. I’ve gradually lost the urge to take a side instantly when I hear about the new latest thing (which might be newly covered or discussed but usually isn’t new). I feel so much more alive and present when I don’t take a side. I’m interested in learning, my mind is open, I see where there are possibilities for me to take positive action and where there aren’t. And, I feel compassion for all who are suffering, not just people on one side.

I still have a few areas that I can strongly feel the pull of side-ism. I’m not fully over the division I experienced of the past few years, and it’s easy to dig in from that place of personal hurt. To shut out other perspectives, impute selfish motivations on others and harden my heart against all those on the other side. When I do, it’s painful and that pain eventually wakes me up to what I’m doing so I can course correct.

Instead of holding onto rigid views, I want to embrace radical uncertainty. To realize I never know 100% what is true. So now I try (I don’t always succeed) to observe what’s happening to me when an issue comes up. When I start to feel that impulse to blame, when I start to feel the compulsion to make others see I’m right, I know I’ve left compassion and curiosity in the dust and am headed for the land of judgement. If I notice that, I take a breath and either literally or figuratively step back to give myself, and the situation, some room. That lets me see where I am and what’s actually happening in reality so that I can live there instead of the mental world of conflict.

Funnily enough, when I don’t take a side I can find myself having judgement against anyone who does. It’s amazing how easily the separation loving ego can find a way to trick me into believing I’m right even though it’s just found another way to take sides.

Peace isn’t necessarily something we achieve - it’s more like a seedling we have within that we can continually nurture. We neglect it when we go into our mental world of us and them, but it’s here waiting for us to tend to whenever we’re ready to return. And when we do, it can flourish and grow.

Oftenwe see freedom of choice as essential - anything that limits choice, whether in the marketplace, the medical or legal system, might be seen as unfair monopolistic behaviour, tyranny or injustice. I myself favour freedom when it comes to most choices - if anything I fantasize of a world, or at least my city, where all but the most critical laws are abandoned in favour of a more trusting style of living, governed by natural consequences rather than human bureaucray.

Yet with choice comes the need to make a decision. And when we are caught up in our egos, which we often are, we can find it tiring, difficult, even overwhelming to choose. Part of this is because we have a lot of judgements, conditioned into us since birth, on what good choices are and what bad choices are. Our intellectual judgements may come into conflict with our fun-loving, short-term or pleasure-seeking instincts, which means that making any choice can often feel like going against ourselves. I judge that eating sugar is the worst, and my tastebuds say eating sugar is the best. So the choice of whether to eat a chocolate chip cookie for me can be ridiculously difficult as I have the internal battle over which part of me to listen to.

Difficulty with decisions increases when considering bigger areas of life, especially at pivotal times of change in education, marriage or our careers. We can be stressed by our choices or stuck in feelings of indecision for days, months, even years.

I was struggling with making a decision over the Christmas holidays - a very minor one about whether to stay in the city the entire time or go to my parents’ home in Georgian Bay. Nothing big was weighing on the decision, yet somehow I became mired in a million thoughts - worries that if I stayed in the city I’d be missing out on the beauty of the water, precious time with my sister’s family and parents, vs worries that if I went north I’d be unproductive, lazy, not fulfilling the obligations of my life in Toronto. My ruminations consumed me until it seemed like there wer no good choices - I could only see downsides. So I stopped and took a moment to question my worries.

I realized that, underneath it all, I was believing that it was possible to make the wrong choice. I looked at that belief with curiosity and I saw the following:

First, I saw that part of me was believing I could predict the future - my ego was busy spinning pictures of what it might look like if I made the choice to stay, and other pictures of what it would look like if I decided to go. My ego is better at creating problems than solutions a lot of the time, and so all it was doing was creating a whole host of problematic scenarios.

Secondly, I was believing it was possible that the path not chosen actually existed. Last year’s Oscar winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” depicted a world of multiverses, with every possible fork in the road splitting off into another universe. On some level, it’s as if we believe that the wrong choice will cause us to miss a better version of reality. Yet, even if those multiverses do exist, our own lived reality is that for us the only path is the one we are on. There is no other path, which means this is always the right one. Every fork in the road we choose disappears behind us, and all regret we feel is a result of falsely believing something better exists.

Thirdly, I was believing that my decision would be irreversible. We may not be able to change what’s around us, but we can change what we’re doing at any point. If I chose to go and headed off on the highway, I could change my mind and turn around at the first rest stop to come back home if it felt wrong. It seems simple, but I think sometimes we forget that we can change our minds with every moment of the day. With most decisions we can back up, turn around, change course.

Finally, I realized that the reason my decision-making was causing such a problem was a simple matter of fear. Fear of feeling regret, sadness, disappointment or boredom. But when such feelings come up for me they are almost always a result of what I’m thinking, not a result of what I’m actually doing. Which means “negative” feelings will likely show up at some point in my day no matter what choice I make. And, since I’ve faced these feelings and gone through them countless times in the past, there’s really no need to fear them. It’s okay if they come up again!

Going through our days without fear of making the wrong choice feels much more fluid and easy. When we are alive to the current moment, instead of caught up in the pictures of the past and future, we always know what we want. When I took the time to quiet my mind, it was crystal clear for me. I wanted to go up north, and from there all I had to do was make it happen.

If you want to make 2024 the year of easier decisions, I’m offering a short online workshop on January 22, the details and link to registration are here. Paid subscribers receive a promo code for 50% off.

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I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of popular culture or technology. I heard about this great new band “Coldplay” about ten years after everyone else was bored of Yello. I didn’t get a cell phone until around 2008, I didn’t get a smart phone until after iPhone4 came out and only now am I talking about AI. This despite AI being a hot button topic for months if not years, reaching a fever pitch in May when the New York Times headline declared it “posed a risk of extinction” comparable to nuclear war.

Having now realized what a massive change AI enables, I’ve turned my mind more seriously to its implications. Whether or not we will be over-run by cyborgs in a Terminator like scenario is not my prime concern - we have so many potential catastrophes to lose sleep over already, really what’s the harm of one more?

What I’m interested in, and, dare I say optimistic (perhaps foolishly) about, is the revolution in human communication, purpose and even spirituality that the technology we call Artificial Intelligence could bring about.

When I used to think about AI, I thought it meant that computers would get smarter and smarter until one day they became sentient beings, with their own will to overrule ours. Now I realize AI has nothing to do with sentience - it is simply a sophisticated tool with a variety of technological capabilities that use human language patterns, making it extremely easy for us to interact with and make use of. Whether what we think of as life can somehow be sparked in AI seems to me as likely as it could be sparked into a toaster.

However, whether AI is sentient or not becomes increasingly irrelevant as its information processing capabilities increase. And, when it comes to rational thinking, it could be argued that AI will soon be, or perhaps already is, more capable of linear “thinking” than human beings are. What humans of the White Collar Revolution now do, AI can accomplish far more quickly and efficiently. Just as automation replaced people in manufacturing, AI can replace most, if not all, people in white collar jobs. While we currently still need a few humans to give AI commands to do the work, even those managerial tasks could be handled by AI as it develops more predictive abilities for what’s needed to accomplish a given objective.

It might be taking us a while to realize it, but from what I can see, no human is needed to write a marketing plan, a legal memo, an advertising campaign. AI can generate cartoons, movies, even books. I no longer need to write essays on Substack, I can feed AI a topic and ask it to write an essay - and then ask it to generate topics, then write them, for bi-weekly essays for the rest of the year. I can ask AI to narrate it in my voice, and soon I will likely be able to get AI to generate a video of me speaking it - and not just in English, but in every language it has access to (perhaps that can be done already). Yes there are some big issues with accuracy (one of them that AI is too eager to please - like a stranger who gives you the wrong directions because they feel bad about telling you they don’t know) but such issues may be fixable one day, and, frankly, humans have some issues around accuracy themselves - everyone from major news media editors to those friendly strangers who point you the wrong way.

If we continue along our technological journey, soon holographs and robots could theoretically combine with AI to literally create a Sarah Climenhaga that seems just as real to the casual observer as I do now, and maybe even able to fool a close family member if technology gets sophisticated enough.

So why am I optimistic? Because I feel so much of what we do to survive in today’s economy is drudgery. Our current system seems aimless - it creates busy work, environmental destruction and massive wealth inequality and gives us (more correctly, a few of us) McMansions and robot vaccuum cleaners in return.

Our economy has become a kind of a middle man that we think can be used to achieve happiness, yet which ends up siphoning off most of the energy we feed into it. Fostering love, light and natural beauty aren’t in our job descriptions. Such qualities may creep into this economic system not by system design but in spite of it, but when they do they are harnessed only to sell products rather than elevate our spirits.

Humans used to exist in exquisite connection with not only each other but also plants, animals and the weather itself. The economic system we have created has confined us more and more to a limited understanding of life where we only look to words - and increasingly words in the digital realm - to define our reality.

If we have now inadvertently designed an economic system where humans are irrelevant, we will no longer need to conform to that system to live. Being freed from drudgery means I can use all my brain power - still more miraculous than any computer - three simple ways. One, for creation and expression of my own unique ideas of the moment. Two, for simple observation of the living and breathing world around me. And three, for connecting with other living beings, human or otherwise. We can use our humanity to serve actual humanity. To serve life in other words, not imaginary profit.1

Of course, the transition for all of us who have been paid for work that can be done by AI might be difficult. I have no idea what will unfold when so many of us are no longer needed in our jobs. There are still many people in the world whose labours only allow them the bare minimum - food to eat that day, and a a shelter over their heads that night. That level of work - the work of survival - will continue to be required of us no matter what technology does. But the kind of work that so many in the “modern” world are occupied by is done not to ensure we can live, but rather to allow us to accumulate money, goods or status.

With our “busywork” off the table, perhaps we will start to recognize our amazing intrinsic qualities as humans who are more important than their place in the economic machine. Perhaps we will finally find another way of being with the world that moves beyond the linear language we have limited ourselves to.

When it comes to Substack, I could get AI to write my essays, but why would I bother? It’s a labour of love for me, I write because I want to communicate with you. So in a world of AI, I could still write for the joy of it. But filling out government forms, doing a resume, or content creation for advertising or marketing purposes are tedious jobs I would just as happily avoid.

Being booted out of the system we are familiar with might force us to be in touch with the present moment. It might get us back into the “don’t know” mind of a child filled with wonder at the new world around it. Without the need to concern ourselves with the many abstractions involved in rational life, we won't be able to live in the imaginary worlds of the future or the past. And when our false purposes - like increasing product growth in the fourth quarter - evaporate, we won’t be able to distract ourself with them. We may simply just live, however we can, connecting with whatever we can, being part of the amazing web of energy around us without needing to understand it.

As I pondered all the present and future capabilities of AI, I realized that, for all I know, I could already be an AI version of an early Sarah Climenhaga - a real live woman who was phased out long ago - or a brand new creation dreamed up by a next generation Fugaku supercomputer in Japan. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter to me. When my purpose is no longer clear, my job is to simply keep myself alive, connect to what’s around me, and experience as much joy as I can.

P.S. One day after this post is published, I’ll publish an AI generated post on the same topic, together with the prompt I fed ChatGPT to produce it. I wanted to ask you readers to choose which version you thought was mine. I was pretty impressed by what was produced, and if I asked you to rank which essay was better, it’s possible you would choose the ChatGPT one. But because of the personal elements in this essay, it was pretty clear to me which one I’d written. So your task is not to choose. But you can read the ChatGPT one anyways and ponder the question of which essay is better, and secondly, whether a company would need to hire a human writer, at least one of my acumen, when ChatGPT can produce an essay like that. The AI essay is behind a paywall, but my unpaid subscribers will be able to read my prompt and ask ChatGPT to generate one using it, or create your own using a different prompt.

I love fall. I love the chill after the sweltering summer heat, the smell of the air, the excitement of all the holidays, and the beauty of the changing colours. To me the leaves are beautiful whether they are in the trees, falling gently through the air, or making patterns on the ground. But with the leaves come the leafblowers, and every time I encounter those machines in action, I go a little mad.

Those of you who know me from my mayoral campaigns share my passion for freedom, for beauty and for much of city life. You also know that I’ve left city politics for now, and am exploring other ways to enact positive change in my own life and the world around me.

One of those ways is by helping others find relief from their pain, whether from difficult relationships in their lives, or the politics that affects us. I’ve found that using a meditative practice called The Work gives me and my clients incredible insights that both improve our experience of life and show us possible solutions to previously intractable problems.

So what does that have to do with leafblowers? Well, I don’t know about you, but for me there are countless minor irritations — like leafblowers — that I encounter in my day. Sometimes I breeze right by them, and other times they bring me down and ruin my afternoon. The accumulation of minor irritations, especially in a chaotic environment like a city, can make it tough to have a peaceful, joyful day.

You’ve probably heard the quote “the personal is political”. This statement contains more truth than we may know. I’m tried changing the world from the outside, but I’ve discovered that working from the inside out is both more joyful and more powerful. 

Below I’ve shared how my experience of leafblowers changed as I used The Work on my belief about them. Take a look and please comment with any questions — or challenges! And if you need a laugh, take a look at the video at the bottom that makes me giggle every time I think about it.

The Work on Leafblowers (for a thorough explanation of The Work go to www.thework.com)

Step 1: Name the belief and a situation where you believe it.

My belief is “Leafblowers are a sign of a broken society”. It came upon me the other day when I was jogging past two people on neighbouring properties using leafblowers.

Step 2: Ask “Is it true? (the answer is either a yes or no)

I sit with the thought, and I believe it’s true. So my answer is yes.

Step 3: Ask “Can you absolutely know that it’s true?”

I sit longer. I consider whether I can absolutely know it’s true. I realize there’s no way of knowing that is 100% true. So my answer is no.

Step 4: Ask “How do I react when I believe the thought that leafblowers are a sign of a broken society”?

When I ask myself what happens when I believe it, I think back to the moment I saw them. With the belief, I feel heavy and depressed. I hear the noise, smell the gas, see the leaves, and all I can see is a giant waste. I feel powerless and see our society as so messed up that we would produce something like this. I feel intensely leafblowers shouldn’t exist and it hurts my brain that they do. I want to scream in frustration and impotence. I feel anger towards all the people I picture using leafblowers — not just the ones in front of me. I start to go into angry judgements about society and I give up on the world and feel there’s no point to activism. I feel these beliefs in my body — I clench my teeth, I turn my head to avoid seeing them, my heart feels heavy. My joy in my running evaporates. I also judge all my past good feelings as worthless, silly and foolish, and feel as if the only truth is that everything is terrible.

Step 5: Ask “Who would I be without the thought that leafblowers are a sign of a broken society”?

I sit and consider who I would be without the thought, it takes awhile to find it. When I do, I feel the motion of running. I feel like I could run right past the leafblowers and not get hooked, like I could leap right over them. It becomes a kind of joyful game to get past them as quickly as possible. I also see I can cover my ears to protect them if I want — with the original thought I’m oblivious to what I can do, but without the thought I see I can get some instant protection from the noise. The leafblowers become more like barking dogs or even crashing waves. I also see my delight when I go past other parts of life on my runs (Christmas displays, children playing, sprinklers) and in comparison can find a kind of curiosity or fascination in these funny machines as I run past them.

Without believing the thought I suddenly remember the hilarious video below, it makes me burst out laughing and the silliness of the leaf blowers becomes funny and light. I start to feel mild interest and curiosity about who is working on banning leaf blowers. I see that I could write to landscaping companies if I want to ask them, out of curiosity, if they could use them less or not at all. I wonder if it would be possible to invent leafblowers that aren’t noisy. These thoughts about possibilities are light and easy and curious, they don’t feel like heavy futile nightmares the way they do when I am believing the thought. The leafblowers just become momentary obstacles that I can shield my ears from or escape quickly if I want. Without the belief the leaves are still beautiful, as is the wind, and the patterns made by the blowing air.

Step 6: Find examples of “turnarounds” — opposites to the original beliefs.

Turnaround #1: Leafblowers are a sign of a whole society

Considering this, I see that there is so much to our society, so many parts, so many people and institutions and jobs. And lots of good things like drinking water, sewage treatement, electricity, heat, incredible varieties of food, song, dance and neighbourhoods. All of us are made of multitudes, we aren’t just one thing. With this thought it’s like I can see a giant puzzle of society today and leaf blowers are one tiny piece that makes the puzzle complete. I also see that it’s a temporary thing — leafblowers weren’t always here and they might not always be in the future, they are just part of a whole society right now. They leafblowers are also connecting me to a whole society — the people, metals, fuel, all the many components and processes that had to come together to create the leafblower. They are also a sign of a whole society because for a leaf blower to be produced and working is indicative that the supply chains and chains of command are functioning. 

Turnaround #2: Leafblowers are not a sign of a broken society.

Considering this, dystopian films come to mind. In those films, when society has fallen, there is broken or rusted machinery everywhere. Usually there are zombies around the corner. Functioning leafblowers and healthy employees are not a sign of a broken society the way burned out cars and zombies are. Without the belief I see that the people using the leafblowers are employees earning a paycheque. The landowners are people who care about their property and pay to have it maintained. And leafblowers are really just tiny machines in the grand scheme of things. There’s no greater significance to them. They are just machines buzzing like flies or little yellow minions. 

Turnaround #3: My thinking about leafblowers is a sign of my broken thinking about society.

This one’s a little bit complicated — the turnarounds about our thinking come more easily when we’ve learned to use The Work. This example is called the turnaround to the self — where we see where the problems are within us. 

When I see the leafblowers, immediately a whole host of painful thoughts come into my mind about leafblowers (see step 4). Then I leap into broken thinking about society. I forget the real society and I go into a ton of judgements and beliefs about society: eg rich people who hire landscapers are selfish, landscaping companies are evil, I am impotent and powerless, there is too much concrete, we are doomed. All of my thinking in that moment is painful, and the painful thoughts about leafblowers is actually a sign of all the painful beliefs I still have about society. My broken thinking about society tries to put society in a box, tries to say I know what society is. My thinking limits society to this one economic model that does not define human society. Even though on the outside I’m trying to encourage others to expand and bust out of this economic model that produces leafblowers, on the inside I’m totally confining society to that same model. In reality, not only is the leafblower a small part of society, but even the economic model that produced it is a small part of what society really is. The people operating the leafblower are so much more than the leafblower. And human society — all the trillions of interactions with each other, with nature, with spirit, the diversity of it all around the world, is so much greater than what I’m seeing when I’m in my broken thinking about it. It’s very liberating and joyful to see beyond that box I trap myself in when I’m believing my thoughts about leafblowers and society.

Here’s my favourite video about leafblowers (not that I watch any others!). It’s the place where I can leafblowers make me laugh my head off instead of scream.

End note: I invite you to make a list of the little things that bother you in your day. Notice whether they weigh you down. And if you want to see them another way, reach out to me. You can book a free discovery call where I can explain the approach I use with my clients, or dive right in with a 60 minute session where I guide you through what’s bothering you so you can come out the other side with a lighter step and a smile on your face.

The topic of our neurology and how it affects our lives has been coming up recently for me. Everywhere I look I’m hearing more about the left brain, or meeting people who speak of the dangers of the left brain outlook. I’ve read psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and listened to neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor talk about repairing our divided consciousness and how important it is to tap into the better outlook of our right hemisphere.

I’m no neuroscientist but I’ll try to sum up my understanding of the difference (no promises as to accuracy!).

The left brain is the narrator that makes sense of our existence. It defines us by separating us from the rest of the world, and it creates a past and a future to help us plan. The left brain wants to measure, to quantify, to rationalize so we can get things done. The left brain also uses judgement to discern, and only trusts what it believes it knows.

The right brain on the other hand lives in the eternity of the present moment. It is connected to everything and everyone in the universe, and is a source of immense joy and creativity. It is entirely spontaneous.

While our right brain sounds good on its own, if we didn’t have the left, we wouldn’t survive long in these human forms. Perhaps we might delight in a butterfly so much that we follow it right off a cliff (or our impaired motor skills might mean we couldn’t move at all). Certainly we would have no individual identity.

Clearly we need both our left and right hemispheres. And when we are nourished by the experience of the right brain - its connection with the universe, its childish fascination and delight, its gratitude for life - our left brains can write symphonies, plant gardens, tie our shoes and make dinner at the end of the day.

I feel the world many of us are closely connected to today is the left brain’s world. While not all cultures run this way (indigenous cultures or religious communities being exemptions), the society I’m familiar with - modern North American society - seems to run according to left brain principles. This society values what can be measured, and the measurement system our left brains have devised are economic ones that categorize things in a very specific way that neglects so much. This society notices, broadcasts and absorbs stories of past, future and elsewhere. Its news agencies and governments don’t live fluidly with the present moment, they are solidly fixated on analysis, punditry, judgement and condemnation, and prevented from easy motion by rigid structures and institutions.

For all of us who want to be part of a greater unity, who value what cannot be measured, and who are more interested in reality than narratives, it can be challenging to find our place in this left brain world. But it’s eminently possible.

It is only our left brains that find problems with the way the world is. As soon as we feel pain about the world around us, we are seeing the world through the judgement of our left brain. As soon as we define an enemy, we are living through the left brain’s belief in separation. And as soon as we believe a narrative of any sort we are being woven into the story-telling world of the left brain.

By noticing our own left brain tendencies, and deliberately keeping the channels open to our right brains, we allow our right brain consciousness to spread into the left brain world around us. Every time we choose to stay in the world of our own experience rather than getting sucked into a story narrative we can do nothing about, we keep connected to what’s real. Every time we feel the sunlight and wind, care for friends and family, savour fresh food, dance in the streets or sing in the shower, we experience our right brain’s world. It is only our left brain that devalues those things in favour of gnashing our teeth and agonizing over painful problems in our lives or in the world.

In consciously remaining open to the experience of both hemispheres, we allow ourselves to use the immense abilities of our incredible left brain to make real in our own lives the beautiful worlds our right brains know already exists.

So there’s no need to fight the outside, left brain or not. Once we rejoin the parts of ourselves we are disconnected from, the whole world changes. And we’ll only know what awaits us once we truly open our eyes - the left and the right one.

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Thanks for reading! For those of you wondering why my posts are not so frequent lately, here are a couple of updates:

Update #1: I’ve been jumping from section to section in the book I told you about previously (and shared the preview and the introduction of). Next up will be Part 1, section 1, about the role of language in shaping our view of reality. It’s taking awhile because I’m working on several sections at once. So I may write another essay or two before I’m ready to share the book again. Stay tuned!

Update #2: I’ve restarted my Emotional Coaching practice where I help clients move forward through painful areas of their lives using a technique called The Work by Byron Katie. To find out more about that you can subscribe to my client newsletter here.

Yesterday you read the preface to my burgeoning book. It was a personal note to give you a background of what led me to write about our reality. Today I share an overview of the ideas we’ll explore and trajectory of the journey we’re embarking on together.

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First, the good news. You're never going to die.

The bad news? There is no you. The idea of a distinct “you” is a mere concept, one of the millions of erroneous beliefs we mistake for truth. Just as we believed in the tooth fairy as a child, as adults we have a worldview that is far more fiction than fact. Our belief in an objective reality that obeys certain rules means that anything that deviates from what we want is seen as a threat, and any part of what we idealise that changes is seen as a terrible loss. This view causes us to feel painful anger, depression and fear over the prospect of death - whether of our careers, ourselves, our loved ones, or our planet. 

Many, if not most of us, view the world through some version of the Essentialist lens first described by Plato and Aristotle. Essentialism, according to the Oxford dictionary, is “a belief that things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are, and that the task of science and philosophy is their discovery and expression; the doctrine that essence is prior to existence.” Our Essentialist outlook has us literally make ourselves believe that we can or do know who we are, who others are, what things mean, and what is important. The evidence I aim to set out attempts to challenge that worldview so we see things in a brand new light.

Underpinning my writing is a different philosophy, one that says that what we describe is not what is. It suggests our daily experience consist of a series of inexplicable phenomena that we need only observe and respond to in an ongoing flow, rather than try to pin down as certain or worse, fight against as wrong. Yet such a philosophy sounds woo-woo or New Agey to my left brain and for a long time I fought against it.

In the past I often found that when I sought solace from the painful outside world through spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation, the world of rationality continually countered my search for love, peace and joy. I questioned whether it was appropriate to live in something as seemingly small as the present moment when there were so many problems swirling around that clamoured for my attention. How could we all live in peaceful acceptance if forest fires are raging, oceans are being polluted or war is breaking out around us both abroad and in our own relationships? Mindfulness is all well and good, but my mind continued to pipe up loudly that I shouldn’t ignore reality in my search for spiritual bliss.  My ego simply refused to accept the serene principles that spiritual practices offer. So I went hand in hand with the skeptical parts of my ego to see if I could find any concrete evidence that would support a more peaceful view of life, and I ended up finding that the reality I thought I knew didn’t seem to exist.

I perused everything from research gathered through scientific methods to religious texts whose lessons derive from more intuitive places. I looked in academic journals, mainstream news and books by experts in fields of everything from journalism to neurobiology, and I’ll be presenting what I found I into three main parts.

In part one of this series, we’ll be looking at where the stories that led to our understanding of reality come from. The fallibility we find when we look closely serves to erode the strength of the foundational beliefs in the concepts that I lay out in the second section.

In part two, I choose a few of the countless beliefs we carry around with us, the ones I consider the most important and perhaps the most painful. Yet the evidence for our beliefs in separation, in right and wrong, in our ability to control, and even in life and death suggests anything but truth. The way we have tried to pin reality down into a discrete series of inviolable facts has simply been a way to support our unfounded beliefs, no more or less true than a fairy tale like Jack and the Beanstalk. 

In other words, I use facts to suggest that there are no facts. Such a paradoxical undertaking might be able to chip away the certainty of our left brain, where our self-professed rational ego resides. Once we’ve loosened the rigid holds our concepts of reality have on us, we can be open to finding ways to navigate the uncertain world that results when we let go of them.

Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti suggested that “if there is no certainty, there is freedom to look”. Part three of this series will offer ways to explore life with that newfound freedom to look.  It includes practices that allow us to look at the wonders of each moment and glide more easily through our daily lives, noticing the flow of energy we experience rather than getting stuck on everything we may currently see as an insurmountable obstacle.  

What we think of as reality is just an experience from our perspective. There may be no such thing as objective reality, or if there is, it is likely far beyond our ability to understand. When we see that reality is not what we thought it is (and perhaps not anything at all), we will be able to fully experience the present moment. Living fully in the present moment means there is nothing left of us in the next moment, which we are then able to be fully present in as well. While we can certainly feel pain, the suffering of fighting it can’t exist when we live fully in the present moment - we simply experience whatever shows up in that moment, and then move onto the next in one fluid motion. Living in the present moment answers all our questions. Or, more specifically, it does away with the need for them. It gives us a way of living with the reality we experience, without the belief that what we experience is reality. It is not that there is something wrong with believing what you experience is reality. If your experience is positive, there’s no need to change it, after all, who wants to wake up from a blissful dream? But if the experience involves suffering, as it does for many, or if the reality seems not a beautiful dream but a scary nightmare, it’s worth waking up.  

When we realize that all that we thought certain is not, we may be freed from our false identities, and clear the clouded lens through which we see the world. Instead of seeing change as a loss to be mourned, railed against or simply denied, we may see possibility. Instead of fearing death of ourselves, our children, our fellow sapiens and all the living and non living beings we are so fortunate to share this world with, we may feel gratitude for our life in the now. And instead of blaming each other, we may rejoice in a continual celebration of what is all around and within us.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, during an interview with cultural commentator Russell Brand, said that challenging our worldview requires  “somebody who is super curious, and somebody who is willing to not accept their own experience, no matter how compelling it is, as evidence that this is how things are”. Are you that person? Or would you like to be? If so, this book aims to help you dismantle the beliefs that may be getting in the way of experiencing life to the fullest.

There is one caveat to keep in mind when reading. In presenting these ideas I have struggled with the language to express life and death, separation and unity, good and evil, and the impossibility of finding absolute truth. Even as I attempt to challenge concepts as untrue, I must use words whose understanding we (hopefully) share. Though there is no such objective thing as “life”, I use that word to refer to what we consider as life. The same goes for words like death, reality, the world, matter and energy. Thus I am somewhat stymied in my attempt to challenge reality by the very language with which I’m describing it. I hope that you will see my rejection of these terms even while I use them as fallibility in my use of language rather than a contradiction in my meaning.  Writer Theodore Dreiser said ”Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean”, so I am trusting you, the reader, to intimate your own volumes of meaning from the shadows that are my words.

I hope what’s in these pages will help us all experience fascination and gratitude for the world we are in. To notice the miracle of existence, embrace whatever surrounds us, and respond with grace and wisdom to all that arises. I hope this book can help anyone who believes they want to make things better in the world, but is paralyzed with doubt, sadness or anger about the way things seem to be. I hope it can help people who feel their lives aren’t what they should be to see that their life, and they themselves, are perfect. When we realize the only thing that matters is the present moment we are experiencing, we can always find what we need, whether it’s the energy and inspiration to create, the freedom to yell or cry, the generosity to help others or the peace to rest. 

When we give up our belief that we know what we see, that we have the ability to control anything, that there is blame to be cast, and death to be feared, we can devote all our energies to creation. We can actively and joyfully share our own dream of paradise with the world, witness all that we can't control with curiosity, and dive into each moment with a childlike enthusiasm, knowing that, as Max Ehrmann said in his 1927 poem “Desiderata”, the universe is unfolding exactly as it should.

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Since I first started sharing my essays I’ve written about everything from lockdowns to left-right politics, from snowboarding to science, from toilets to transit. I’ve shared my mayoral campaign policies and my personal struggles. And through it all I’ve been challenged again and aga…

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Those who followed my 2022 Toronto mayoral campaign may have heard me speak about the mess of bylaws we have (200,000+) and how costly, ineffective and inefficient I believe they are. Part of my vision for the city was freedom from the myriad ways our government tries to micromanage and control every aspect of our lives. While adhering to strict controls may be appropriate for a rail system, in the real world my feeling is that byzantine rules, enforced from above, inhibit creativity, innovation, conflict resolution and progress towards more beautiful and healthy relationships with ourselves and the natural world we live in.

Earlier this summer one anonymous neighbour called the city to complain about my dog barking (a toy Pomeranian who admittedly has a high pitched bark when it erupts, but is mostly quiet and either indoors with us or out for an outdoor adventure in the park, on the bike or in our canoe).

The encounter with city bureaucracy revived my frustration and sense of powerlessness about an all controlling state. The subsequent vortex of despair I was thrown into over the call from animal control (yes I know it was an over-reaction) led me to do some cognitive investigations into why I was so upset with my facilitator Susan using a technique called The Work.

Not only did our inquiries help me come back to the real world and out of my catastrophic mindset, it also led me to realize I have an internal Big Brother (or Sister) that rivals the external one in its desire to control.

The rules and regulations I have for myself are more intrusive and damaging, more capricious and ineffective, than those of the government. When I disobey the rules, the punishment for the infractions is insidious because of its invisibility. No fines are issued or jail time incurred, but when the bylaw officer within me rears her head I feel a kind of inescapable internal pain.

The good news is, now that I’m aware of her, I’m not powerless against the internal bylaw officer or the rules she creates. And together we can work together to dismantle my inner bureaucracy, one rule at a time.

Invisible rules for myself that I’ve just become aware of (and am now on a mission to find more of) include Climenhaga bylaw #25137 “No Watching TV”, bylaw #9084 “Don’t Scroll on Twitter” and bylaw #006 “Don’t stay up past 10 pm”. Sometimes exemptions are granted but such exemptions, like real world exemptions, involve torturous bureaucracy with complex negotiations and unreliable outcomes. The specificity of the bylaws can change regularly and without notice, and they’ve been invisible due to the cloak of belief in my values that is not the values themselves. That is, while values like staying off screens and getting a good night’s sleep may be healthy in theory, when the values get transformed into codified laws of behaviour my reasons for having the values (basically, to enjoy life and connect positively with the world around me) disappear, and only the strict rules remain.

The bylaw officer within me turns me into someone who is both paranoid of and sneaky with myself. If I violate the Twitter bylaw I scroll furtively, like I have to hide it from everyone, feeling deep shame and that I’m an awful person. If I watch something silly on Netflix while I’m doing the dishes I have to run a constant internal narrative of “I’m doing the dishes, it’s productive, I’m helping the household” to try to argue with the bylaw officer that says I’m wasting my time and rotting my brain. She even follows me on vacation at my parents’ cottage, when I stay up past bedtime doing puzzles. As I pore over the pieces I unconsciously hold my back rigid in trying to avoid the officer who tells me it’s too late. I’m scared to look at the clock as it ticks toward 1 am and when I do go to bed I feel like I’ve let the world down with my irresponsibility.

Rest assured, it’s not that I feel the bylaw officer every day or every moment. I’m often not aware of the internal authority that a lifetime of conditioning has on me - whether it’s Thomas the Tank or school teachers or my own decision to take a hard line with regard to something like diet or the environment. But when that bylaw officer does show up, she makes my life miserable, without actually creating the so-called “better behaviour” that she is meant to encourage.

Thanks to inquiry, I’ve realized that without the bylaw enforement officer breathing down my neck I can be alive to the current moment. I can notice if I’m tired enough and want to go to bed, or instead want to take immense pleasure in the satisfaction of the puzzle I’m doing. I can see if Twitter is actually giving me any useful information or gratification, and log off of my own volition if not. And I can appreciate if a movie is giving me a wonderful escape and fun entertainment or if I’d rather do something else instead.

If you think my by-law officer sounds unreasonable, I agree. For some reason, a long time ago I granted her the power and the authority to harass me, in the mistaken belief it would make me a better person. Now I’m finally realizing that my bylaws don’t make me a better person. We really are each divine beings. Free of our delusions, we want to take care of ourselves and love other people. We don’t need rules and regulations to keep us on the straight and narrow. We can trust in ourselves, treat the internal voice as friend to be curious about instead of dictator to obey or hide from, and live fully in each and every moment. Thomas can keep his rules and regulations, but we can be guided by love instead.

It’s the middle of July and I’m about to go on a canoeing trip in Algonquin Park. So far this summer I’ve spent many days at our family cottage, spent time with friends and family, played tennis and rediscovered my love of puzzles. But in the midst of my own personal paradise of sun, swimming, and freedom, I am not alone. I am frequently visited by my longtime nemesis misery, who shows up in all seasons but whose appearance in the wonderful days of summer, my favourite time of year, is all the more galling because it seems so unjustified.

We each have our own experience with a lack of peace, whether it’s fleeting and situational or chronic for no apparent reason. For the first couple of decades of my life I thought any unhappiness I felt was mostly externally generated. I believed I just needed to learn to do the right thing so the world would behave the way I wanted it for my upsets to be gone. But as I grew out of my twenties I came to realize that my emotions weren’t actually anyone else’s fault. That the internal landscape where joy and despair lived was only affected by the outside world due to my conditioned reactions to it.

What didn’t change was my childhood belief, reinforced by the world I grew up in, that I needed to make bad feelings go away. And I’m grateful for that belief since my quest for happiness and peace has taught me incredible things that certainly have made my life journey both more full and more joyous. I’ve learned the benefits of releasing others from the obligation of making me happy, to stop blaming the world for what I feel is wrong and instead tackle my inner demons through everything from spiritual pursuits to music to running as long a distance as my legs will let me. I’ve read wonderful books, listened to inspiring and comforting speakers, and had transformative sessions with my own personal counsellors. I’ve dipped my toes into the teachings of a variety of religions and have revisited my Christian roots, finding wise words about life and love in the pulpit and sacred writings.

Yet there is something in my quest that I’ve turned into pressure. In pursuing the idea that there is infinite peace and joy, that it’s here within our grasp, and that we need only to open our eyes, breathe or have faith, and we will be able to access it, I’ve set a bar so high that I feel as if anything but joy is a failure. And that a moment lived without peace is both a personal shortcoming on my part and a gravely missed opportunity to live as I am meant to.

But the reality is that so far, in my experience of life, it’s been easy for me to feel unhappiness. It can start in the morning, when I open my eyes and don’t feel quite right. Thoughts rush in to explain my dis-ease - that I haven’t found the right purpose, that I should have a different job, that I should be doing something to help the world, that I don’t have the right attitude to life. I’ll cast about for something to lift me up, and sometimes my efforts will work - the fresh air of a walk will invigorate me, the satisfaction of cleaning up a mess in the kitchen makes me feel useful, a journal entry helps dispel my fears or cares, or an examination of painful belief shows me a lighter way. But sometimes my efforts don’t work. The day can go by and things will just get heavier and heavier until it seems like my failure as a person is complete.

So there’s a limit to the success of my make “bad” feelings go away approach whether its through eating or enlightenment. Plus that strategy has the huge downside of making it incredibly difficult to cope with bad feelings when they won’t go away.

I think I am finally realizing that my painful emotions of sadness, anger, disappointment show up, and leave, on their own schedule. My job when I feel them is simply to keep going with my day, however I can. If I can power through them with work or play, great. If I can use one of my spiritual tools to learn from them, great. But if I have to surrender to just plain misery, what if I simply welcomed it as a friend? When my children were babies and cried inconsolably, I just held them until it passed (at least that’s what I did in my good parenting moments). Perhaps that’s all we need to do for ourselves. Just be there with the misery, and when the inevitable self judgement of misery comes, recognize it as part of the misery package.

I’m fortunate that my anguish does pass on its own - today is one example where two hours ago I felt unable to move, and now I’m filled with energy again - to connect with all of you, to pack for my camping trip, to have dinner with my family. I don’t know why misery shows up in my life the way it does, but after 51 years of trying unsuccessfully to fight it, I think it’s time to give up the battle and live in peace.

I hope you are having an amazing summer full of joy. But if you find yourself overtaken by painful feelings at any point, please know that this essay is not to tell you to look for the bright side. It’s to tell you that I’m with you in the darkness too, and you’re just as lovable there as when the sun comes out to shine.

My inner dialogue has me listing the pros and cons of voting today.

Con: I don’t believe I’m going to win. So, if my vote is not going to count, why take the time out of my schedule to cast it?

Pro: I don’t know - I cannot predict the future. Though everything I’ve learned so far leads me to believe I won’t win, there’s still a tiny possibility that I will - who knows how the civic mind works - maybe Climenhaga is close enough on the ballot to Chow that people will mark the Climenhaga box. Maybe everyone except my supporters will forget to vote. Maybe there’s some other unlikely scenario I haven’t considered. If it doesn’t cost me anything to vote (which it doesn’t - my voting station is around the corner), I might as well do it, just in case. Also, if anyone in power is looking at the voting breakdown, they will see that at least one person in Toronto wants fare free transit and the conversion of asphalt to orchards, so perhaps they will take that into consideration when they make policy going forward.

Con: I don’t believe this process has been fair and I don’t want my vote to legitimize it. I feel our elections reinforce everything that I see wrong with the way we live. To win the election requires media coverage so that voters know who candidates are. To get regular media coverage, of the sort that the top candidates have received, requires that the media be interested. The media is primarily interested in people who have followed the unwritten rules of our current economic and political system. This means that only people who have succeeded in systems that destroy our environment, manipulate others or create conflict can win. How then can we have change through those systems if our elections only reward those who thrive in them?

Pro: If I had never followed any media coverage, never read what other people thought and ignored my own biases, I could go into that voting booth with a light heart and see it for what it is - an opportunity for me to say who I want in power. Whether it’s flawed or corrupt or unfair is not actually up to me. All I need to do is to vote or not vote, and voting is easy if I’m not burdened by my assumptions.

Con: I don’t believe we should have the type of government structure we’re voting for the leader of. Having top down government over three million people seems to be the wrong way to go, and I increasingly believe that hierarchical authority of the sort we have is inherently tyrannical (I find resonance in the writings of Darren Allen if you’d like to read more on this topic). I believe the needs that we try in vain to get government to meet should be met instead by ourselves as individuals within closely connected communities. So why would I vote for a mayor when I don’t think we should have one?

Pro: It’s not up to me to decide what structure is best for 3 million people. What gets done with the voting results, and who creates, reinforces or dismantles the structure is not within my hands. My only role here is to decide what’s best for myself. So again, I can vote for myself and my vision. I know my vision is the one I want. And I know that voting gives me a place to say that.

Ultimately, my ruminations stem from the fact that I tend to overthink. I spend a lot of time dwelling on my problems as if I’ll find the answers to life in my mind, which I seldom, if ever do. If I keep ruminating on whether or not to vote I’ll never even get out the door (which in itself would be a decision). But if I take a step back the solution is right in front of me. Today, the right answer for me is to go vote. And, to remember, as Bill Murray said to his team in Meatballs, either way, “it just doesn’t matter”.

Now for my predictions for tonight’s election results.

I started to make a detailed list and then realized I couldn’t - the list is simply too long. So I’m providing more general predictions:

I guess Olivia Chow will win with around 150,000 votes. I’d guess another 200,000-300,000 will be split by the candidates covered by the media (Bailao, Bradford, Furey, Hunter, Matlow, Saunders). After them (or even potentially above a couple of them) will come Chloe Brown who is a good news story in both this election and the last since she was able to gather a lot of supporters just through her policy ideas. Then Ben Bankas and Chris Saccoccia, who will each get a substantial number of votes from devoted audiences who aren’t swayed by their lack of coverage in mainstream news. There’s wild card Xiao Hua Gong, who has advertised substantially but declined media interviews. I have no idea how many votes such advertising will yield but I don’t think it’ll be less than 10,000 or more than 20,000. For the candidates who have held office before but haven’t received major coverage I’m guessing they will get between 5000 and 10000 votes each. All other candidates - all those who haven’t held office or been recognized by the media - I would expect to each receive between 1,000 and 4,000 - basically the largest number of people who can be physically reached and convinced without the aid of money, advertising, or viral social media posts. As for myself? I’m guessing around 1000 votes. I got close to 7000 last time but my media coverage and campaign activity were both far higher last time. And, I think a lot of my past supporters were politically engaged and more likely to have chosen me from the existing pool of candidates rather than being solely devoted to me. With a bigger and more well known pool of candidates I think those voters will choose someone else. This isn’t self criticism (I don’t think), it just feels like a realistic assessment of who votes for me.

The only reason I’m interested in making these guesses is that they show me what my own experience of the world leads me to believe. I make these guesses based on who I talk to, what I read, my past experience in political campaigns. When I see how they deviate from the actual results I’ll be able to see the errors I’ve made from my assumptions. And seeing mistakes in my thinking always helps remind me to check my certainty when the next round of assumptions comes along.

This concludes the Mayoral Edition of Sarah’s Thoughts Substack. Thank you for joining me throughout the campaign, and I hope you have a great election day whether you vote or not!

Political campaigns often come with big promises, and candidates get asked how they’ll make the budget work to deliver on them. Discussions about the validity of promises and their proposed financing are useful to a degree, but miss an extremely important point, namely, that the money does not belong to the politician, not does it belong to anyone in government. So why do we accept people throwing ideas around that involve spending the money we give them with no strings attached?

Money of course is an entirely fictional creation, whose value has been and continues to be manipulated by big players, even more so with the concentration of wealth we have today. Setting that aside, our current economic system recognizes money as something we earn, and something we spend for a service, a good, or a gift. And, in all cases but the paying of taxes, that system fully entitles us to consider what we earn as our money, and to use it for purchases only when we know exactly what we are paying for.

This isn’t the case with taxes. It’s true that we do receive value for our taxes - the money we hand over to the government each year ends up giving us many things. I enjoy a lot of benefits - I have a sidewalk and road outside my house that I didn’t have to build and I don’t have to personally maintain. I don’t get an electrical bill for the streetlights at night, and I can call the police in an emergency without having to give them a security fee. But whether we pay taxes is not optional. And we only receive the aforementioned benefits because the government agrees to pay for them. They can be cut or increased any time - a library branch cut here, a giant expressway renovation spend there. We can write letters or go to meetings to try and influence government decisions, but we ultimately we have no say in their final choice. And unlike in the rest of our economy, where we have the legal right to expect what we’ve paid for to be given to us, when it comes to taxes there is no accountability for the money we hand over except for the one day we vote every four years.

If I ever trusted our government to make the best choices with the money I handed over to them, I no longer do. I don’t believe we should be spending billions on road construction and maintenance, on tasers, cars, and guns for police, on boondoggle megaprojects or even on many of the well intentioned social services (like shelters) that some say do more harm than good. I feel a large amount of the money our government spends goes towards bureaucracy, waste, unfair contracts, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile I see important civic needs like affordable, frequent transit, safely designed streets, community pools, arenas, libraries and low cost high yield ecological improvements ignored in the budget process.

So how do we change this situation? Conventional right wing politicians promise to find efficiencies and cut costs, while their left wing counterparts suggest increasing taxes to pay for public needs. The former never seems to work since managing a 16 billion dollar budget from above is impossible for any mayor, or city council, to do, and inefficiencies, bias and even corruption automatically come with big projects and big institutions. And the latter strategy of raising taxes can can act as a perverse incentive on labour and property. Plus, while tax increases are meant to help those of lower incomes, complicated tax regimes inevitably seem to favour those on the highest end of the income scale.

Instead, I would like to see our budget process changed in two ways: increase service specific user fees, and allow people to have a say for every dollar they contribute.

Let’s look at user fees first. Instead of paying for city services like water, energy and waste through taxes, I suggest we price them at their true environmental cost (ie, the cost that ensures no destructive environmental impact and even repairs past damage) and we pay as we use them. We already do this to a certain degree, but I suspect we still greatly subsidize waste, water and energy consumption through our taxes, and I know that the user fees we do charge are far too low, given the overconsumption and waste in most households, especially higher income ones. Fees linked to usage would offer residents complete control over how much they pay, unlike taxes, which are solely determined by the government.

Secondly, let’s give people the final say in what they pay for. In the first part of this essay I listed the things I don’t want to pay for, and the things I do. Right now, if I were elected mayor, and if I could find a majority of councillors who agreed with me, we could allocate the budget according to my priorities. But, while I think my priorities are good ones, I don’t actually think letting me have the entire say for 3 million people is the way forward. I think we all should have the opportunity to choose. The specifics of how to accomplish that would need to be developed by us together as a city. We could do it by city-wide referenda. We could do it by community voting blocks, or look to places like Porto Alegre in Brazil, where the concept of participatory budgeting arose - which I also wrote about in my last campaign.

Or we could break it down even smaller (more in line with my Anarcho Queen vision) and raise and spend money collectively only through neighbourhood consensus. To enable good budget decision making by residents would require complete accounting transparency and massive decentralization of decision making. But allowing people the choice of what to pay for and how much - while giving them the knowledge of what it costs to provide services we take for granted - could open up a new world of civic innovation.

It’s no easy feat to run a city the size of ours. And by tinkering with the way we do things at the top I question whether we’ll be able to accomplish the changes I’d like to see. But if we trust residents and a friendly universe, which I do, opening up decisions on our city budget creates the potential for the kind of beautiful transformation we can all be a part of.