It’s probably no surprise to my friends, but last year I was diagnosed with adult ADHD and I have been living and working with that SUPER helpful diagnosis ever since. A couple of weeks ago, CBC Ideas ran a two part series on ADHD and the Myth of Normal. Well worth a listen, especially for the part where neurodivergence is discussed as an evolutionary advantage. I especially appreciate that Edward Hallowell features in this series, as his book (with John Ratey) ADHD 2.0 has been massively helpful to me. I keep it close by as a user manual for my brain.
Speaking of books, I’m currently reading The Beekeeper’s Question by my friend and mentor Christina Baldwin. It is a beautifully written novel, and contains typically Christina turns of phrase and observations. The beekeeper’s actual question is so very Christina that if you know her it will break your face into a wide grin of recognition. The book attacks deeply important questions about our current society with a story set in the 1940s, long enough ago that the patterns are repeating again, and the lines connect then to now.
Chris Bolton’s lovely meditation on desire paths introduces a new term to me: Sneckdown. “Sneckdown” is a relatively new word used to describe the patterns of affordances that cars leave when driving in snow. This has to be one of the most Canadian words you can imagine but all those who live through urban northern winters know what this means.
We do indeed desire better futures, better societies, better ways to work together, right? I keep holding out hope, but this important piece tells us what the constraints are if we want to rebuild and reimagine democracy, let alone build a world where care and support are there to build wellness and prosperity. Is it over? It’s kind of over. What could be next?
To wrap up this week, my first as a 57 year old, I feel seen.
Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.
I read a couple of Peter Levine’s posts that resonated strongly this morning about undoing reckless damage to important government and democratic institutions and redefining the call to service for public servants. I don’t know very many other people that publish so widely and so freely on the topics of civic life and democracy, but Peter is one of the ones with whom I find myself nodding in agreement over almost everything. I think I retain an enduring love/hate relationship with government, but my years as a public servant were rewarding and I would recommend it to anyone, even with all of the attendant frustrations. Institutions are essential to democracy.
If you are in the public service and need some inspiration, Thea Snow has shared some resources she likes from a systems thinking lens; (h/t Benjamin) and if you are more inclined to work within the public service as a complex system, Chris Mowles reports on a talk by Carolyn Pedwell that does just that.
Service, of course, knows no bounds, and today Peter Rukavina paid tribute to his friend Stephen Southall’s mom Carol and family and Stephen’s incredible service to his mom through her long illness and death. I knew Stephen 35 years ago in Peterborough where we would often jam blues songs, him on his harmonica and me on the guitar and us making up nonsense lyrics. Facebook kept us in proximity in recent years. The whole post from Peter is a beautiful read and ends with this quote: “I hope death is like being carried to a bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on a couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” I think that was a quote was from Carol. Worth remembering.
Tenneson Woolf reminds us that we can always start again: “We learn, we humans. I’m so impressed by the courage that people have. To stay the course. To let go the course that doesn’t serve. To nuance the daily. To trust the simple. To open to love. To be unflinching.”
It reminds me of something I once heard Thanissaro Bhikku say. Something to the effect that when you are first learning to meditate, you catch yourself again and again drifting away from the breath. You can catch yourself 50 times in a 20 minute setting, but each time is a practice of waking up. Practicing waking up 50 times is excellent. Start again.
Starting again is a key skill. If you don’t get it right the first time, you start over, with collaborations, with ideas, with commitments. It’s a complex world. We don’t live in it perfectly. It requires humility. It requires grace. It needs a breath, a second chance, a sacrifice of some resources. It helps to be able to frame it as a learning, but not to hold on to it as a lesson. You see that difference?
“Human perception excels at detecting subtle pattern breaks” writes Cameron Norman over at Censemaking. Spotting the exception to the pattern can reveal the pattern. It can also reveal the hint of an affordances that can take you elsewhere. That boring staff meeting that happens every week? Think about the delightful surprise that comes when something interesting actually happens. And then the insight “oh wow…I dion;t realize how humourless this whole enterprise had become…” A key question for querying the patterns we are trying to understand is “what the hell was that?” Dissonance and novelty shocks us into seeing the mundane and normal.
Starting over is essential to reconciliation. Not slightly-embarrassing-land-acknowledgement “reconciliation” but the real deal, where lands and material resources are returned to Indigenous Nations so that we can all start again. Like the Yurok have a chance to do in California. Remove dams, invite the salmon back home, restore health and stewardship and start the relationship over. These are not about us and them. They are about the potential of we together, starting with the first people and the first principles and the land’s own direction about how to build and maintain health and stability and relationship.
Let’s go. The land welcomes you to try.
And in the doing over, you discover. I’ve been at it for a couple of days, but these little notes posts, based on my daily reading, seem to gather around themes. Perhaps I’ll post a summary of the themes each week or so.
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A convincing 6-0 win last night for the Canadian Men’s National Soccer Team over Honduras in the first match of the 2025 Gold Cup. This biennial tournament is our de facto continental championship, held between 16 teams in the CONCACAF Region, plus a guest, in this case the soccer-washing national eam from Saudia Arabia. The tournament is held mostly in the US, although last night’s match was played in Vancouver. Canada last won this trophy in 2000. This year’s edition also serves as the qualification tournament for the 2026 World Cup, which we are also hosting along with the USA and Mexico.
Last night’s match was sweet for a number of reasons. Those of us that have watched our national team for a while will remember an 8-1 humiliation at the hands of Honduras in 2012 which ended our qualification run for the 2014 World Cup. It was perhaps the low point in the men’s team fortunes and since then we have risen through the ranks of world football, eventually qualifying for the 2022 World Cup. Every time we play Honduras, I pray for a smackdown and last night was the biggest loss we ever handed them. Our team looked fantastic. With several key starters injured, we nevertheless showed up strong, commanded possession,polayed unafraid of Honduras’ physical play in the middle and used our speed and creativity on the wings to shred the Honduras defence. It was a thing of beauty to watch.
It was also a beautiful chance to see two British Columbia based players come into their own. Joel Waterman, of Langley BC, played at centre back and almost scored in the opening moments of the game. Joel played for our TSS Rovers back in 2017. He later moved to Calgary Foothills and eventually into the Cavalry side of the new Canadian Premier League. In 2020 he became the first CPL player sold to Major League Soccer when he signed with CF Montreal. He has remained there ever since, helping the team through some ups and many downs, and often appearing as their captain.
While Joel is always a player I watch, having stopped off at our club for a season, another BC player made his mark last night. Niko Sigur, from Burnaby BC, and a player who plays for Hejduk Split in Croatia, scored his first goal as a national team member. It was the first goal from a BC raised player for Canada in ages. Marcus Haber scored one in a friendly against Mauritania in 2016, but none of us could remember the last BC player to score a goal in a meaningful competition. This lack of BC players on our national team has been an abiding concern for us at TSS Rovers and was one of the motivations for starting the team in 2017.
In other sports news the Stanley Cup was decided last night. I have followed the Toronto Maple Leafs since I was a boy, born the year after the last won a Stanley Cup in 1967. My kids, born on the west coast, don’t share my love of the Leafs, and they have developed attachments to Vancouver and, in my daughter’s case, Edmonton. Last year, the Oilers took the Florida Panthers to the seventh game of the finals and lost. This year they only lasted six games. Florida – the team that has also knocked Toronto out of the playoffs in recent years – is a very, very good hockey team. In our heightened state of cross-border anxiety, this series between a Canadian team and an American one had added significance. I feel for my friends who are Oilers fans. Losing the final to the same team two years in a row stings. It is said that the Stanley Cup is one of the hardest trophies to win in sports. You need to survive an 82 game regular season lasting 6 months and play four best-of-seven rounds of playoffs for another two months. That can include 4800 kilometer trips diagonally across North America as it did in this series, which plays havoc with bodies beaten and bruised from 60 minutes or more of playoff hockey. Florida played 105 games between October and now.
Now one of the greatest traditions in sports begins. Every player on the Florida roster will get to spend one day with the trophy, and the stories of what happens on that day are NHL legends, as the Cup makes it’s way around the world to celebrations, commemorations and all manner of hi-jinx.
Even if you are only peripherally interested in hockey, as a Canadian it gets into your blood, it becomes a cultural reference and a shibboleth around which we rally, becomes the central part of quintessentially Canadian TV shows and is taken up in spades by immigrants to Canada, even as they also bring their love of soccer to this place.