It is snowing lightly outside, and it is a very quiet morning. The snow is unbroken by prints from boots, shoes or tire treads, and its colour is a most un-Toronto white. To me it seems symbolic of the new year: promise, potential and fragility. One set of tire tracks will break the spell. The sense of fragility comes from knowing that so far this year at least, Toronto has not had any murders, no Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan, and we have not yet had the first occurrence of what seem to be sadly inevitable events; this is the soap bubble part of the year; filled with beauty, yet heart-breakingly ephemeral. However, the fact that the bubble exists at all shows that this special time is not impossible; the challenge is to make it last as long as possible.

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So much of the news has been about barriers recently: stories commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, continued commentary on the Security Wall in Israel and the occupied territories, the security barriers on the U.S./Mexico, and just in the last couple of days we’ve had had not a physical barrier but a security-driven barrier at airports for flights flying into the U.S. With flights delayed/cancelled, and flight schedules thrown into a shambles, it might as well have been a wall there too.

Let’s not forget other barriers as well; the “Great Firewall of China” put in place to control the Internet access of the citizens of China. Gated communities. Even Copyright Law, the attack on Fair Use,  Digital Rights Management and copy protection technology are barriers, as they are means to attempt to control access to content.

All of these barriers (and many more) have something in common; they are an attempt to solve a particular issue, not by addressing its root causes, but by essentially just trying to keep it at arms length through measures whose effectiveness is illusory at best. The recent air security incidents in Detroit show us just how effective banning liquids has been; DRM is just an invitation to crack, and there are ways to get around the Great Firewall of China.

A barrier, in the context of the examples I mention above, is a tacit admission of defeat. The barrier builder is saying “I am unable/unwilling to tackle the issue, so I wil build the barrier instead to keep the problem away from me” and sadly for each barrier that is built, there are those with a vested interest in keeping the barrier firmly in place, and indeed often suggesting that new barriers be built.

Barriers fail over time. The Maginot line, Hadrian’s Line, etc. all eventually failed, either suddenly or over time, as history made them obsolete. I believe the same will happen with the barriers I have mentioned, and we be forced to confront the underlying issues.

And it can’t happen a moment too soon,

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Around the corner from our home is a house where the owners have decorated an external tree with real Christmas ornaments and real candy canes. The first time I saw them a few days ago I have to admit one of the first thoughts I had was “aren’t they worried about theft/vandalism?” But the last time I checked, everything was still in place.

It is nice to see that kind of trust and optimism rewarded.

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I am writing this as someone experiencing my first agnostic Christmas season in many years, but one phrase is resonating for me right now, and that is “Peace on Earth” Now I am not speaking specifically about world peace; many before have done that much better than I can. The kind of peace I am talking about would be better described if I used the phrase “Calm on Earth.”

I’m sitting in a coffee shop sipping on a cup of tea as I write this. My younger daughter is off at a Christmas concert rehearsal for a concert tonight, my wife is busy singing at another gig this morning, and later this afternoon my older daughter has a Christmas play rehearsal. Yes if you’re a singer, Christmas is a busy time.

For so many the holidays seem so busy; we feel a grim desperation to get the gifts bought, the meals cooked, the cards sent, the visits made, the smiles pasted into place for Christmas parties. We use all the technology at our disposal to increase the velocity of the season, and buy more technology so we can do it at even higher speed next year.

I think we’re missing the point.

We spend the rest of the year living at a dizzying pace, and then celebrate by speeding up even more. Why can’t we mark the occasion by allowing ourselves to slow down? Even as an agnostic,  when it comes to peace I find much of the traditional Christmas imagery powerful and evocative; we are given the image of that silent night, with a miracle occurring when most people were asleep. The stillness of the night, and the calmness of sleep  added to the magic.

For many people, just the thought of one peaceful day during the holiday is a yearned for, unattainable gift. Business at the speed of thought, being online 7 x 24, or using feeling the pressure to use the holidays to get a jump on the competition has crowded out the calm.

But imagine the holiday season if we did allow ourselves more calm time? If the social media junkies could rediscover the quiet joy of companionable silence? If the sales folk could stop selling, if the marketing folks could stop marketing, if the workaholics could stop working, just for a little while, and reconnect with aspects of their lives they may have forgotten. Do we have to make that one more shopping trip, get to that one more party, make that one last sales or marketing presentation, or live blog the unwrapping of Christmas gifts?

And here is where I feel the magic could happen; if we allow ourselves the gift of calmness, we might find the compulsion to consume, control and compete ease off ever so slightly, and aren’t these compulsions behind most of the issues we face? It might be a bit of a stretch, and maybe I’m being naive, but the acceptance of calm could lead to Peace on Earth.

It’s ironic that a gift that can be free could be more valuable than the most expensive item under any tree.

There is calm available, if you know how to let it find you. Regardless of our personal faith, philosophy, etc. this season can remind us of that.

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In a recent blog post, Chris Brogan takes issue with the concept of “Content is King.” He suggests we should “work hard on content, but focus on relationships“, and while the ultimate goal of enhancing connects between people is a noble one, I see this interpretation as a broad brush approach that does a lot of content a disservice.

Throughout recorded history, many creations by artists, writers, musicians and philosophers and others were definitely not seen as relationship building when first released to the world. Though now recognized as masterpieces, and works that resonate through our cultures today, when first created, these works were seen as shocking, threatening and antagonistic by many in society. Think of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 Theses to the door of a church. The first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, leading to fistfights and rioting in the audience. The philosophy of Socrates, who lived what he believed, and ultimately paid with his life.

These (and many others) are examples not of creativity driving polite conversations and relationships, but of people using their creations to shout in anger, to point out, mock, and confront conventional thinking. The typical response was being ignored, marginalized or attacked, not the building of a large loyal audience at the time. By contrast, many of the contemporaries of these revolutionary thinkers made comfortable careers out playing the game, working their networks, creating safe, comfortable, non-challenging and ultimately forgettable content, or perhaps more accurately, product. As a result, they are mere historical footnotes, stub articles in Wikipedia. They made themselves irrelevant by regurgitating truisms and trite conventionalities.

I fear in many cases that much of the Social Media space is sliding into this sterile frame of mind. If content is always written from a relationship point of view, the logical consequence is to fall into the trap of creating what we think people want to hear, even unconsciously. We spend too much time congratulating each other for agreeing with each other. As much as we think we are being new and different, we risk becoming merely a cadre of conventionality.

One of the comments on Chris’ post I found especially disturbing:

“you can have great content but if people don’t connect with you and build that relationship then your content means nothing.”

If we use this simplistic metric, so much of the great creations of our civilization would need to be written off. For the truly inspired thinkers, their creations would not change regardless of whether they thought it would bring friends, fame and fortune, or would cost them every friend and possession they had. For them, the most important relationship was with truth as they saw it; the only audience that mattered was their creative conscience, not the temporal equivalent of how many retweets they got over a five minute span.

While I don’t believe in shock for shock’s sake, if one doesn’t get strong negative reactions on occasion, I’d be worried.

The price of progress, the fare of growth is struggle and argument. We grapple or we simper.

Go ahead; poke the bear.

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It occurs to me on this Remembrance Day that in a sense we are all surrounded by former enemies. For example,  I work for a German company and my manager is of Italian descent, and of course both Germany and Italy were former enemies of Canada. But not any more. The targets of race hatred and hostility decades ago have become friends and colleagues.

England and France have been enemies many times, but not any more, and as a Canadian of Anglo-Saxon descent it is utterly unremarkable these days to have Francophone friends. In fact, I am a mix of English, Scottish, Scots-Irish and Welsh and there certainly have been some historic grievances amongst those groups. If I were to keep those ancient hatreds alive, I’d need to combine self-loathing with multiple personality disorder.

In fact if I take a look at anyone around us who is not a close relative, if we go back far enough in time there was probably a time when their ancestors were the implacable enemies of my ancestors, and any thoughts of reconciliation would be considered impossible. But we are not enemies now.

So peace happens; it make take generations, but surrounded by so many former enemies it is the only conclusion I can reach. Multi-generational hatred must be tended, groomed, and passed down like a precious family heirloom.  Break the chain, and the hatred can be forgotten, never to be paraded on an Antiques Road Show of hostilities.

So if we look at today’s conflicts and despair, try to inject a small note of optimism. In our daily interactions with former enemies, we’ve proved that peace between people can be the norm, millions upon millions of times every day.

Let it happen. Please.

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On Friday last, on the way home from work, in my subway car there were plenty of high school students who had gone to school dressed up for Halloween. Last night I was handing out candy to plenty of costumed kids, and we older folks smiled indulgently, and remembered our own Halloween days long past, when we wore Halloween costumes.

Now it’s the morning after, the costumes taken off, and in many houses no doubt there are debris fields of candy wrappers to be cleaned up. Halloween is done for another year.

The sad thing is that so many of us are still wearing costumes. We just wear a different type of costume (usually more than one), and we do it every day of the year. For example I’m not a suit and tie kind of man, so whenever I have to wear a suit I refer to it as my “interview costume.” For me and for many other people going to work sometimes involves wearing such a costume, to be removed as soon as possible after work.

What is sadder is that the costume we wear does not stop with fabric and shoe leather. Our costumes are also personas we have to adopt. Whether at work, pretending to find meaning in a sales spreadsheet or brilliance in the bosses’ latest PowerPoint presentation, in front of our children, trying to look and act like responsible parents, in church for some, going through motions and rituals that have long since lost meaning,  even in our closest relationships, we seem to spend most of our time tending our facades, and desperately trying to pretend to be who we are not.

Compare that to how our children look at costumes at Halloween and other times of the year. Rather than being used as instruments of constraint, costumes are used to liberate the imagination, and to foster a child’s exploration of his or her personality, rather than stunt it.

At Halloween, children make a game and a parody of the macabre; it’s a great way of saying that these terrors have no power over them, in direct contrast to us adults who all too often are ruled by their fears. And at Halloween, that is the real horror.

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One way of looking at life is as a series of complex questions, with how we grow in life being defined by the kinds of answers we come up with for these questions. The questions seem to get increasingly complex as we get older, and we yearn for the simple, clear, unambiguous answer.

There are two kinds of simple answers: the first kind, all too prevalent today, is the answer that takes the place of thought. It is the knee-jerk response, the offhand over-generalization, the answer that allows us to clutch our comforting biases closely as we stay glued to our own internal version of Fox News, rather than allow our cherished assumptions to be challenged. Simple answers are easy, seductive and take the place of thought and contemplation. The bell rings, and like the dogs of Pavlov, we salivate, before we even know what we are doing.

The second, rarer kind of answer, is the answer whose simplicity has been discovered by slogging through the complexity to arrive at a simple answer. One must painstakingly examine each aspect of the problem to evaluate whether or not a piece of information is part of the answer, or is irrelevant. To find this kind of answer takes time, effort, and is often painful. In the process, one’s most cherished beliefs can be challenged, and indeed often shattered and rebuilt.

The best example I can think of here of this kind of simplicity is Einstein’s equation E = mc squared. To get to this beautifully simple and elegant answer, Einstein spent years working through hellishly complex math, and the deceptively simple result turned our understanding of the universe on its head. Scientists (particularly in the areas of cosmology and fundamental particle physics) know that elegance and simplicity are the hallmarks of a good scientific theory.

The following example may not be earth-shattering, but I think it illustrates the point, and it certainly resonates with me!

The picture below of Bob Goyetche was taken in Montreal earlier this fall at Podcamp Montreal 2009.

Bob Goyetche

Bob had a new DSLR camera, but had a 50mm non-zoom lens attached, instead of the typical zoom lens. He passed it over to me and some others at the table to try out, and this photo was one of the results. (I don’t remember which of us took this picture). What was interesting was that even though Bob had told me that the camera did not have a zoom lens mounted, when I was handed the camera and pointed it at Bob I instinctively tried to zoom to frame the image.

Zooming to me seems analogous to looking for the simple answer, the mental snapshot. With a non-zooming lens, to frame a picture means using your feet to move around, and actually looking at your subject matter to evaluate alternative ways of framing the image, rather than quickly zooming in without thinking. Even though I went without a zoom lens for a long time when I first got into photography as a teenager back in the 1970’s, I realized that evening in Montreal how having zoom lenses had made my eye lazy in later years.

When I got back to Toronto, I decided to get a 50 mm lens for my DSLR and found one on eBay. What I am starting to do is go out with just the 50 mm lens, to try to get back in the habit of seeing and thinking. I might be out for hours and only come back with an one or two images I like, but that’s OK. Here are a couple of recent images that came about because of using the 50mm lens.

Our two pet rats

No Wading

Whether it’s photography, social media, spiritual matters etc. so many forces in society want to give us (or indeed sell us) the simple answer.

Resist.

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It’s Monday morning in Montreal, and shortly I’ll be getting on a train and heading home to Toronto, after having attended Podcamp Montreal 2009 (an amazing event!!).

This in itself is sort of an ironic statement, as technically Montreal is my home town, and I only moved to Toronto (via Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Waterloo, Ontario) when I was in University. I haven’t actually lived in Montreal since 1968 when I was 6 years old.

Almost all the relatives I had in Montreal have either passed on, or moved away. I don’t know my way around the city, (how many six year-olds are allowed to wander around large cities?), there is nothing that ties me here except a birth certificate. I love the city, its atmosphere, its history and culture, its energy, but it is not home. I love coming here, but I always feel a bit sad, or at least wistful when I do.

What really strikes home though is that it is not just a chronological separation; the Montreal of my childhood no longer exists (and this is a good thing). As a Montreal Anglophone,  I was a child of the “Deux Solitudes” era, where the English language assumed a predominance disproportionate to the number of native speakers; one just assumed that wherever you went, you didn’t have to speak French to function. There was certainly no shortage of arrogance in that regard. For the most part, my parents had English friends, as did I. We lived in a linguistic enclave.

Fast forward to 2009. I was struck by the Montreal Anglophones attending the conference: to a person it seemed, they were able to flip over into French at the drop of a hat. The Francophones as well of course were able to go back and forth with ease. I took French in high school, and first year university, but that was a long time ago, and it is hard to blow the dust off of it every couple of years.

I tried fumbling through in my halting French, and felt a sense of shame that as a Canadian I didn’t have a better command of both official languages. To see a group of perfectly bilingual people, brought together by a common interest, able to share discourse is either language is for me a Canadian ideal.

And now I turn my gaze to Toronto, where a numerical majority of its residents were not born in Canada. One hears so many languages on her streets, and while I know a few words in Greek, Italian and Russian, I certainly cannot converse in these languages, and I feel poorer for it.

If social media is all about communication, then to assume that as an English speaker I can sit back and let others translate their thoughts into English is to merely repeat the mistakes of my generation, and previous generations, and we will all be the lesser for it.

I will try to do better.

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There are days when it’s hard not to feel old, and for a while at least today was one of those days.

This afternoon I walked through the University of Toronto campus, and just like every other year, the students keep looking younger. And then it hit me; it has been 29 years since I was a freshman in university. 29 is not a round number, like 20, 30, or 50, but it does give me pause for thought.

I think how the experience has changed. For one thing. no computer. For the first two years of university I did all my essays (and as a history major I had many) on a manual typewriter.  It was only the last two years when I had the luxury of the use of an electric typwriter. And as someone who hated writing second drafts, and would revise directly from first draft to typed final copy, the thought of me having even the most basic word processor back then makes me feel wistful. It might have helped my decidely unspectacular grades!

Music was on vinyl, or cassettes. Pirating happened, but not as easily or as casually as it does today. And without internet, or cheap long distance, the world did seem smaller.

But before this turns into a maudlin tribute to years gone by,  I should focus on the similarities between students of today, and the former students of my generation. I’d like to think I still have a spirit of learning (in fact more today than when I was in school). And I am happy for what learned, as a member of my generation (late cycle baby-boomers, to be precise).

I’m glad to have learned computers when they were comparatively primitive. I’m glad I learned photography in the film era, and learned to do darkroom work. I’m glad my first audio editing involved quarter inch tape and a splicing block. Doing things the hard way pays off, in the kind of learning you get in return.

And to this year’s class of frosh, or whatever they call you these days, enjoy these years, but never, ever stop learning.

And every now and then, try doing something the hard way.

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