Peter told me this morning that my top three adjectives are: buggy, itchy and hot. Then he thought again and added thirsty. Does this not make you think of a complainy toddler more than a delightful woman? Haha. I smiled because it rings true. 

I don’t disagree that I am often itchy, hot and thirsty. And that I make much more of mosquito sightings and death count, post swatting, than he does. But I’d really rather be known for all the times I remark on the beauty of a flower, the incredible changing nature of clouds, the cleverness of writers, or the tastiness of my latest bite. 

Alas, there was just a bug buzzing in my ponytail. It was so distracting that I had to stand up to get it out. I am not joking. So while my coffee is delightful, it’s kind of buggy out too. 

Peter’s late father Norm—whom I sadly never got to meet—kept daily notes for 54 years. In 1990, he migrated his note taking to a single Microsoft Word file. At some point after his dad’s death, Peter was able to access the file, and the treasure trove of fascinating, and oft times banal, entries. 

I have smirked, at times, when Peter and his brothers read examples of the detailed things their father noted, like this bullet point from this day in 2017: 

• went to Physiolinks but I was too early so I went to the A&W in the mall for a coffee, started to drink it but it was too hot so left it in the car.

His notes didn’t have to be deep reflections to reveal how he was spending his time, what he cared about, what he was proud of, what he was troubled by. Eight years ago on this day that was the heat, some knee pain, and itchy legs at night.

I kept a daily journal for the first five years of Lali’s life. As I always intended it to be for her, it doesn’t have the full brunt of how parenting can break a person at times. Though, like Norm’s entries, it won’t be hard for her to read between the lines. 

I think I stopped writing when I could no longer get the beautiful Pantone "Colour of the Year" journals I was using. I surely regret that I made aesthetics more important than keeping track of our stories. 

Life is passing by quickly, and I cannot remember the extraordinary, let alone the ordinary. To remedy this a little, we popped into The Bookmark on the weekend and left with a gorgeous Some Lines a Day five year journal by Leuchtturm1917, thanks to help from the awesome Lori Cheverie, who has managed there for 35 years. 

We wrote some short notes in it last night to kick things off. I am excited to capture today too. I believe, perhaps naively, that together with Peter, we’ll keep it going and be able to see what we were up on July 6, 2025-2029. It is certainly in Peter’s genes to keep track! 

Here’s a draft:

• Sitting at The Black & White Café in St. Peter’s to write a blog post.
• Peter trying out his new yellow lens, which make him look quite different in a “I am Bono” kind of way.
• L gone to see E.
• Concerned about how O will adapt to upcoming changes that we believe will be really positive.
• Were planning to host Mom, Dad and B for a BBQ but the weather kept changing.
• About to walk on the Confed Trail for a half hour back to our car.
• Peter getting to see what being with someone lost in their blog writing is like.
• Very grateful for the pace of my life and its abundance. 

And to bring it back to Norm, I’ll add one more:

• 4:53 p.m. going to make a quick stop at the washroom before returning to the trail. 

In early June, Peter came home with a book called Tiny Experiments. And as I do with most books he brings home for us, I jumped the queue and read it first.

I liked it. It hit the spot for a whole bunch of reasons. Very often in family life, it is impossible to know what to do when I haven’t done something before. Parenting a teen is a first for me. Iterating on a supportive housing model that we created for our trans autistic daughter has thrown us many “what the eff do we do now?” curveballs

The risks can seem inflated, the path unclear. So the notion that we don’t have to solve the next ten years helped to diffuse our anxieties and tamper our reactive ambitions. The idea of tiny experiments also reminded me of the “toe in the water” concept from my leadership coaching days (From Immunity to Change by Kegan and Lahey).

Writing in this blog again has actually been a tiny experiment, or pact, to use the language from the book. I asked Peter if he’d be willing to take on a pact for two weeks if I would automatically say yes to whatever pact he proposed for me.

His was easy (well, easy for me). I asked him to start drinking at least 1.5 litres of water each day.  His baseline was coffee, a can of Bubly and a little water if he was thirsty or working out. He can write more on his experience. It is true that I used the pact idea to get him to change his behaviour in the hopes he would feel the health benefits.

Mine, chosen by him, was to write something courageous on my blog everyday. Hardly on par! I had last written more than a year ago and it was only to share some travel experiences. I was contractually bound to say yes. And I did appreciate the clear parameters.

In the pact world, the measurement is simply: did I or did I not (drink 1.5+ litres of water, write a post)? I agreed I would aim for courageous but added a caveat that writing again on a regular basis was already pactful enough.

Since I started on June 16th, I have published twelve posts and will shortly publish this one. That means I only missed 4/17 days. Some days I just wasn’t in the mood to share what was going on inside me. On the flip side, I have written 13 blog posts in a 2.5 week period after zero writing for a whole year. And of those, about half felt vulnerable and courageous.  Writing about my life felt purposeful (and sometimes indulgent). It wasn’t hard to remember to do it as I had made a promise to myself and an outward commitment to Peter. My writing is flowing more easily; and, I learned that I too can compose blog posts directly on my phone.

I only told one other person about the pact writing. As I was writing my first post from The Gallery Café, I blurted out what I was up to when Jessica, the owner, stopped to chat. It has been freeing to write without any feedback. Yet it was also important for me to write in the public domain to keep me on track. I am pretty sure I would have blown off journalling by day two or three. Right now I would be writing nothing about this in my journal, having dropped my pact! I’d have the guilt and nothing to show for it.

And so, I have completed this particular pact. I’m grateful to Peter for buying the book and saying yes to a pact of his own. It feels like a big success, as I feel more capable and less resistant. I intend to continue writing, but what to do from here? Just write blog posts everyday for the rest of my life? Hardly. Clearly I’ll need a new tiny experiment so I can pact it up! 

I am often overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the world. Like how can there be enough lemons for the whole world each day? How can we build all the buildings, ships, airplanes and coordinate all the tiny parts needed for each? How can each of us own so many individual things that no one wants when we move or die? How can we eat breakfast in Halifax airport in the morning and then be near London Heathrow picking any three items for £6 for supper.

And where do all those Tesco turkey, bacon and cheese sandwiches get made anyway? 

Having just finished “A Week at the Airport” I am imagining that they get made just like airplane meals “in a windowless refrigerated factory [a mile from Heathrow, where] eighty thousand breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, all intended for ingestion within the following fifteen hours somewhere in the troposphere…made by a group of women from Bangladesh and the Baltic…foods that would be segregated later according to airline and destination now mingled freely together, like passengers in the terminal.

That Halifax airport breakfast I remember from last November was served to us by a woman who had already gotten her kids ready and dropped off at school before driving more than a half hour to the airport to start her shift. 

Book author Alain de Botton was commissioned to immerse himself in the inner and out workings of Heathrow Terminal 5 as Writer-in-Residence. The stories he shares range from the heartbreaking to the sublime. I was riveted. 

My whole life, I have watched people in public spaces like airports and wondered about their lives. How long was their commute, I’d wonder, for the tired looking flight attendant who must have just finished their shift? How many kids did they have at home? Or did they live in a tiny flat somewhere in London where they could go crash peacefully? Were they exhausted by their work or did they love to fly the skies? 

Was that passenger who cried during the flight leaving loved ones or flying to a sick parent or their funeral?  How come my seat mate refused all food and water offered on a transatlantic flight from Paris to Toronto, while trying to convince me to take a call from his niece who was trying to find work in Canada. And should someone offer to help that mother whose toddler is crying? Yes. Always yes and it should be me if I am having this thought. 

And what about the people who get taken to private rooms in Immigration in larger airports?  Did you know that there is a room at Heathrow Terminal 5 that has toys one can keep, plus ample snacks, for kids whose parents are being questioned?  

Large international airports are like cities whose ‘residents’ come from every corner of the globe. They are anxious, exciting, overwhelming places. Their scale and logistics boggle the mind. As does the number of lemons they must use in the run of a day. 



 

I’m an improved version of myself, for me, and others.  Perhaps that seems like an arrogant and subjective claim to make about myself. But as I am making it solely as a reminder for me, as a point in time reflection, so be it. 

How do I know I have changed for the better? 

I know because today we have the good fortune to be moving to our camper for some weeks this summer. Normally, I’d have insisted we all agree on a rather early time to be on the road, fully packed and out the door. Instead, today I got up and read the final fifty pages of my book*, spent twenty minutes on my yoga mat, and have been packing up the final things less urgently. The me of a few years ago would never had allowed this. 

While it may all sound rather Zen, the path to here has had lots of resistance and urgency inserted along the way. It seems to take me trying ALL the different approaches to learn what feels good and what doesn’t.

Whatever patience or calm I am bringing at the moment could evaporate in a flash. But for now, writing a short blog post in the middle of packing up, while others move around me seems, like an incredible victory on my growth path! 

*The book was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Really good!