Wanderlust and Words

As the year draws to an end, I have been counting my blessings. This has been a very good year for me. I have been healthy and strong and full of energy. I have a solid network of family and friends who sustain and support me. My apartment has become a comfortable home with the addition of new flooring and new furniture. 2009 has been a year of discovery and learning and beauty: I have moved outside my comfort zone in networking and promoting my freelance business.   I spent three glorious weeks in Spain studying architecture and design, trying my best to learn a new language, and exploring a new culture completely on my own. I have taken thousands of photographs and even gave a slide show about Spain at the public library. I have read voraciously on so many different subjects - creativity, economics, politics, and more.  I am learning new computer skills, so essential in our current age. I developed a professional website and started using Google Reader and Del...

We make thousands of decisions every day – what we want to eat or drink, whether or not to purchase a new electronic device, how to carry out our job. Jonah Lehrer’s book, How We Decide, is a fascinating look at how we arrive at all these different decisions. What surprised me the most was the absolutely vital role played by our emotions: “every feeling is really a summary of data, a visceral response to all of the information that can’t be accessed directly.” Our emotions help us to interpret complicated information. They serve as the link between all the information stored in our brains and our response to a new situation. We rely on stored memory to help us decide when to swing at a baseball or when to brake. We don’t have time to consciously think through each of these actions, but instinct and emotions help us decide on the right response. In fact, if we think too much about how we swing our arm or how we steer, we’ll make mistakes. Emotions also help us sort through compl...

Life is a Celebration How many guitar players and bands are writing alternate national anthems? Not many, I suspect. But the Mighty Popo did. Because citizenship matters to him. Mighty Popo was born to Rwandan parents in a Burundi refugee camp. He had no citizenship, no country that he could claim as home until he was granted Canadian citizenship. Mighty Popo and two of his band members played at a recent symposium on immigration in Saskatoon, and he had many of us up and dancing. He kept repeating that, “Life is a celebration.” Mighty Popo’s albums are available from Amazon and on iTunes. He's also one of the featured artists on the CBC's two-part African Guitar Summit . Refugee Success Story For more information about Rwanda and Burundi and the life of a refugee, I highly recommend reading Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. The book recounts the story of Deo, a young Burundi man, who arrives in New York City, with nothing. He deliveries groceries and makes fr...

I really wonder why I bother to vote and why we spend so much money on maintaining a parliamentary system when our politicians seem incapable of taking a stand and establishing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. George Monbiot has singled Canada out as one of the major threats to reaching an international agreement in Copenhagen. Why? Are the politicians too busy squabbling amongst themselves or are they protecting the oil industry, particularly the tar sands? It was reassuring to attend a lecture at the University of Saskatchewan by Dr. Marc Jaccard, an energy systems analyst who builds models to understand the interrelationships between policy, technology and economics. Jaccard says that it is increasingly obvious that we have the technologies to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions with marginal cost increases. (Of course, we still have to have the political and social will to do it.) I’m not going to try and reproduce his talk, but he made some points th...

The Opposable Mind: How successful leaders win through integrative thinking by Roger Martin Roger Martin’s book is a very accessible study of how successful business leaders resolve conflicting opinions, question long-standing points of view and develop creative solutions to their problems. The book is based on interviews with a number of successful leaders, many of whom are Canadian, and provides concrete tools that all of us can use to improve our decision-making capacity. I took three specific ideas away with me: Existing models ≠ Reality Martin defines integrative thinking as “the ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.” We avoid complexity by accepting either/or solutions rather than drawing out the best elements of each and combining them as a creative ne...