I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently… and not for the first time.  But this time is different.  I’m pondering mortality in a healthy way,  I think.

At this point I’ve already survived the child stage where I don’t really grasp what life is, not even well enough to consider asking the question.  I’ve been the teenager whose life was “over” or worth ending by my own hand because the person I liked or the thing I desperately wanted didn’t end up being mine. I’ve been the young adult whose whole life was ahead of them, wondering what I might do and doubting that I was really qualified to be in charge of guiding my own destiny.

I’m finally at the age now where I’ve chosen a direction, built a life, shared it with another person, brought some lives into the world, and watched others that were important to me leave the world behind.

Last week I was paralyzed by grief. This week I’m thankful for reminders of how fragile and temporary and precious life is.

It makes me appreciate that I won’t always be here, nor will anyone else. I have to accept that my own children might not outlive me, and that I might not live to see their children. There’s no way to know.

Grief is difficult to endure, more so if your response to it is to continue to harbour the fear of loss deep in the back of your mind. It compromises your attention. It reduces your involvement in the present. It saps away the richness of the here and now in the same way that a positive attitude adds colour and depth to human experience.

I want everyone and everything I love to live forever and ever, and sometimes I live as if that premise were fact.  Grief is a reorientation to reality; a necessary reminder of impermanence and the necessity to enjoy what is while it still is.  Including ourselves.

I doubt that any of us would bother to read the terms of service anyway, but at least when things went wrong the blame would rest solely on us for not understanding what we’d agreed to.

by schatz (flickr)

I’ve finally reached that time in my life where it’s become tempting to lie about my age.

While this has long been an accepted if not celebrated custom of women, it’s not been as popular among men.  Of course, consider that men have benefited enormously from the (probably male-perpetuated) notion that age on a man makes him look more distinguished. A touch of grey; a few wrinkles; a hardened, weathered face: all elements of increasing wisdom and masculinity to further distance us from the boys and young men we evolved from.

It’s actually grossly inaccurate and unfair of me to characterize women lying about their age as a “celebrated custom”, but that’s what we all conspire to pretend. Honestly, because of the (again, male-perpetuated) pressure on women to remain eternally young, lying is more an unjust necessity masked by coyness and humour.

The more I consider it, the more I want to believe that things are reversed. Women have the sensible and self-determined approach, and the belief that age looks good on a man is a white lie that they conceived and nurtured because they knew men were too lazy to go to the great lengths that women do to look good.

With that as my accepted premise, I’m beginning to understand the appeal of pressing the pause button permanently. I’m staying 30-something forever, and anyone impolite enough not to indulge me may consider themselves permanently excused from my company.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of my age—more that I don’t think that the number is a reasonable or definitive description of the person I am today. It’s not something I want people to use to measure me with before I’ve had the chance meet them in person.

When I think back to the teen and twenty-something me, it seemed like people in their 40s and beyond were positively alien—as far removed from my own experience and perception of reality as could possibly be. Most older people I met didn’t do much to dissuade me from this belief. Then, as now, adults either believe themselves to be so evolved that they don’t attempt to relate to youth, or they’re concerned that doing so might damage the boundary of difference that is the basis for their authority. Maybe they’re fearful of being ridiculed for trying to appear cool. I don’t know.

I do know that when I was a teenager, every now and then I did meet adults that impressed me with their youth. They didn’t overtly intrude into my reality with clumsy, embarrassing  attempts to speak my language. They didn’t brag about their connectedness to current culture. They were subtle. They listened well and showed genuine interest without prying too far. They read cool paperbacks that they’d offer to lend if they saw you trying to read the back-cover text. They listened to new music but didn’t seem the least bit concerned about whether the kids around them noticed. They were talented hobbyists who painted, photographed, or played electric guitar. They dressed down or up depending on their mood or the occasion.

I like to think I’m akin to the adults I used to idolize.  At least that’s how it feels from within. I’m not struggling with impending mortality so much as trying to reconcile outward appearances with inward feelings.

I’m aware that at least externally I appear increasingly less attractive, boring, harmless, or irrelevant, depending on the eyes that move across me. Internally, I feel young and hungry; driven and passionate, sometimes to the point of rage; still potentially dangerous and irresponsible… not unlike the person who inhabited this body 25 years ago. Education, life experience and the passing years may have made those two lives diverge, but they are still indefeasibly linked.  The additions and renovations still exist on a foundation largely unchanged.

I am older. Am I mature?  I suppose so, in that I’ve made choices in my life that required sacrifices and I’ve been compliant with those necessities, even when I felt that they robbed me of a substantial, even definitive aspect of my being. I don’t write nearly as often as I once did. I haven’t played music professionally for nearly 8 years. I haven’t had a close friend in nearly 10. But I have had love and children, and a chance to better understand myself and grow by having to think about myself both less often, and differently.

I understand that the commitments I have in the present will eventually require less of my time, and eventually there will be more time to gather and connect the lost parts of my life.  I hope that when that time arrives, the core of what is me is still as recognizable as it is today, both to myself and to others.

Blogging about blogging. How meta can you get?

Not long ago, I made the acquaintance of a young, energized public servant.  I was impressed by their¹ enthusiasm, imagination, expression and boundless drive to create.  I encouraged this person to start their own blog and share their ideas with their colleagues at large.  To my delight, my challenge was accepted and the resulting material was as good as I’d hoped: a wellspring of inspiration and discussion.

Then, one day, it all disappeared.  Because of strong divided opinions within their shop about external social media engagement, my colleague had deleted their entire blog—without backing up any of the material.

I was saddened, but not surprised.  I’d experienced a similar crisis at the beginning of my own public service career.  There wasn’t a heated internal debate, nor any direct warnings from supervisors about the content of my writing.  In fact, the awareness of social media within my division was only just beginning.

What I did experience, from orientation sessions and interactions with new colleagues, was the subtle and constant reminder that I was a public servant now.  As a government employee, my life was at greater risk of coming under the microscope.  Everything I said and did, everything I wrote, my personal and professional life—it all needed to be more carefully groomed and diligently managed.  Don’t wear your ID off-site, don’t publicly discuss any issues that are unfavourable to the Government, don’t broadcast strong opinions that could be interpreted as partisanship, and absolutely do not speak to the media.  By extension, I interpreted that as a cue to try and erase anything I might have produced that might fall outside the lines of generic male public servant.  For expediency’s sake I just deleted everything.  Some of it I’d backed up, some of it was lost forever.  The next morning the sun still rose and the stock market didn’t crash, nor did Doctor Who arrive in the TARDIS to shake a stern finger in my face and lecture me about compromising the future of Earth history.  All considered, I take this as an indication that I must have retained the good material.

I reverted to homogenized anonymity, and all was well.

Then, in August 2009 I discovered² GCPEDIA, and it was really hard not to notice the number of employees who were openly blogging or tweeting.  Furthermore, they had the brazen audacity to actually add themselves to lists, where other rabble-rousers had already neatly organized themselves into snappy little tables, complete with links to their potentially offending material.  Egads I was inspired!

Nearly instantly, intoxicated by equal parts of  “Hey! She’s doing it! Why can’t I?” and “Ha ha!  They can’t fire us all!” I launched a Twitter account of my own and embarked on this little blog for good measure.

Fourteen months along I can honestly say, its been almost universally beneficial to my career.  Here’s why you should start a blog (and/or a Twitter account) of your own:

1. You can’t distinguish yourself if hardly anyone knows you exist

You have career aspirations; we all do.  But how can you differentiate yourself from the other 250 candidates in the resume pile?  How can you make sure that your resume remains filed on or near the top?  Don’t be anonymous.

There’s a reason that successful people have PR representatives.  For one thing, they can afford it, but for another it helps to keep them in the public consciousness.  But fear not!—less successful and less wealthy people like you and I have the option of  “promoting” ourselves by creating something publicly accessible (a blog or a Twitter account) and widely useful (insightful commentary, instructional articles, great links).

While I started working for the Government of Canada in May 2007, for all intents and purposes I don’t feel like really existed here until August 28, 2008.  After that day, I started meeting dozens, then hundreds of other publics servants.  My definition of public service changed significantly with the realization that my engagement with my own colleagues through the GC’s Web 2.0 toolkit and these external channels could be beneficial to Canadians as a whole… and a part of my job.

I am no longer anonymous, and that’s a good thing.

2. Increasing your personal network beyond your physical workspace

In an ideal world, I’d exist independently of the space-time continuum. I don’t want to be limited by the number of hours in the day and the number of people I’m in close proximity to.  With social media, I don’t have to be.  Now I can benefit from the experiences of people from everywhere in my government, or any government. They know the things I haven’t learned yet; they’ve read the things I haven’t found the time to search for; they’ve discovered the things I never believed even existed.

Now, unlike before, I know who to contact when I need something, and people know they can contact me for what I can provide.  My blog and Twitter accounts have transmogrified³ my voice mail and e-mail and Twitter DM boxes into conduits of opportunity: expertise inquiries, project collaborations, membership invitations, career opportunities, social gatherings, speaking engagements, training requests…  I help others in the ways I am able, and in return I’ve reaped great rewards from the enormous knowledge base, expertise, and connections of my network of colleagues.

For example:

• How many Directors (or higher) did you meet this year?  How many of them made a point to make your acquaintance because someone else had told them about you?  How many of them phoned or emailed you for advice?  Until my blog, my answer to these questions was “zero”.
• I had four job interview opportunities referred to me in 2010.  Sadly, it wasn’t a great year to change jobs: a lot of positions ended up being eliminated through attrition, including some of the jobs that I interviewed for.  However, one great interview I had resulted in another invitation to another interview.  I owe all of this to people who knew about a job, thought of me, and made an introduction happen between me and someone who wanted to talk to me.
• My network of colleagues (and their emails, voice mails, and requests) created such external buzz about me that it created internal buzz in my own space. My Directorate actually became excited about the use of tools like GCPEDIA and GCconnex, not because of my internal cheerleading, but because other Departments were requesting my assistance.

3. Improving your engagement with your job

Social media’s greatest hurdle in the workplace is the perception that is has no business use because  engagement is a distraction from real work.  There’s that fear that people will spend all day watching stuff like  Charlie Bit My Finger (cute) or Man vs. Bear (funny).  In fact, the opposite is true.

Disengagement leads to distraction and boredom, which fertilizes the ground for the rapid spread of unproductive behaviours: idle websurfing, personal emailing, listening to soft rock commercial-free favourites, and those persistent, longing, ever-so-realistic daydreams about… well, never you mind that!

• Real disengagement happens when a person is rarely challenged by their work, because they are employed in a position that only taps a minute subset of their overall potential.
• Real waste in the workplace happens when people with valuable skills and knowledge remain unknown and unconnected to people who could greatly benefit from their resources.
• Real harm to productivity occurs when people don’t know who to call when they’ve encountered a problem they can’t solve, but may be too embarrassed to look for help within their immediate group for fear of appearing incompetent.

Creating an extended web of expertise where your skillset becomes known to others and their strengths become known to you can go a long way to re-establishing your sense of connectedness with your workplace, your job, your real purpose. That web exists already: you just need to begin weaving yourself into it.

Whatever happened to my friend?  For now, “blogging is still out of the question” in their shop.  But you?  I really think you should climb on board.  Write what you know.  Avoid the controversial and focus on the helpful.

Twitter (technically a microblog, but also called a status update service) is a low hurdle to get you started quickly—anyone can share useful information in a sentence or two.  Start there, then explore Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, or WordPress to begin sharing even more content.

__________
1 – Indeed, I’m using “their” to refer to a single person in order to avoid disclosing gender. While this may make grammatical purists boil in their own fluids, my I won’t resort to the male-as-normative “generic he” nor the cumbersome “his or her”. My prose is cumbersome enough, thanks.
2 – Well, “crashed it” would be a more fair description, I suppose.  Because I had administrative experience with GCPEDIA’s system software I was promoted from user to Administrator in less than two weeks.  Not long ago, Thom Kearney told me that he still speaks about this as an example of what’s possible, to inspire others. =)
3 – I can’t believe I’ve never used this word in a blog post before. Even if it wasn’t a staple of Calvin and Hobbes, it’s still a fantabulicious word in it’s own right.  Plus, it’s a real word, unlike fantabulicious.

I instantly reached down into my pocket. There was plenty of change: easily enough to buy that poor person another hour of safety.

But then I noticed it was a brand new Lexus.

“Hah!” I thought. “Yeah, right!”

I kept on walking.

The moral of the story: I sincerely like to help people. I do it every day. I’m just less inclined to help the wealthy, or the wilfully overindebted pretending to be affluent, out of a parking ticket.  That said, I’ll jump to save a stranger from being hit by a bus whether they’re wearing Reitmans or Armani.

Yeah, I’m well aware it was “just a Lexus”. If it had been a Porsche Cayenne I’d have laughed out loud on my way past.

Have a nice day.

IMAG0047, originally uploaded by toddlyons.

I love the architecture of Place du Portage IV. It’s still so unabashedly 1970s; evocative of a time and place out of childhood where Ottawa was remote and near-mythical.

I never believed as a child, nor as a young adult, that I would ever live or work in the National Capital Region.

Ottawa was a place where no-one I knew lived. It only existed in television commercials, ostensibly as a mail drop for the USC at 56 Sparks Street.

Perhaps that’s why I get such pleasure at the sight of this building. It’s the Ottawa of distant memories—one that stayed exactly as it was, so that one day the child that imagined it through the window of television might experience it first-hand as an adult.

IMAG0030, originally uploaded by toddlyons.

I walk past this sign every day on the way to my office. Am I the only one that’s struck by the amusing juxtaposition of children and animals?

Thankfully, my kids are allergy-free, but just the same I’d prefer if they weren’t fed by passing strangers.

Get a Grip 1, originally uploaded by toddlyons.

My wife loves me,

This I know,

For her gag gifts

Tell me so.

Just about ever Saturday, my wife brings me home something from the second-hand shop she works at.  Often it’s clothes, but occasionally it’s a novelty gift like this one.

Yeah, sometimes I do need to get a grip, but it’s never anything to do with my age.

Get a Grip 2, originally uploaded by toddlyons.

I’m a happily-married father of three girls (two, four, and six) who’s witnessed his involvements outside work, home, and family dwindle from some to little, then from little to nothing, and more recently from near-nothing to near-something.  I could use some perspective about what a realistic expectation is because for the last ten years I feel like I’ve existed within a social vacuum.  What’s normal for a married guy in my shoes?

When I first met my wife I ran my own incorporated small business.  I shopped at will. I played bass guitar in a band and gigged a couple of nights a week.  I worked out at a health club regularly.  I had half-a-dozen friends that I connected with for walks, hiking, biking, and the like.  It was pleasurable and mostly-fulfilling, but arguably self-indulgent.

I gave all that up when her life took her across the country, and threatened to take her away from me.  I closed the business, quit the band, and packed my life into a U-Haul van.  Several days and nearly 4,000 kilometers later we began to  rebuild our new life together.  It’s fulfilling in many ways, but nothing that could be accused of being remotely self-indulgent.  Our spare time and spare dollars go to our kids, for their present and their future.

Presently I don’t have any friends outside of work colleagues.   I don’t spend at will.  Most of “my stuff” is over ten years old.  All of my clothes for the last seven years (except socks and underwear) have been from Salvation Army and Value Village.  All of our recently acquired home entertainment gear are anniversary gifts from last year.  I don’t have any friends.  I don’t have hobbies.  I haven’t played in any kind of band, even a garage band, since 2003.  I haven’t seen the inside of a health club in 10 years.  I don’t have friends.  I often joke with my wife, only half-jokingly, that we’re in the business of raising children.  Did I mention that I don’t have a friend?

I love my wife and kids.  Particularly in the last three years, my marriage has gotten really good.  We’ve hit that pivotal point where we’ve endured hardship, survived handily — even prospered somewhat.  We trust that whatever happens, we’ll make it, because so much has happened already.  And my kids?  If they don’t exceed my accomplishments in education, career and life happiness, I’ll consider myself as a failure as a parent.

At this point in my life my wife has agreed that one evening out every second week, of 3 or 4 hours in duration, wouldn’t cause undue hardship to her or the kids.

How does this sound?  It took a long time to get to this level of free time.  Is it excessive?  What are things like at your place?  Give me your thoughts!  Be honest; be explicit.  I’d really love to get some idea of what’s reasonable, but I don’t have the peer group to swap notes with because as I might have said, I don’t have… well, you know.