nANIMOv

Fridays are dedicated education days so no surgery work today.

One of the tasks I assigned myself for this month was to affirm a stranger every day. It feels like a simple task, but one that has been hard to be consistent with. I’ve found that when you are trying to find something to affirm a stranger about it can be hard to come up with something, either that or I just feel too awkward about complimenting a random stranger to say anything. Uncalled for affirmations are weird, but they don’t have to be creepy. I guess my goal in assigning myself this task was to be a bit more out going and to try to look for the good in strangers. So far still needs some work.

I’ll state the obvious: life is full of choices. Knowing that isn’t all the helpful though, despite how often people say it. Knowing that I have to make a choice doesn’t relieve any of the pain or anxiety that comes with actually having to make it. That said, I am a firm believer that every person makes the best choices that they can with the information they have available to them at a given moment, otherwise they wouldn’t have made said choice. Event when that choice turns out to be detrimental or ends up causing the person pain, in that moment or at that time, the decision served some sort of function or seemed like the right thing to do under a specific set of circumstances. We can never say for certain whether the ultimate outcome is net good or bad. Sometimes people say there are no good and bad decisions and it always depends on what you make of it, but I’m not convinced that is 100% true. But also what do I know, and maybe it simply doesn’t help to think that way.

What I like about art is that even the most hyperrealistic art, even photographs, are all still just impressions. No matter how hard you try, an artist’s character will always bleed through the medium. You can never recreate the exact moment that a piece of art was being made, and so you can never recreate any one piece of art. Yet the art itself serves an as artifact of that moment, and with that creates its own, allowing those who experience to relive that moment within their own imagination and from the lens of their own worldview.

Penguins have always been one of my favorite animals. I don’t remember where it all started, but I remember when I was little always pulling out the “P” section of our World Encyclopedia to look up penguins and how the largest penguins are the emperor penguins. I think what I liked about penguins is that they seemed so out of place to me at the time. Like who who have thought these awkward birds would call icy tundras and rocky cliffs their homes. They waddle about on the land, having lost the ability to fly (without a doubt the best part of being a bird), until they trip and stumble into the water where they instant transform into these slick, graceful torpedoes with an agility that probably surpasses most birds in the air, swimming at speed that allow them to launch their whole as body out of the water back onto the ice/ land where they resume their unassuming terrestrial existence.

I feel like I can relate a lot to penguins. At least to the waddling and stumbling part.

Our culture is obsessed with heroes. From superheroes we read about in comic books or see in movies, to our adoration of military veterans and frontline workers during this pandemic, we can’t get enough heroes. At times it feels like our idolatry of heroes stems from a desire to be saved, from an attitude of either “I’m not strong enough to be the ‘hero'” or “I am unwilling to make the sacrifices of a ‘hero.'” Both are reasonable in their own right, but my response to these would be, Who says? and, Why not?

At the conference last month, someone said, “We don’t need more heroes, we need better system.” And that is 100% correct. If our systems were adequately taking care of people, especially the most vulnerable we wouldn’t need heroes. If our systems prioritized safety and wellbeing over revenue and profit we wouldn’t need heroes. But thank God we do have heroes to carry the burdens of society so I can continue to live my relatively carefree lifestyle.

So let’s toast to them and make them banners and give them a day where we celebrate them and tell our kids to aspire to be like them. Anything but create better systems to support them and to make them not have to be the safety nets for all of society, especially when things go to shit, because to do so means placing some of that burden on me, which simply will not do.

Yesterday I started a challenge for the month of November to complete 10 tasks every day for the whole month. Part of this was a revisiting of the monthly challenges Alfred and I used to do for the In-Progress Report (yes we will start it up again eventually). The original intention was to help us develop better habits to work towards our various goals that would bring us closer to who we wanted to be. It was helpful as a way to remain cognizant of my daily activities and be more intentional with how I spent my time.

This time around, I want to open it up to whoever wants to join and also put some more skin in the game by adding a cash prize from a collective pool. I think utilizing community is a historically untapped (by me) resource that can be really helpful for accountability and motivation.

If you are feeling like you are in a rut or want to change things up or have been trying to develop/ change some habits you are welcome to me and the others who are challenging ourselves and each other this month. Instructions for how to join are here, sign-up by next Tuesday if you want a chance to win, but you are also welcome to join or follow along without competing.