Tag: experience

Re: Canvas

Lovely are the days when the sky is like canvas: It can be milky white, soft grey, or baby blue, as any base colour will do. It’s the expectancy that’s magical. You might be thinking specifics (ex. visual art) but I am going to explore all of life as a canvas, where the individual can make a uniquely authoritative impression. 

We have the ultimate authority to decide once the accident of our birth has passed. Some have advantage. Some are squelched. Some are burdened by culture. Some must push against obstacles while others leap over them. The world is not fair and restrictions exist, but our personal authority is what matters. This is freedom: we get to decide. I wish that all humanity had the same opportunities to decide that I have felt through my existence. Freedom means choice, and I have had a lot of free choice when it has come to painting my canvas. 

While you are canvassing your thoughts about this idea of personal authority, consider how we do that during an election. I’ve volunteered to canvas my neighbourhood for various political parties. Anyone who has done this knows it can be risky. You are making yourself vulnerable to another person’s opinion. We may not all reside under the same canvas tent. Some of my favourite interactions have been when I’ve been allowed as a canvasser to respectfully present my view while the canvas-ee shows how they’ve painted their life in a pleasing way. We can agree to disagree because I believe Politics is like Art: It’s subjective.

My dad was a visual artist. He would get excited over a fresh square of canvas. The placement of the equipment was deliberate. He needed time to see his work before he had even begun to outline it. Inspiration and planning; all rolled into a single musical thought. I would watch him humming as he made his first brushstroke, much like a sailor might raise his canvas sail hoping that the wind would blow, just right, to send his craft onward. A baby must feel this same sensation on rising onto two legs for the first time. With new height comes an expanded view, with unknown possibilities. “Wait!” thinks the tot, “I’d better sit down for a minute to process.” Parents, anxiously watching, may have their own designs on this blank canvas they’ve recently birthed, but their authority won’t last long.

Ultimately the decisions will be ours to make. Some of our choices will depend on current fashion. What we display on our conscious canvas may be at odds with current trends or we may wish to seek a common thread. Likely, who we are will be a work-in-progress. Some may have their canvas damaged like a storm distorts the peaceful blue of the sky. But most things can be mended with time. We may choose to cover-over what came before, so we can make a space for what is yet-to-be. Or we can quilt the fragments of our past to blend with what is now. It’s up to us.

Re: Walk

In my time at University it was popular to hang posters with inspirational sayings. I remember seeing the one with a set of footprints in the sand describing how someone might walk with you in times of trouble. Another poster showed various pathways to talk about the road less travelled. Still another suggested the end result was not as important as the journey itself. Walking was central to many of these themes, and woe be the person who didn’t walk their talk, ideologically or in campus conversation. No one wants to be labelled a hypocrite!

There are many songs that depend on the word Walk to drive the message: Who among us has had boots made for walking, or been advised to just walk away like Renée. Maybe we’ve walked like an Egyptian after two many drinks or walked 500 miles just to be the one who falls down by your door. I’ve walked the line between good and evil, just to please the one I wanted to love me back. In the olden days if a boy walked you to the car or to your doorstep he was considered a keeper.

My 95 year old special mom sets a good example by going on a daily walk around the block. She takes seeds in a bag for any bird friends she finds along the way. As do other elders, she has a stable walker with handles suited to her height, a seat, and wheels she can brake so she doesn’t roll away when she chooses to sit and take a rest. I go with her sometimes but I find her slow pace a challenge to my balance. In a metaphorical sense I am taking a walk with her during this twilight part of her life. Watching her deal with the changes that come with aging is a privileged learning experience.

I’ve felt fortunate to have legs that can carry me to where I wish to go. Now in my eightieth decade I neither have the will nor the ability I once had to cover great distances. I have a friend who has mastered the famed Camino de Santiago trail. My son has tramped the beautiful West Coast Trail of Vancouver Island. My hikes have been much less impressive but I have enjoyed the ground I’ve covered. I have taken part in fund-raising walks and once, in late elementary school, I spent time training on a track in the manner of Olympic walking. I wasn’t fast enough to make the team but my hip-work impressed my weekend extra-curricular dancing instructor so much that he designed a special dance character for me. I was a cop-on-the-beat in a dance recital routine that had me walking around a Paris neighbourhood dressed Charlie Chaplin style: Rubber legged, bum waggling, and twirling my truncheon. The audience loved it!

Alas my 15 minutes of fame on that stage would not have propelled me to a career in show business or to be noted on Toronto’s Walk of Fame. But here I am talking about my walks.

Re: Flight

When my thoughts take flight I am lifted above clouds of doubt. My thinking sets me free to soar above conflicting emotions. I can see more clearly the path ahead.

I happened to be in our parking lot when our neighbour, I now call him Captain, was just coming home from work. I learned that he was accumulating hours for a commercial pilot’s licence that would get him an elite job back in his home country. We got talking about my time with the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife in Ontario, since that was the last time that I was a passenger in a small aircraft. I told him I had never been in the co-pilot’s seat and he said, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

He rapped on my door at 10:30 the next morning. At the airport, the Captain had to check-in so I filled in time with a look around a part of our airport dedicated to pilots and the Victoria Flight Club. I gazed out to the tarmac curiously wondering which of the planes parked there would be ours to fly.

All the paper work done, we walked to our plane and I took pictures while he did a circle check. Finally I got strapped into my seat, headset on, engine started, then more checklist items. I was beginning to wonder if we would ever lift off! As we taxied down the runway there was a lot of incomprehensible chatter from the tower and other pilots: “Delta, Victor, 3, Bravo, Romeo this and Alfa, 4, Sierra, something, something”. I just counted backwards from ten slowly and silently until we were off the ground. I wasn’t really nervous just in awe that such a tiny bit of chattering metal could hold two people aloft. I commented after gaining altitude that it didn’t seem like we were going very fast and my Captain laughed and showed me the airspeed indicator. We were cruising at 110kph.

I thought of my dad, who had once invested a chunk of his hard earned money to take flight lessons, only long enough to take one solo flight. Being in the air, feeling how fragile that existence is, sparked a memory of watching him land at Buttonville Airport, near Toronto. I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, and can recall his beaming face as he shook hands with his instructor. He spread his wings again at 70, while parachuting, ticking another box. When I see a solitary cloud in the sky I think of him sitting on it, grinning at me.

As the Captain and I dropped altitude for our runway approach I felt surreal. In our three dimensional world we hovered as a falling leaf awaiting touchdown. I was aware of my two dimensional existence as we drove home yet the feeling of being transported to another world has never left me. Flight gives you a vantage point unlike any other. Seeing my world from another perspective boosted my understanding of my place in it.