They are both hard to figure out, they both take constant practice and no matter how much you try, you’ll never get it quite right. But when you do, man oh man it is so sweet!

I should say off the top that I enjoy no particular wisdom so feel free to summarily reject this blog as the idle musings of a muddled mind. What I have is an abundance of time and I’m sufficiently self absorbed that I can presume to think someone might be interested in these thoughts. ‘Not even remotely!‘, some of you might immediately respond but of course that would be missing the point, wouldn’t it. I’m writing because I like to read the sound of my mind thinking.

So are there any Secrets to Life?

Well, of course not. Don’t be daft.

But there are some Wisdoms. My only real disappointment is that it has taken me seventy-two of my allotted years to figure that out. Damn, I am so stupid!

DO THE RIGHT THING. Damn, if only I had just done the right thing. And the shame of it all? Doing the right thing is invariably the easier choice. Somehow to be human is to trek on down the ‘Wrong Way Road’ picking up speed as we go, careening from mistake to mistake until the inevitable pile up.

Got to say it was a fun ride though.

Until the crash.

ENTHUSIASM. A little while ago a friend of mine sent me a photograph with a caption and said ‘I think of you when I see this.’ Naturally I was intrigued. How we are perceived by others, particularly close friends, is so important. And of course that perception is often on a collision course with our own self image. When I opened the image I saw a young fur ball of a puppy, suspended in mid air, in full gallop with his legs extended front and back. His face was joyful and if you spent any time looking you’d swear he was grinning. The caption was the capper though:

“Live like someone left the gate open.”

I am so good with that. In ‘Tony’s World’ that is a high compliment.

When I was ten, still new to Canada, a friend of my parents took me aside and said, “Tony, you have joie de vivre. I hope you never lose it.” I nodded politely, still the dutiful little English schoolboy and jumped right back in the lake to play with my friends. Naturally, I didn’t have a clue what she meant. It might have helped had I known french.

My fiancé Mac was heading out to her stag before our wedding which I knew was going to be a ribald affair (on account of her friends were crazy!) I turned to her and said, “Squeeze the orange Mac. Squeeze the orange.” Of course she looked at me with some sort of ‘What the hell are you talking about’ readout in her eyes as she closed the door behind her. Tortured fruit metaphor aside, I still think it’s the right way to live. I was thirty – six when I said that to Mac, at a time when I naively thought life would supply a never ending bowl of juicy ripe oranges to squeeze. Damned if I knew that it would be no more an endless supply than life itself would be an endless voyage. Whoever came up with ‘All good things must come to an end‘ was an asshole. A prescient asshole but an asshole nevertheless.

And now my friend sending me a photo of a dog suspended in midair in full escape, saying it made her think of me. I’m good with that. It’s all some version of the same message. We are blessed, we humans, with the capacity for enthusiasm, it can be harnessed and be the octane of the moment. I know I’m a little exhausting to be around sometimes but if I am given a choice on how I choose to live my life, I choose ‘enthusiastically’ and sometimes that means ‘in this moment’ as in dive in to the deep end and get wet. Soaking wet. Our lives are short, even a long life is infuriatingly short, and no doubt life can be hard but for God’s sake it is an extraordinary gift to be alive, something we all take for granted at some point or another. So for me one way to acknowledge the gift, is to live it at full volume. I tell my wife I love her everyday, without fail. I kiss her without reason. I am enthusiastically married and that is how I show it. That is me at full volume. Not a phone call to any of my four children ends without me saying “I love you” and that is how they end their calls with me. It is a choice. If you are in love, say so. With enthusiasm.

And I promise you one thing. Enthusiasm will pay you back. Not necessarily in financial reward, although the two are very often linked. No, enthusiasm will pay you back in fulfillment, relationship and a sense of well being. Little known fact: Enthusiasm is recognized currency in the Land of Happiness.

BE INQUISITIVE. Be relentlessly inquisitive. It is why we are all armed with the word ‘why?’. Used well it is one of the most powerful and freeing words in our vocabulary.  ‘Why?’ is the vocabulary of thinking and thinking for yourself. ‘Why?’ keeps your brain fit. ‘Why?’ stops us dying on the vine as we get older. ‘Why?’ keeps us learning.  Of course it drives us crazy at times when our young children keep asking ‘Why?’. It can be hard not to hear it as a challenge to our parental authority. But it is not that, it is a request, ‘Help me understand’ and it enables them to move on.

And by the way, if you are sixty or seventy stop feeling sorry for yourselves. Of course technology moves on and has left many of us uncomfortable and feeling stupid. As it did our parents. It’s just our turn now. And because you don’t want to look stupid, or as though you don’t know, you stop asking ‘Why?’. And so you get stuck. And you feel increasingly remote and isolated and the worst of it all, you feel unseen. And unhappy. ‘Why?’ can still be what it was to you when you were six, it is the key to the door of knowledge. Use it. Until you die. These new machines and social platforms allow us to communicate and stay connected in ways that were unimaginable just a generation ago. Embrace them. ‘Why?’ Because they are amazing. You’ll never regret it.

Oh my God!  I do go on. Feel free to abandon this drivel if you’ve had your fill. But if you stay, don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.

LAUGH. Hard. Laugh as much as you can. And it’s not as though we don’t have enough material. One of my favourite authors, the American humourist David Sedaris, says we don’t need inspiration to write, we don’t need hilarious things to happen. He says the answer is already in all of us: “Human beings are hilarious, we are so funny. Everyday, we are funny. The trick is to ‘see’ it.” Another friend of mine sent me a message when we were trying to plan a walk. She said she and her husband were being cautious because they didn’t want to get the ‘Big ’O’. I replied,

“Hey, no problem but do you remember the time when the ‘Big ’O’ meant something entirely different. And you were good with that.”

My friend laughed. Of course she did, that’s what we do. Funny is everywhere. And where there is funny, laughter isn’t far behind.

And we humans can find humour in the most difficult of circumstances. My great friend David L. who sadly passed away last year suffered through years of a relentless cancer, for which he was receiving ground breaking treatment. Each day, immediately after our radio morning show in Kelowna BC he would go off to the BC Cancer Agency for daily treatment. He was part of a ground breaking study on beam radiation which drew oncologists and researchers from around the world to Kelowna and it became part of his legacy as an important contributor to medical science. The next morning, David would have me in stitches recounting his stories of meeting these doctors, all of them eminent physicians in their own country. He would be introduced to them as they entered the room where most procedures were carried out.

“David, this is Dr. Ahmet Jarpour from Mumbai.”

“Good Morning David. How are you today?”

“Oh fine, you know, in the circumstances.” he would reply.

“And Dr. Hamish Stuart from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.”

“Good Day Sir and how are you doing?”

“Well, meeting a lot of people as it turns out, in an unusual place.” David would say, trying to summon the delicious understated politeness the moment would seem to require.

And through all of that as David explained, he was in stirrups naked from the waist down. I’ll spare you the details save to say he was in a most undignified position, something every woman who has given birth can no doubt appreciate.

He told me these stories with the skill of Jerry Seinfeld, as an observational humourist, observing himself. His resilience extraordinary, his faith unbending, his family loving and his humour intact; David rose to this awful challenge with an unbending conviction, humour and laughter joining in the fray.  Start with yourself. Laugh hard, with enthusiasm. Trust me there’s no end of good material.

BITE YOUR TONGUE. Guarantee that those of you who have found yourselves in trouble with a friend or co worker or family (so now that includes all of you) didn’t bite your tongue. I know with the benefit of hindsight, that easily ninety percent of my conflicts and arguments throughout my life were unnecessary and avoidable. I just did what we all do, I indulged myself in the moment, I fed my vanity, I chose my weakness over my strength. I didn’t bite my tongue. But what the hell, pretty sure it’s why we’re given quite a few years to figure it all out.

YOU’LL NEVER GET IT RIGHT. We are doomed to make mistakes. Remember the cello. Do you think a concert cellist got it right the first time, or the one hundredth. Or the thousandth? Of course not, that would be an unreasonable expectation. A cello is so hard. And so is life! Give yourself a break. But do we stop trying? No, of course we don’t. We try again.

SAY SORRY. It goes with the mistake thing. That is why we have the word ‘sorry’. Use it. We are doomed to make mistakes again, sometimes the same mistake, and in the case of a certain breed of husband, repeatedly. Sure it can get old but for as long as you mean it, say it and then try again.

LEARN WORDS. Learn them. Lots of them. They are the basic tools of language and language is the basic tool of communication and communication is the basic tool of relationship and relationship is one of the pillars upon which our happiness rests. Imagine trying to build a house without a hammer, or a saw or a drill. Imagine building a conversation with an empty ‘tool box’, without words. Imagine trying to tell people what you are thinking or feeling without enough words to do it. You can’t. So learn them. Read books and then read more books. And yes, it’s not easy. Neither is learning how to play the cello.

STOP SWEARING. And speaking of words. “For fucks sake stop swearing so much. Shit!” I have no idea how we got here but we suck at civil conversation. Profanity is used as punctuation now and few things get in the way of being heard, more than swearing. It may simply be what was inevitable as the world has become more raw, more jagged, more confrontational and more violent. As there is a soundtrack for the times, profanity and vulgarity is the vocabulary for these times. And he asks rhetorically, do you suppose there is any connection between what we do to one another and the way we speak to one another?

Make no mistake words can be violent, they can assault the person at whom they are directed, as surely as a punch in the face. But even if they are not that, they are offensive to many and whatever happened to not wanting to intentionally offend people, particularly those about whom you care. Or does ‘suck it up buttercup’ cover that off? I knew before I wrote this that I would be dismissed as old fashioned, and out of touch or, just old, on account of I am. Perhaps, or perhaps not. Perhaps we have just let it happen, like some once clean neighbourhood declining into a ghetto, we didn’t see it happen before it was too late. Here’s what I think. I think ‘shit’ is a filthy word and I think ‘fuck’ used in conversational exchange can be a violent word.

So this whole thing is of course ridiculously naive. There’s no stopping our use of profanity. For many of us it’s oral punctuation, ‘shit’ a comma and ‘fuck’ some sort of exclamation mark. It’s so commonplace that most of the time I’m not even sure we hear ourselves swear anymore. So how about this? How about we just tone it down a bit. Just give it a try, see what it sounds like. It’s not as though there aren’t lots of other words we could use.

When I was a young criminal defence lawyer I was very aggressive in court, well known for ‘taking no prisoners’ when I had a witness on the stand. And I would save a special energy for police witnesses. On one memorable occasion during a major drug trial, I confronted a cop about a dead dog. Members of a drug squad had killed a dog during a drug raid. It had been guarding the house.

“So why did you kill the dog?” I asked in full outrage.

“What dog?” came the glib reply.

And I lost it. “Why are you lying in this court?”

And before he had a chance to answer the gavel slammed down, the Judge rose from his chair and pointed right at me.

“Mr. Peyton, my chambers. Now!”

There was no mistaking his tone. ‘Mr. Peyton, my chambers now!’ was not unfamiliar to me. My style of cross examination tended to get everyone’s hackles up and from time to time that included judges. Chambers is where they sorted out young lawyers like me.

The judge threw an Oxford dictionary across his desk at me.

“There are two hundred words in that book which mean ‘liar’. Learn them! Don’t you ever accuse a police officer in my court of lying under oath again.”

“But Your Honour, he is lying and you know he is.”

“Of course he is, anyone can see that. That was clear before you called him a liar! When you do that you bring the administration of justice into disrepute and that I will never allow. Controlling my courtroom is my job. Now go back out there and prove he is a liar! That’s your job.“

So here’s the point, in case I’ve lost you along the way. Words are awesome and we can use them with precision, to slice and dice as the moment calls for it.

I will concede this. From time to time there can be little doubt that ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’, used judiciously can do good work. It’s like anything though, used too often, they lose their impact, they are no longer any good for their intended purpose which has always been to stop the listener in their tracks. To get their attention.

My own family will not like this, not one bit. They might even think I’m talking about them. I’m not. For sure they’ll tell me not to throw rocks in glass houses. They’ll tell me I’m a hypocrite.  I’ve been a cop, a prison guard and a defence lawyer and I’ve never sworn in my life. Not once.  Really.  Of course I have and with the best of them.  

I told you off the top, I’ve been trying to learn the cello all my life and I still make mistakes. Shit!

So thanks for sticking with it. I completely understand if you’ve had it with my idle musings. I’m off to a cello lesson.