Category: Non-fiction

Waiting with Joy

The third week of Advent focuses on joy, and on Sunday the pink candle was lit beside the flames of the flickering purple candles beside it. Advent is a time of waiting, a time of darkness and long stretched-out silence before the great light and the revelrous celebrations of the king’s coming. And yet the third Sunday of Advent, in Advent, speaks of joy. This poses a question, at least to my mind: can the two (waiting and joy) be reconciled?

Before delving into this question, I want to look at a few quotations concerning joy to see what possible insights they hold for our topic of discussion. The first is a Bible verse from James: “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy” (James 1:2). Here trials are equated with joy: joy is given as a name to describe difficulties and darknesses that inevitably appear along the human journey. What’s more, no qualifications or conditions are applied to these trials. Instead, they are considered joy whenever they arise, not only in specific circumstances or at specific times. The verse does not say that trials can be considered joy, but that they are nothing but joy and they are so in all times and in all places and regardless of external factors.

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The Runner and the Creative Urge

I have said it before and will likely say it again, but I believe strongly that all humans are creative beings. This is not to say that all humans exercise their creativity or even recognize their creativity, but that the capacity to create is embedded inside each human self, not only a select few. It also goes without saying that such creativity, even if accessed according to its potential, would be lived out and expressed in a different way in every person, since no two people ever leave the same imprint on our earth.

What does all this have to do with running? In my opinion, the act of running is inextricably linked with the creative urge, the desire to create that dwells within the human soul. It may seem as though the two are on opposite ends of the spectrum. The former (the act of running) concerns the body: that is, the physical aspects of a person. The latter (creativity) instead revolves around the mind and the soul: the mental or spiritual domain. However, I think we enormously limit ourselves if we compel these different realms of self to abide in isolation. The diverse pieces of personhood (mind, body and spirit) were not intended to be self-contained, separated from one another in neat, compartmentalized boxes. Rather, they are blended and intertwined in surprising and unexplained ways, and only when they are permitted to fulfill their natural unity can the person truly experience a fullness of self. Thus, the way I see it, the physicality of running can lead very easily into the creative sphere.

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Of Pens and Pages

I always carry my notebook with me and I always bring my pen. There is something terrifying about the thought of leaving home without a pen. To venture into the unknown without this essential piece of self seems unwise and unsafe.

My pen is silver and cool; it has a nice weight to it as my hand glides across the page. We have been together for so long, my pen and I. I wrote my last two novels with it and other things since. I have many different pens, and yet I always write with this one when I want to access something real and true. I keep buying ink refills and when they run out, I feel slightly despairing until there is a new pack in my hand.

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Let it Be

In my first Advent reflection, I talked about my uncertainty over what the upcoming Advent season would bring. This uncertainty, to a certain extent, still holds true a week later, and I found myself searching yet again for an idea. However, after reflecting some more on preparations for Christmas, I was drawn back to the very beginning of the story and the person whom you might call the first to prepare for the coming king: Mary.

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Christmas Carol Day

Happy Christmas Carol Day!

You might be asking yourself, what is Christmas Carol Day? Well, it happens to be a holiday heralding in the Christmas season, a holiday that always falls upon December 1st. This holiday also happens to be completely made up by yours truly. But seeing as I invented the holiday several years ago, I feel as though it might be on its way to gaining some sort of traction, at least among a (very small) handful of people.

As the name suggests, Christmas Carol Day is all about listening and singing along to those familiar songs that mark this time of year. I must admit that I have broken my own rule and begun listening to such tunes before today, but I plan to spend a greater amount of time this afternoon and evening blasting my Christmassy music (apologies in advance to my neighbours). It has often been said that there is something magical about the Christmas season, and I think this is certainly true of Christmas carols as well. I think this “music magic” stems from several reasons.

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Advent and the River

I have been sitting here for some time trying to decide what to write for my first Advent reflection. Today is the first Sunday of Advent: the first of four Sundays preceding Christmas. A purple candle was lit upon the Advent wreath and a hymn was sung entitled “Come, O Long-Expected Jesus.” Outside frost was glazed across the grass and the mud was hard and cold, preparing for the coming of snow. Over the window frame of the front room in my apartment, coloured lights are strung, and the glow reflects in the open glass and out into the darkening sky of November.

Christmas is on its way; all the signs that accompany its coming have begun to arise. December is only a few days from our midst. Despite this, I don’t know what to write. Despite this, I am not quite in the spirit; the spirit of Christmas is still distant rather than intimate. It is far away and I am watching it descend while I think of Advent-related ideas upon which to reflect.

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The Lost Art of Listening to Music

I don’t think it is entirely inaccurate to say that we are living in a shuffle culture; we are a people that shuffles. When I use this word (to shuffle), I am not referring to a kind of movement. I don’t mean to conjure up images of a person shuffling along, walking down the street and dragging their feet on the ground. Such a use of the word ‘shuffle’ might be more applicable in my previous post on The Lost Art of Walking. In this post however, I am using shuffle in a very different sense (though there is certainly a connection between these two meanings of the word): ‘shuffle’ is an option we have the power to select when we listen to music.

Is listening to music an art that has been lost? Here I must distinguish between listening to music as an art, and music as an art in and of itself. Saying that to listen to music is an art implies two things. First, it implies that when we listen to music, we are not just passively receiving someone else’s art, but creating something ourselves through the process of listening. Secondly, it implies that there is more than one way of listening to music, and that perhaps some ways are better than others.

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The Runner and the Body

The runner and the body. In a certain sense, the two are one and the same: the runner has a body; he could also be described as being a body. The act of running and the body of the runner are inextricably linked. To explore this relationship would undoubtedly be a large task, one I could only hope to partially open within the confines of a blog post. That is why I want to discuss not the body as it is during the act of running but rather, the effects of running on the body and how these effects (or the anticipation of them) can spread their influence to the mind as well.

I don’t think anyone would deny that running is good for the body, though you could deny that it is many other things: namely, enjoyable or worthy of effort and time. I suppose I should also add a condition to the opening statement of this paragraph: running might be more destructive than good for the body that is already plagued with injury. But I see this as the exception rather than the rule. In its ideal and intended form, running brings much ‘good’ to the body. It increases fitness and health, reducing risk of illness through cardiovascular exercise. It also helps to trim and tone the runner’s physique. This last point is the one I want to flesh out a little (if I can be excused for my use of the pun).

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Real Change

How does real change come about?

When I pose this question, I’m not referring to broader social change, but change at the level of the individual. To what degree are we, each as individuals in our own right, able to influence or effect change in other individuals around us?

I think this is a very pertinent issue, because the idea that an individual can really influence another is one that comes up in teaching, parenthood and evangelism, to name a few. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call the two roles in such a relationship the teacher and the student (though they could just as easily be friend and friend, sister and brother, or any number of other combinations of roles). The teacher presumably has his own motives, extraneous to the mere subject being “taught.” Though passionate about the subject at hand, perhaps he also experiences great enthusiasm at the prospect of being the catalyst or cause of a “change for the better.”

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The Lost Art of Eating

In a previous post in this series, I talked about breathing and how this simple practice is necessary in the maintenance of life. Eating (unlike letter-writing) is also a necessity for survival. Although people are capable of enduring conditions of severe scarcity, they need a certain amount of food and to ingest this amount of food with a certain measure of regularity, in order to live. So it can be easily established that food plays an essential role in our lives and that it is a fundamental need, rather than merely a want. What remains to be seen is whether the sphere of food can be elevated into the sphere of art.

Although I used the word “eating” in the title of this piece, I want to include the entire process of preparing and arranging food in my discussion, not just consumption. For it is very clear that food is about far more than nutritional value (or lack thereof), even if we intend to desire it only as such. The basic definition of food might be cut down to its constituent parts, but whenever we encounter food on the practical level of daily living and not in some abstract theoretical realm, it is impossible to separate the food itself from the experience of eating.

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