Goodness52

"There are two fatal errors that keep great projects from coming to life: 1) Not finishing 2) Not starting." Those really don't sound like words that would come from Buddha's mouth, but he still gets credit for the quote. Who cares, right? It's just so true. A year ago, when I started Goodness52, the finish line seemed an eternity away, and it took some intestinal fortitude to see it through to the end. And now here I am. Time to look back on a year that began with running every day for seven days and ended with a little dog coming into our lives . As far as I know, this kind of New Year's Resolution is a new thing. So, getting started meant having the idea in the first place. That came during a run in the first week of January last year, when I realized that running every day for a full year would likely put me in my grave. I settled on something new every week instead, and what a journey that became! After running for seven straight days, I went in...

"Most people I've met who weren't kind to animals weren't kind to people either. Kindness is kindness. Simple as that." It seems perfectly fitting that I close out 52 Weeks of Goodness with sage words from the often-irreverent-but-always-topical Ricky Gervais. A known dog lover and animal rights advocate, he's also currently co-starring with Brandy the rescued German Shepherd in the wonderful comedy drama AfterLife . The show came along at the same time Val and I adopted a rescue of our own, a tiny little scruffy mutt from Mexico who came to us as Julie. And Julie she shall remain. When Gervais says stuff like " dogs will save humanity " I totally get it. They have the power to make us all better human beings, especially when we give them a second chance on life. For us, that meant a local rescue operation called Mex-Can , which takes in abandoned and mistreated pooches from the Guanajuato region of central Mexico. We were introduced to Marlen...

"Keep your friends close, and your farmers closer." Good ol' Anonymous can always be counted on for the best quotes! In this case, Anonymous really nailed it for the week I spent following the 100 Mile Diet. Some of the inspiration also came from author Barbara Kingsolver, who ate locally for a year and wrote a book about it : Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life . Unlike Kingsolver, who produced 70% of her food from a farm in Virginia, I was going to have to do this the hard expensive way. That meant shopping for it. Val and I are really lucky to live in one of the few places in Canada where we can get farm-fresh produce, meat, cheese, beer, wine and more within 160 kilometres of our house. And so the week began at The Old Farm Market and The Root Cellar. Both are known for their stock of local goods. And yes, both are very spendy. I specifically chose the month of January for this challenge, because it's a lot tougher to do in the middle of wi...

"Dancing is a vertical interpretation of a horizontal intention." Fred Astaire, you saucy chappie! Those are some truly inspirational words from the greatest ballroom dancer the world has ever known. But could it mean there's even hope for me, a hopelessly uncoordinated and ungraceful ox? Before I could answer that, Val and I would have to spend the week introducing ourselves to some basic steps courtesy of the Victoria Ballroom Dance Society . Friends of ours joked that we would probably be the youngest people in the introductory class, and that the few people who showed up would be little old ladies. Wrong! We were blown away to see an entire range of ages, and a 50/50 split in gender. What's more, the place was packed with at least 40 people all wanting to learn more about moving their bodies to music. So we started off on comfortable enough footing. Our instructor, Elizabeth, was a real delight. In our first hour-long session, she took us through three la...

"The day after fasting, the music that comes out will be very joyous." I never really thought of Chris Martin as a philosopher before, even though I think Coldplay's Fix You is one of the most hauntingly wise songs ever written. When it comes to fasting, I think he's onto something I hadn't considered before trying it for myself. The release from fasting makes you appreciate everything you have so much more. Kinda like the guy who stops hitting his head with a hammer because it feels so good when he's not doing it. Admittedly, I did NOT go the seven days without food. Let's set that record straight. What I did was follow the hip new trend of intermittent fasting . There are all kinds of ways to approach it, and the one that appealed to me the most was the 16/8 method: 16 hours every day with nary a morsel, and 8 hours of normal eating. Yeah, basically you skip breakfast. During a normal work-filled week, that would be fairly simple, and I know...

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies." My daughter Holly polished off the Game of Thrones books when she was in Grade 8, so she knows about book bingeing. I have yet to crack that series, but I get what author George R. R. Martin means about living a thousand lives. So, with a mittful of Christmas holidays at my disposal, I decided to spend a week adding seven lives in seven days. Of course, I don't think any human could devour seven whole books in that time, so I read the first chapter of each one instead. Calgary's fantastic new public library The week started in Calgary, where our family cozied up in a condo across the alley from the fantastic new public library. It's been raved about by the New York Times , and is now considered one of the world's greatest public spaces. Oh, and it also has books. Because I've been heavying up on non-fiction over the past few years, I really wanted to get the flavour of seven different voices to...

"There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward." Kahlil Gibran, who you might be surprised to learn is the 3rd best selling poet of all time (after Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu) has been a guiding light for me ever since I read The Prophet as a teenager. His words about giving are especially wise during the holiday season, with commercialism raging all around us. So, hot on the heels of a week in which I spent nothing, I decided to give a bunch of stuff away. And sure enough, it did bring me joy. A year ago, Val and I moved from our large Calgary bungalow to a small two-bedroom condo in Victoria. Along the way, we parted with about a third of everything we owned. That included an unforgettable "garage sale" day when everything was marked either $1 or FREE. It was amazing to see how many people went straight for the things marked FREE, even though the much nicer wares were sitting a few feet away at only a buck a piece. Lesson learned: people li...

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." As colorful as you might find that rascal Oscar Wilde, the simple fact of his spendy lifestyle was that he ended up declaring bankruptcy, and selling off the rights to The Importance of Being Earnest . Even when he was at his poorest, Oscar found ways to keep us his collection of china and purchase an angora suit. Imaginative, yes, but the brilliant writer ended up having to part with it all. With that grim reminder, I decided to make the second week in December all about spending nothing. Okay, almost nothing. We still need to eat, so just to keep my bank statement at $0.00 for the week, I asked Val to do the grocery shopping. Other than that, I chopped my spending like a newly elected politician and became a financial monk for seven straight days. With Christmas shopping fever in full tilt, I discovered the joy of parking my credit card in its wallet sleeve while the madness raged all around ...

"If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy." Red Green, that iconic TV handyman who could fix just about anything with a roll of duct tape, offers what is perhaps the best reason ever for Doing It Yourself. It's the ladies! As I placed an order for a garden shed and bravely said nyet to the $175 assembly charge, I was already picturing Val swooning into my arms having admired my manly handiwork. Beyond just engaging my inner cheapskate, venturing into Handyland also fires up my "little grey cells" and ignites my problem-solving abilities. So I started the week poring over a manual and then watching a YouTube video on how to level a space for a garden shed. I even read a great article on why DIY is good for you , beyond the obvious of saving money. Then off I went to Canadian Tire, walking out with a shovel, a level, a square and something I've always coveted in my toolbox - a rubber mallet. During the week, I cha...

"The world would be a better place if everyone was a birdwatcher." I wonder if the artist Robert Bateman knows just how popular birdwatching is these days. It may not be "everyone" but in one in five Canadians are now self-proclaimed birders. It's even soared past gardening in popularity. Naturally, I had to discover the joys of birdwatching for myself! Val and I are truly lucky in where we live. Just a few blocks from our front door in Esquimalt, we ambled down to a quiet marina, and immediately spotted a pair of mute swans drifting along as darkness approached. Maybe not as rare a spotting as the trumpeter swan with its all-black beak, but stirring just the same. It was enough to want to get out with the binoculars and get more serious. Next up was Esquimalt Lagoon, home of a migratory bird sanctuary that's been described as a birdwatcher's paradise. We went on a chilly but sunny day and were simply stunned at the variety and sheer numbers...

"For we were spinning out our lines walking on the wire. Hand in hand went music and the rhyme." When Bernie Taupin wrote those lines for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy , he and Elton John were already looking back on a music-and-lyrics partnership that had launched them to stardom. They had caught lightning in a bottle, and it was magical. With that as inspiration, I decided to spend a week trying to make a song, with my son Nic as the music and me as the rhyme. So...what to write about? The idea came during a text exchange with Nic. I mentioned that Barrow, Alaska had just seen its last sunset of the decade (on November 19!) and he replied that apparently, the sun does set on the American Empire. I asked if there was such a thing as the "American Empire" and we were on our way. After a few disappointing stabs at it, I had something that I thought was workable verse. Here it is: Wishing Hole We heard voices calling in the n...

"We produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery." Putting pen to paper, as Charles Dickens explained so well in Great Expectations , is a comfortable activity. The second you make contact with the paper, you feel a soulful journey beginning. And so, for a week, I did just that, but in a fancy way. Since I already know how to write, I decided to try my hand at something a little more elevated and challenging. Hello, calligraphy! The first thing I learned while exploring the countless YouTube videos available on the subject, is that calligraphy is not handwriting. It is lettering. Rather than attempt to connect all your letters with a continuous line, the goal is to give each letter its own character, and that means frequently lifting your pen off the paper and moving to your next starting point. The next thing I learned was about upstroke...