Goodness52

"My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is." Ellen's grandma knows something a lot of us don't. It's pretty easy to just go for a walk. We fall into these comfortable habits, like tucking into dinner in front of the big screen and then sinking deeper and deeper into the couch until it's time to brush our teeth and go to bed. Well, not this week! For seven straight days, Val and I put our shoes on after dinner and headed out the door. It's something I remember doing as a forced march with my dad when I was a kid, and something I hadn't done for at least 10 years. That's despite knowing the many benefits of an after-dinner walk , which include better digestion, improved sleep, and weight loss. There really was no decent excuse for not going for a walk. After all, we live in Victoria so it's pretty easy. And not just Victoria, but a great ...

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness." Was John Keats talking about art? A pretty face? A stirring sonata? For the sake of this week's post, let's go with art. I am not artistic. I'm so unartistic, in fact, that I once had a freelance business called Robb J Can't Draw . So I approached this week with the appropriate amount of fear and healthy amount of respect. My goal was to product a work of "art" within 7 days, under the watchful eye of my artist wife .  Val supplied me with the art board, a collection of paints and brushes, and a lot of advice. My job was to fill in the rest with a subject and some brushstrokes. Here's how it went. I'd recently seen a picture of a grain elevator being demolished in Mortlach, Saskatchewan. As a transplanted prairie dog, that image moved me. Those "things of beauty" are fast disappearing on the prairie landscape, and...

"Nothing burns like the cold, but only for a while." I don't even watch Game of Thrones (yet) but I know what George R. Martin is talking about with this cold thing. It's what I discovered in my week spent only in cold showers...and in a cold ocean. It burns for a while, but then you discover something deeper than mere pain. The idea–or maybe challenge–was suggested to me by my buddy Jon, who even presented me with the research and logic behind the Benefits of Cold Showers . So I resolved to take only cold showers every day for 7 days, and cap it off on Sunday by joining the Swim-A-Month-Club for their monthly swim in The Gorge, the ocean-fed waterway just off Victoria's Inner Harbour. All this in the month of March, after the coldest February the city has seen in 83 years. Well. Here's my anything-but-earth-shattering discovery. Cold water hurts. And yeah, it kinda sucks too. I decided to sneak up on the plan, starting Monday with the shower set at...

"I'm not talking about a dating site. I'm talking about the whole experience of college and putting it online." Whether or not Mark Zuckerberg actually said that, I think The Social Network nicely captured the essence of social media in the age of Facebook. We have become socially fixated in much the same way we obsessed about sex in college. Okay, maybe it was good grades for you. For me, it was sex. Even though I'm technically an old dude now, I've glommed onto social media in ways I haven't even been fully aware of. Facebook is the grandaddy, but Twitter gets its fare share, along with Pinterest, LinkedIn and others. I didn't even realize that Strava was part of the picture, but when I think about how I post my runs and rides, share photos of my athletic adventures, give thumbs up and comments to others in my circle, it's clear that it's just like all the others. The only no-fly zone for me is Instagram, but only because I promised m...

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." I'm sure Mark Twain was thinking about women, too, when he offered his wit on the subject of clothing. So, in the week of International Women's Day, let's start by agreeing that this is a universal truth. Or is it? This week's resolution was part social experiment to see how differently I would feel, and how differently I would be treated, if I wore a tie every day of the week. For some people, this is no biggie. They dress up every day. But my job at Benevity is not like that. Hey, this is the software biz. If If I wear a tie to work, I will be the only one in a company of 500, and that includes a CEO who describes himself as a "recovering lawyer." If I wore a Sex Pistols t-shirt and pink bunny slippers, nobody would bat an eye. Put on a tie, and suddenly eyebrows are raised everywhere. I started counting the number of times co-workers said "Job interview?...

"I love coffee, I love tea. I love the java jive and it loves me." I'm begging you, Ink Spots, shut up. For a solid seven days, your 1940 blues tune has been ringing in my head. I've been hearing it every time I pass a Starbucks or look over at my co-workers cradling their coffees in front of them. Maybe you've already guessed it; my commitment this week was to go caffeine-free. I decided to go whole hog on the idea, which meant no morning coffee, no afternoon tea and no caffeinated sodas. I also picked a particularly challenging week to do it; at a Benevity client conference in Palm Springs, where silver-plated coffee urns waited outside every meeting room, where hundreds of attendees strolled the corridors with their paper cups, and where the heavenly smell of coffee filled every nook and cranny. In hindsight, I don't even know why I did this. If my 52-week journey is supposed to be about discovering myself through goodness, I'm not convinced t...

"Please Mr. Postman, look and see. Is there a letter in your bag for me?" The thrill of getting a letter in your mailbox was well understood by the Marvels when they wrote Please Mr. Postman in 1961. The Beatles loved it so much, they performed it regularly in The Cavern in the early 60s. More than a decade later, the Carpenters turned it into a #1 hit. But enough already with the music history. The point is, in this day of impersonal emails (which include the equally impersonal ecards) and 140-character tweets, people still experience a jolt of joy when they open a mailbox to discover something from a real live person inside. That's the feeling I was going for in my lucky seventh week of Goodness. Since it was Family Day week, I decided on a family-themed course of action. Every day, I would create an entirely fresh postcard using all the digital tools at my disposal, and send a card to a different family member. That would have mail zipping across Canada, and f...