Out With The Old

            As time moves on, everything we take for granted changes. Traditions rooted in purpose and significance have their origins lost, yet continue to exist because it’s tradition. Festivals and celebrations evolve or get co-opted, becoming entirely new events with little or no relevance to their original purpose. The meanings of words and the structures of languages change, leading to disagreements about recorded information from earlier ages. Sometimes records are destroyed, out of embarrassment or malice, erasing whole sections of history. When events of the past century have been clouded, muddled, and denied, what can we be certain of from even earlier times?

            It doesn’t take long for things to change. How many memes are there about kids not understanding common objects from twenty years ago? We fail to pass on knowledge and history because we take it for granted that it’s common knowledge, and it fades into obscurity. And let’s not forget that history is written by the winners, or that history is nothing but words – and, with enough influence, words can be changed.

            It’s important to remember the important things. It’s important to pass them on. And it’s important to stay aware of how meanings change over time, and move to correct it if we see it happening. Otherwise, it’s out with the old, in with the new.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Endings are Beginnings

            It’s interesting that this is the season that’s thought of as marking the end of the year when it’s also marking the beginning of the year as well. Why is it that there’s such a focus on the end of the year, when the beginning of the year happens at – literally – exactly the same time?

            I suppose it’s probably because endings come before beginnings, and what’s right in front of us is easier to see than what’s lurking behind it. It’s all rather arbitrary, anyway, since it’s simply a time someone in the past chose to start counting from, yet we shape our minds around it.

            For example, the end of the year is when it’s important to be with family and to be generous, showing people how much you care. Which is silly, because you should care about people the whole year round, but I feel it also says a lot about humanity as a whole.

“Look! The year is coming to an end, better get together with family before time runs out!” Then the New Year comes and everything becomes about taking strides forward – making this year better than the last. And all the important things, like friends and family, get pushed into the back of the mind until we realize that another year is almost over, so we’d better get together.

            As a species, we love symbols and traditions. Having a checkpoint that we pass every year is a nice way to tell ourselves that we can keep growing and improving, and it gives us a point to use as a starting line. Yet, we’re also supposed to put our best foot forward, so wouldn’t it make more sense to get together with friends and family at the start of the year, rather than procrastinating until the end of the year?

            We could even split the difference. We could shift the New Year to the beginning of winter, rather than the end, and have our traditional get-togethers at both the beginning and end of the year. Or we could move the New Year to the most sensible place to have it start, at the beginning of spring, and we’d get together in the middle of the year.

            Or, of course, we could simply decide that what’s important to us is important for the whole year. Not everything has to have a set time or place. Time is just an imaginary construct we have so we can organize things, anyway. Perhaps we should stop using time as an excuse.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Into the Void

            One night, as I lay abed unable to sleep, I decided to do a year-by-year recollection of significant life events. I started with my earliest ones and worked my way up to the present, cataloguing my life, as it were.

            I came across an interesting revelation as I sorted through my own mind. For every year from age four forwards, I could find several events I considered significant and defining in my life – the number increasing as I got older. Right up until I was nineteen and got my first job.

            After starting my job, the number of important occurrences in my life dropped to one, maybe two a year. For the five years that I held that job, almost nothing significant happened in my life beyond meeting my wife and moving out of my parents’ house.

            As I continued on from those five years, starting with when I quit my job, got married and started my own business (yes, all at the same time), I again started getting several important life events each year.

            It was as if having that regular day job sucked every ounce of meaning out of my existence. Now, it could have simply been me, as I’m a low-energy person. It could be the nature of the job – food service work is rarely rewarding. But, I couldn’t help wondering.... Is this how it s for the rest of the world?

            It could be, and it might just go unnoticed because it looking back on a life like this is so rare. With the way we’re forced to live in this world, do our lives simply get sucked away into the void of work?

            My first instinct is to ask, how did we let this happen? And why did we let this happen? Then I realize, those aren’t the important questions. What I really need to ask is, are we happy like this? And what can we do to break free from this cycle we’re trapped in?

            Is it even possible to break free, or are our lives doomed to be drained away into a void of endless work for all eternity?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Everyone is Important

            Earlier this week, a friend of Facebook shared an image that said, in essence, “Remember that everyone you encounter changes your life in some way.” The next day, a friend with no connection to the first shared an image saying, “Remember that you change the lives of everyone you meet.” Both say the same thing from opposite perspectives and that coincidence must have lodged in my subconscious, because look what I’m blogging about today!

            This is a view on life I’ve had from a very young age. Everyone effects everyone around them, perhaps in small ways, but even the smallest influence can be significant.

            For me, one of my best examples goes back to when I was writing my first book (not including the picture book I wrote when I was six) – around age eleven or twelve. At this point in time, I was still at the stage where I imitated other writers – in this case Brian Jacques with his anthropomorphic animal characters.

            My brother, in his first year of highschool, had a friend a few years older who was also writing a book. My brother arranged for me to swap books with this friend so we could give each other feedback. The feedback I received from this person I’d never met yet took me a huge leap forward – he gave me the confidence to stop imitating and become my own author.

            In addition, this same friend lent my brother R.A. Salvatore books, which I started reading as well. He became one of my favourite authors and those books had a huge impact on my views of the world. There are some philosophies in the books that, rereading them recently, I discovered I’d been expressing to other people almost word for word without knowing it.

            It is amazing for me to think that someone with so loose a connection to me and who I only met once (at that point in time – a decade later he started working in the same plaza as the pizza place I worked. We started chatting, realized our past connection, became friends and, eventually, my wife and I shared an apartment with him for two years) could so influence my entire life thereafter. That’s all it takes, though! Most people never realize how the most insignificant seeming thing can change the lives of people around them.

            A lot of people also wonder about their importance in the world and weather they make a difference. The answer is yes. You are important. I am important. Everyone is important. Just because you can’t see how far your reach spreads doesn’t mean you make no difference.

            Everyone’s lives are made up of a myriad of connections. Even a slight tug on a tread of their lives can cause ripples that carry on forever. So, remember that the next time you feel insignificant. Without you, the world would be an entirely different place.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.