seasonal nature

it seems that one of the biggest differences between student life and the seemingly impending fate of a career-type job is the loss of seasonality. not a complete loss, of course - the seasons still do occur, and some careers change seasonally as well. but for the most part, in most professions, it seems to me that the day-to-day is more often than not the every-single-day-to-every-single-day. it's always been a saving of grace for me that the school year ends definitely, and dependably. granted, in university it's entirely too common that the summer consists of not much more than full-time work to finance the upcoming school year, but the change of pace, at least for me, is a welcome alternative to the possibility of having a year-round, ever-consistent day-to-day. that day-to-day sameness is one of the things that i look forward to the least pleasantly in my future. to be quite honest, i'd like to avoid it as much as possible. that's not to say that i'll refuse to be in the same job for the entirety of the calendar year, but what's the use of having a spring, summer, fall and winter if you're stuck indoors at your job for the better part (and i do mean better in both the quantitative and qualitative senses of the word) of your days? summer isn't just warm, lit, late evenings. and winter certainly isn't just cold, dark, early ones. awhy should i reduce my free every-day to just that for the sake of making money?

forget it, i say.

and, of course, i am well aware of the apparent necessity of rigorously scheduled work days and long hours in the development and maintenance of our modern-day societies and (moreso) economies.

but i also happen to disagree with it.

i think that there is a balance between economic proliferation and quality of living. a balance that teetered and came crashing down long, long ago. the industrial revolution and the rise of modern-day capitalism are wonderful things in some respects, and they've given rise to great accomplishments, leaps in technology, medicine, human rights, democratic process, and global community. but because the delicate balance of things hasn't been tended to there is also a great amount of poverty, cultural and racial disparity, gross injustice, war, violence, oppression, and many more things of such grave nature than there ought to be. and most of these things ar facts of life, as they seem to be reflections of part of human nature. as such it's probably not possible to create a human world completely free of them. but it seems to me that we're failing miserably on whole at even coming close to the mark.

it's a thought; humanitarian organizations are run and administered mostly on a volunteer basis. from a purely economic standpoint, it would appear that our society places near-zero value and utility on the greater good of the people. the invisible hand, however, seems to find more ways than i can fathom to make sure that we all have our cell phones and flashy cars and attention-grabbing commercials during our primetime soap operas.

and again, allow me to note that i'm not eschewing society at large, or the idea of a free-market economy. i do own a cell phone. i do drive a nice car. i watch the oc almost every week. i'm not arguing against everything we have. not at all. i embrace it as much as anyone else does. but i also embrace balance, and that is what i see lacking.

balance.

i'd like my cold winter nights to be balanced with the warmth of a quiet, snow-shine lit winter afternoon on a path in the mountains with the woman i love.

i'd like my warm, summer evenings to be balanced with the comfort of sleeping in on cold, rainy days in the middle of july.

i want my work days to be balanced with the rest of my life. the important part of my life. the part of my life that I'll work to enjoy, not work and have pass me by.

here's to you finding your balance in life, too.

jh..

the drive from edmonton to banff is something that i'll always remember. it's one of the things that's easy to leave relatively not-thought-about, if not entirely unnoticed. the drive has been part of my life for longer than I can remember. it's comforting in its own way - rounding familiar corners, reading familiar road signs, passing familiar farmhouses... and the mountains are truly amazing. despite their immense size, they have a subtle way of sneaking up on you. as if they were sleeping giants they grow out of the plains in long, slow breaths until they tower around you and swallow up the entire horizon. the prairies. the city. the everyday world. your worries...

____________________________________

she played him satie, late at night, in her quiet room in a town in the mountains
......in the snow-feathered fall.
and it was perfect.
it was enough to move mountains.
......................to tear down everything he knew and build it back up again in an instant
..........................that he wished would last a million years more.

And here they are, the collective new footwear.

The former is for running fast (but only up to and including distances of 400m in length in any single given effort).

The latter is for jumping far (but only once, not thrice, at a time).

Inaugural track meet tomorrow. Nervous. Excited. It's like a first date, except hopefully it lasts somewhere between 7.10-7.20 seconds over 60m. But maybe that's a lot to ask from a first date.

'small as a wish in a well..'

i wonder if we all feel that way sometimes? once in a while it'll hit me, and hold me for a time, that we're nothing at all in the grand scheme of things. some recent estimates have put the size of our universe at about 156-billion light-years wide. and right now you're thinking, "yeah, i guess that's pretty wide. who cares." yes, not even a question, rhetorical as it would be, but a statement. "who cares." but let's think about just how much distance that is. please, humour me and allow that i dust off that BSc in Math and Physics that i put somewhere on the bookshelf here in my office, and let us take a closer look at things.

ready? then here we go.

light tavels at approximately 3.0E8 m/s. that's 300,000 km/h. if light could hug the surface of the earth, it would travel from your flashlight, around the earth, and back to you again, a total of - wait for it - about 7 times in one second. let that settle for a moment.

that's fast.



real


fucking


fast.




if you have pretty quick fingers, in the time that it takes for you to flick your flashlight on and then back off again, that tiny blast of light has already travelled around the world and shone its little bit of love on your back. well, shit, son. you've got nothing on nature.

excellent. so we've established that light is fast.
real fucking fast.

now, let's ask what a light year is. "hey, smart-ass, what's a light-year?" a quick definition: light year: the straight-line distance that light travels in one year of earth time. another quick bit of math will give us a better idea of just how far that is.

(3.0E8 m/s)*(60 s/min)*(60 min/hr)*(24 hr/day)*(364.25 days/year)*(1 year) = ~9.46E15m

that's about 9.5 trillion km. big numbers. "who cares." right. well, to put in perspective, that's 15735600000 round trips from edmonton to calgary. and light does it in a year. (as an aside, light would travel from edmonton to calgary and back in just about 2/1000 of a second. that's right, kids, 500 round-trips every second. again, real fucking fast.)

so that's a light year.

now take 156 billion of those, lay them end to end, and that's about the width of the universe, as far as we can tell. (nb - that figure is a safe lower-bound estimate. it's probably bigger.)

1472852160000000000000000 km.
2454753600000000000000 round trips.

if you set out in the fastest rocket-propelled aircraft man has ever built, it would take you about 2308894066050000 years to cover that distance. that's about 170 lifetimes-so-far of the universe. and you'd be moving at about 7297 km/h. seems wicked fast, right? light would sort of kick your ass, moving about 41113 times as fast. (of course, things would change a bit once we buddy up with einstein and start talking relativity, but that's a hot little topic for another day.)

so try and let your mind grasp that magnitude. the size of things is absolutely staggering. i've probably come up disgracefully short in trying to share with you the sense of things that i experience when i think of this, but it's hard to grasp, let alone communicate. it seems to come down to this: in the grand scheme of everything in this universe, we are absolutely nothing. our biggest worries, our hardest exams, our most painful heart-breaks, our gravest injustices, our most horrendous natural disasters, our largest 50 Megaton nuclear bombs, our everything. it's all so incredibly, unbelievably, infinitesimally small.

it's nothing.

we're nothing.

we. are. nothing.


so this is where human nature seems to take over, and demands to know just what we are then, because, "we must be something! we're too important to be nothing! we're everything!"

and maybe we are. and that's what makes things fun. just feeling that small is something amazing in itself.

i won't go to the length of cliche and say that this should change the world, end hunger and poverty, and establish eternal universal peace. but i do think it would be great if everyone held on to the thought for a little longer, a little more often.

it's pretty humbling.


peace, love, nothing, and everything.
jh..

sodom, south georgia - iron & wine

music amazes me.

for as long as i can remember it's been a part of my life. my person. one of my earliest memories is of banging away on a xylophone in the music room at malmo elementary school. some of my favourite baby pictures are the ones of little toddler me rocking out to raffi tapes on my dad's walkman. there's never been a time in my life that i've been without music. it's as ubiquitous in my memories as anything else. more than most.

music has always been there for me, through every emotion, occasion, experience, time of day, time of year...the list runs endlessly. it seems to be the closest thing to unconditional love that something inanimate could offer itself as. music is a shoulder to cry on when the shoulder isn't there. it's the fill-in best friend who'll scream and jump up and down with you for as long as you have the energy to scream and jump up and down. ecstatic or enraged, music doesn't care. music is there. everywhere. music makes us laugh, scream, cry, sigh, shiver. it sends chills through our bodies, and it warms us to our very soul. we write and sing songs of joy, freedom, pain, suffering, loss, love, life, death. and the world wouldn't be the same without it. life wouldn't be what it is. it would be incomplete.

and it's ours. every one of us. whether we hum along, whistle to ourselves, tap our feet, nod our heads, sing, play, write, imagine, or even remember a song that we loved years ago and thought we'd forgotten about, we're a part of it. and it of us.

and it probably won't ever end. if modern physical thory is as correct as it seems to be, every last bit of matter in the universe is made up of almost immeasurably tiny, planck-length strings, each vibrating in its unique mode. silly as it may sound, that's the music of the universe. and it makes up every last bit of us. of you.


you are music.


jh..

"And energy got its own will, and people think they make music still. But music is there without you or me, we just manipulate, for better or worse..." - Deltron 3030

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley