EclecticLip

(Originally written March 15.  Posted March 28) 

We’re back from the Diamond Capital of North America(tm), with tales of our quartz-priced travels and gypsum-level accomodations. 

On the flight over, I was struck by the vast expanse of the north — most of the landscape was as empty as the mind of a Zen adept.  It was astonishing, thrilling in a way, to see an entire landscape under the horizon, unoverrun by civilization and unblemished by the mark of man.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the oil sands from 35000 feet, but sadly Fort MacMurray and its environs were crowded over.  So much for seeing one of the “7 eyesores of the industrial world” with my own eyes.*

The first thing I noticed when stepping off the plane and into the frosty frontier, was that the airport was very small.  You walk off a ramp onto the tarmac and into the terminal building.  Mind you, Yellowknife does have a third small baggage conveyor, to Whitehorse’s two.  And it’s got bilingual ads at the airport — English and Japanese!  Playing to the tourist base, the audio tour of the legislative assembly building is also available in Japanese, as well as the expected English, French, and nine other official languages of the territory.  While there seemed to be more Japanese folks in Yellowknife than Aussies at Whistler, it’s apparently a big draw for German tourists too.  Which means *both* sides of my family tree predisposed me to visit.  In a sense, it may have been my genetic destiny!  (That and invading Russia…  hmm, maybe it’s an Arctic wanderlust thing.)

Back to the igloo-esque legislature building: it’s open on weekends, staffed by a volunteer and a security guard.  Built in 1993, it’s the first permanent legislative building for the Territories.  Prior legislatures met in the ballrooms of Yellowknife hotels, with occasional “road trips” hither and yon; maybe an attempt to neutralize the Yellowknifers’ home field advantage.    The NWT flag was actually designed by a Manitoba high schooler, who in 1969 won $1000 for his inspiration, about thirty times what graphic design student Caroline Davidson was paid three years later, for designing the Nike Swoosh.  (To Phil Knight’s credit — did I just write that? — he later gave her an envelope-full of Nike stock.)

Fair to say that things are pretty relaxed up in the Territories — someone outside can look all the way into the legislative chamber while they’re in session.  Reinforcing this impression, the security guard at the offices of Joint Task Force North told me that, even though the Canadian Forces were a “diet Coke of a military” he was “pretty sure” the building didn’t offer tours.  He then suggested a couple tourist venues I might consider visiting during my stay.

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* this is my list, in no particular order; readers’ private lists may vary:

- Ohio’s pride, the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire a record thirteen times over the years  
      (note: since cleaned up)
      (note 2: I sure hope that’s a record…)

- the great manure lagoons of the factory farms of the American midwest

- the Yanacocha Mine in Peru: a “cyanide fortified” open pit gold mine as big as the tax havens where its investors probably hide their winnings: bigger than Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, it’s a whisker smaller than the Cayman Islands

- the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch         (filed in Wikipedia under that very name!) 

- the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 
      (note: in the quarter-century since 300,000 people were evacuated, wildlife seem to be thriving there)

- Alberta’s oil sands tailing ponds

- Exxon Headquarters in Texas - scientific illiteracy central

(incidentally, three score and ten years before Exxon started funding global warming deniers, the President of Union Oil bankrolled the publication and distribution of three million copies of the first American Christian Fundamentalist tracts.  Fun guys, those oil barons…)

I’ve been using the ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done at work for about a year now, and despite my undeniable novicedom, have found it invaluable: I feel like a Stone Age artisan newly introduced to bronze!

Like so many transformative tools, the basics are delightfully simple — but like eastern martial-arts disciplines with which it shares… well, virtually nothing, the arresting simplicity takes years to master. 

Actually, I jest — the end-goal of GTD, as it’s known to its acolytes, is to allow the practitioner to engage in their life and work attentively, undistracted by other action-items and to-do’s that might otherwise clutter the mind.  Which means it’s basically the Zen ideal of mushin, or “no-mind”, dressed up in 21st-century American secular idiom.  And mushin plays a central role in every eastern martial-arts discipline I’ve chanced to read up on.  So GTD does in fact share a common fundament with karate, judo, aikido, and their cousins.
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For me, the biggest GTD learnings have been:

• discovering the exhiliaration of the empty inbox!
• the idea of separating items on my to-do lists based on timeframe (my prior attempts to make to-do lists failed because my short- and long-term items were jumbled together)

Most gratifyingly, the “outsourcing” of my memory to Outlook has let me clear my mental cache of those things-to-remember that always floated around in the back of my mind, depleting my concentration.  So now, instead of multitasking, I can monotask.  That is, I can direct 100% of my focus to various tasks-at-hand, instead of only offering 90% (because the other 10% needed to be held back to avoid forgetting other action items).

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With my quantum leap in workplace productivity, it was a rashworthy irritation that I couldn’t apply similar methods at home with Gmail, given its more limited architecture.

So discovering GTDInbox a few days ago was a real psychological emollient.    A Firefox extension, it layers a GTD-friendly interface onto the Gmail interface.
Within a few hours, I’d decluttered my Gmail Inbox from about 170 to under 50 items — one screen.  And there’ll be a few whoops (as in plural-of-the-celebratory-whoop, not as in gentle-expletive-indicating-accident) of joy in the living room when I attain the mythical state of “Inbox Zero“. 

Just when I’d nearly set myself up in WordPress template “White as Milk 1.8″ a horrifyingly irksome formatting problem emerged.

Reminded me of the Zen koan:

“It is like a buffalo that passes through a latticed window.
Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through.
Why can’t its tail pass through as well?“

But whereas Wu-tsu was (presumably) referring to the lingering effects of karma — cumulative past action, in secular vocabulary — in my case it was arguably “ox”tensibly a more mundane matter of trying to tweak just a bit too much.

Harrumph.

There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

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