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Published: 16 December 2023

Go Fast or Slow
 

My Step mother used to say to me "move or they will throw dirt on you". When I was driving she would beg me to "go the speed limit at least!". Looking back that's funny and I guess I was always slow.  Even an ex-girlfriends mother who I really liked, wrote me birthday and Christmas cards and addressed them to "Dear One Speed". So come to think about it today, maybe I was slow moving.

Today I tell people that I am slow but eventually I get there. Maybe it's a variation of the expression "slow but deadly accurate". I may not be deadly but usually the final outcome is something that I am happy and proud about. It reaffirms my cautious slow nature. I don't measure twice and cut once, I measure sometimes for weeks and months and even years before I cut. In fact I have many outstanding projects which I have not started yet to cut but I have researched them incessantly. (The broken fridge has been broken for weeks and I will order a new one just as soon as I choose one. Not only does it have to fit through the front door width of 31"  and fit inside the built in space with handles of less than 33" in depth but also it has to be the right colour which I have not decided on yet and has to be on sale. I can dwel on choosing this fridge while the weather is cold outside.)

I have two speeds, slow and stop. But occasionally, very rarely actually, I have one hidden speed that only comes out in a blue moon, and that is slowly attack it and get everything done in half an hour. I shock myself and everyone else when this happens.

I shocked myself when I attacked my mom's double garage and cleared all the years of accumulated storage to make room for my car. It actually took 20 mins with help from my neighbour Steve. This fall I redid my mom's kitchen after years of hating it. I made a pantry, moved the fridge into the old pantry, painted the ceiling three times and all the walls, bought three kitchen counter tops and put one on and just basically really rearranged things so that now I love spending time having coffee and cooking in the kitchen. I did the same upstairs in the master bedroom (because I am the master haha), and I just love going upstairs to the bedroom and asking Siri to turn on the bedroom light.

Most times these sporadic bursts of action are unplanned, they just start. It's when they are planned that they take forever to get going.

Today I am writing this when I should be doing something else. Coffee is done and now I should get to the something else.

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Published: 13 December 2023

Saving or Spending

I am convinced there are two kinds of people, those who enjoy saving and those who enjoy spending. Of course there are extremes in both cases but generally saving or spending is a state of mind. I have lived both as a saver and a spender.

Saving

My mother grew up during the second world war. She saw her father who was a lawyer and member of parliament lose everything. They packed a few bags and left a large house with paid servants. They lost everything they owned and walked. My grandfather said he lost everything twice in his life. This obviously had a lasting impact on my mother.

When my mother came to Canada, my grandfather as an immigrant found any job he could to support his family. He painted houses in Edmonton and later when he moved to Toronto he found a job as a clerk in an insurance company. On his immigration papers it said he was a farmer. But he was an educated lawyer and in Ukraine a politician. He helped the poor. Now he was poor. In all the time I knew my grandfather I never saw him as poor. He was always happy. He was always more interested in people and still in politics. I remember him sitting in his single bed bedroom writing at a small wooden desk every night. He was content doing what he enjoyed. Money did not affect him as long as he had the basics. Also interestingly, he did not take his identity in money or wealth. His social status was in who he was and what he did as a person. People came to visit him often and they very much respected him, even calling him doctor.

My mother developed a responsibility about earning money. She took odd jobs like cleaning people's houses. Later when her mother wanted to stop her Avon selling business, my mother reluctantly took it over. My mother sold Avon, cleaned houses and sewed our clothes. She made a very tight budget and even saved money for a rainy day. With her saved money my mother later loaned her father $10,000, that would be close to a million dollars today.

When my mother met my father, he also did odd jobs to survive. He was a taxi driver for one day till he crashed the car. He repaired washing machines and the first one took him 8 hours which he recorded as 1 hours of labour because he had to learn how it worked. He always said he was an expert when he had no experience at all. (Later I used the same strategy. As a student I went to a St. Georges Golf Club in Toronto to sign up to be a golf caddy. Day one on the job I was standing in a long line of caddies and along came a golfer asking for a double A caddy. Nobody responded and I was at the end of the line with a low B rating and so was guaranteed to not get picked all day. So I yelled out, "I am. I'm an AA" He picked me then later after we finished he complained to the clubhouse that I should only have been a single A (I made a few mistakes like using a cart instead of carrying the clubs on my shoulder and holding the pin with a shadow over the hole). But I still got paid much more ($4 for a full round) as an A than I would have. And later I was known as an A and got picked to caddy at the Canadian Open Championships with a compassionate man how taught me all the rules of a good caddy.)

My parents were very poor. My mother later got a job as a secretary and they decided that my father would go to university and my mother would pay for it. My father didn't last one semester because he didn't like to study. He tried to bribe the professor to get a good mark. He was thrown out or quit, I don't know but then he went to Ryerson when it was a trade college and he learned drafting. He became a draftsman. But he liked to show off. He liked modern things. He made himself stereo speakers and bought stereo equipment. He bought one of the first reel to reel tape recorders. His mother bought him a brand new 1955 Buick which he then used to 'go out' while my mother stayed home with the kids. My father partied and spent money. He never saved. Money to him represented buying new things and showing what he bought. (I did get this from my father that I too liked to discover new technological things.)

My mother was a hard worker and she saved everything because of her deep rooted fear of being poor. My father was a smart man in physical things like mechanics but not in book studying things. He did not save. Later in life he would continue to inherit money and spend on things like ski vacations to Europe and dinner parties for friends. My father made no investments. My mother early on made investments. She started to learn how to trade on the stock market. Then there was no internet so there was no way she could track her investment but instead had to rely on brokers who changed heavy rates (over $100) to buy and sell stocks. But Canadian bank stocks cost one dollar then so in the long run there were no bad investments. My mother continued to invest in various stocks and mutual funds and lately I started reading, learning about trading and investing (I was very cautious at first with the goal to not lose money instead of the goal to make money - I wish today that instead of practicing for a year I had actually invested in real stocks which would have made me wealthy, but that's the story of my life I guess). Today my mother trusts me to manage and buy and sell her stocks, which is a big honour to me. I still discuss with her what I plan to to and she still gives me her approval or not.

My mother saved all of her life. She enjoyed watching her savings grow. She did not enjoy spending it. She would spend eventually on things on sale like very colourful clothing but even today she still saves more than she spends. But my mother has come to a point today where her whole life of saving now is pointless. She can't spend it. All she can do is pass it on to her two children, one who would spend it and the other who would save it.

My mother's fear of losing everything and being poor was the motivation to save and invest. not only did my mother save all the money she earned and invested (she rarely sold stocks or mutual funds) but she also saved all her things. Her basement is full of all the clothes she and me and my sister ever owned. She never threw anything out. The kitchen table and radio that we had when I was a kid are still there. My mother took it almost to an extreme of becoming a hoarder, only she has a very large basement. I have inherited some of these hoarder traits and I have taken that to extremes as well because today I take great pleasure in decorating our kitchen and my bedroom with free things that people threw out to the curb as garbage. Even though I can buy things I take greater pleasure in finding them for free outside or in Value Village.

My mother was a hoarder but she was also generous. She gave to charities and she always helped people (like me when I was living destitute in the garage with no money). My mother is generous.

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Published: 12 December 2023

A Child is the Greatest Gift

I found a box of old pictures my mother had that I didn't know about. I am shocked that my parents took so many pictures of me in the 1950's. From the traditional baby in the bathwater to typing at a typewriter.

What impressed me was two things. First I smiled and looked very happy. I was a very happy baby. We were poor and I slept in a drawer instead of a crib.

And second, I was beautiful. I never knew this. All through my youth I was told that I was good looking but I didn't believe it because I felt awkward.

Later as I got older all my pictures showed a frown and unhappiness. Some of it may have been the awkward age of preteen growing up but I think it was something else. I think it was the immaturity of my parents who didn't realize what a gift they had with a beautiful child. They were too young to value this gift and instead my father treated me as a possession that constantly disappointed him in his vision of how he wanted to present me as an extension of him to the world. My mother loved me and cuddled me non-stop but early on she worked very hard and then went to school nights. The worst time came later at the age of six.

I was six years old when my mother moved my father out of the house (today I am very proud of her for doing that) for cheating on her (it took me into my twenties before I figured that out). But it was the next 7 years that changed my life. It was the time from when they were separated until they were divorced. When my father who no longer lived with us came to our house everyday in his big Cadillac at ten to six every night. It was when my mother sent me out to talk to him because she wasn't speaking to him. I was sent to ask for money for child support. At six years old until thirteen years old I was sent to carry messages from my mother to my father and had to endure his wrath that he wanted me to pass back to my mother. I remember this time as a time when I cried everyday. He would spew venomous anger and threats at my mother who I loved until I cried and then he would stop. I then had to go back inside the house and answer my mother who asked, "well what did he say? Did he give you the money?". Finally, my mother hired a lawyer and garnisheed his wages which again made him very upset. He then started threatening to kill my mother and this was a time when I peed in bed and had horrible nightmares of my mother being in an accident.

No, my parents who both loved me were too young to appreciate the beautiful gift they received and instead they used this gift as a weapon in their anger against each other. They didn't talk directly to each other, they used me as the go between to unleash their anger on each other.

I see this very clearly in the pictures. You can see the years of crying in my face. You can see the stolen innocence, the robbed youth and their unawareness of what they were doing and how they were hurting their gift of a child. You can see my beaming happiness turned to a look of despair and resigned sadness and unhappiness that would then follow me for the rest of my life.

I am not saying that this was all bad. It had the benefit of making me grow up faster, of understanding selfishness and anger and later of being able to negotiate multi million dollar contracts in my work. It made me introspective and quiet. It made me afraid of getting married and having a family. It also made me never want to do this to a child ever. When I married and then divorced I was absolutely sure to never criticize my ex-wife to my daughter, to my gift.

We all have lived through lost innocence and stolen youth and it has shaped who we are today. But, it just struck me what a beautiful happy full of life child I was. I see what a gift I was to my parents. And how they were too young to appreciate their gift. And how they didn't realize the damage they were doing to this gift.

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Published: 12 December 2023

What is Success Part 2

As I progressed through the decades of my life, my goals and definition of success changed. Yes, in my twenties I was racing forward to the world ahead of me (avoiding getting caught by a woman and marrying). In my thirties, I struggled through aimless careers and relationships with women. My thirties was a grey decade of frustration. In my forties I finally started my own company and found boundless energy to make it work to the detriment of my family and other relationships. It was also fast moving but not a proud decade. In my fifties I finally started to calm down and become a better human being. Its when I opened our powerlifting gym, a happy time of my life. But it was also a time a struggle both financially and romantically. I seemed to be more sensitive. In my sixties, everything fell apart. The sky cracked open and I experienced the worst pain of my life. A whole decade of pain. The pain of losing everything financially and emotionally. Living destitute in a garage. My daughter disowned me, my dog died, my best friend betrayed me, my God's present to me girlfriend left me and my family except for my mother looked down on me. But at the same time, in this unthinkable pain I grew the most. I read and thought and studied more that my entire school life. I was driven to find answers. Finally, after all this searching, I simply gave up. I lost all faith. I had no goals, no plans and worst I couldn't see my way out of this. It seemed like life would never get better. Never. This was it. I had achieved all the success before and now I had no desire to go back and try to achieve the same successes. It was quiet. Everything died. I died.

From that absolute quiet, from six feet under ground level, I started to make an effort to crawl out. But nothing was the same. Everything was just noise, just a distraction. I felt old and beaten and 'who cares'. My mother still talked with me and told me to make goals and get going. I was in a nihilistic dark place. I was in a hole. I wished a car would hit me and end it. I walked. And I started to write a blog about my feelings about my dog.

Fast forward to my 70's and I am still here. But everything has changed. My daughter is my closest friend and my mother is my closest friend. My sister and my feelings of love toward her have come back. Marven my hand me down male cat purrs and cuddles all day and provides the most cat love a person can get. I have a handful of friends who are really good people. Financially, I am not lacking. (I started investing and learning to trade while in the garage). So you could say I have crawled out of the hole and am on progress to a quieter different kind of success.

So, what is success today?

Well to start it is not anything close to what success meant to me before. Gone, at least for now, are the sports goals of success. Gone are the being the best in the world in different areas. Gone is striving. It is replaced with taking my time, with "No Rush" and appreciating what is in front of me now. Learning to do woodworking and to build things is my new sport. Learning to stay ahead technologically is my enjoyment. Keeping up with my few friends and my family (except for my father for now), and taking care of my mother is what gives me peace and enjoyment. I've started acrylic painting, pencil drawing and find I like it and am pretty good at it. I am delving into the past in my family tree and learning that I am not so much an individual as much a replicate of my mother. My DNA is what I am. I see for the first time Ukrainian soldiers who look exactly like me. 92% of my DNA is the same as theirs. I see where I came from. My face, my nose my character, all these things came from my ancestry. I did not create them. I am very little individual and more a continuation of those before me. My goals are no longer to stand out. Instead they are more to understand where I came from and continue my heritage.

Today my goals are shorter, more like to do lists. Things that need to get done. And I revel in the feeling of success when I achieve them. I painted and rearranged the kitchen and now everyday I sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and thoroughly enjoying my success. I also painted and redid my bedroom with an Ikea bed frame on sale for cheaper than buying the wood and with mattresses I found at the curb that people threw out. Yes I cleansed, steamed and washed them with hydrogen peroxide. But now what a feeling of satisfaction to sleep in the greatest bed in the world with beautiful sheets that I bought for next to nothing at Value Village. My bedroom is a completely transformed heaven and peace and beauty. Slowly I will redo all the rooms in the house to reflect how I want to live, to be peaceful and beautiful. Slowly I get things done and this is now my greatest sense of success.

So what is success? The answer is it changes. The goal posts are moved all the time. What is important today will be different tomorrow. It depends on where you are today, what is in front of you now.