
What's a Big Day?
To knock off anything ambitious you generally need two things: unbroken time and sustained focus. But nobody has the first, and we’ve lost the muscle for the second. The solution – one solution, my solution – is Big Days. I’m suggesting you carve out one 24-hour block of time per month and devote it to a single task. When you clock back into your life the next day you’ll have put something significant in the books – be it soul work or work work. And no one will even know you’ve been gone.
One Big Days
Big Apollonian Day
The two sons of Zeus couldn’t have been more different. Apollo, god of the sun (not to mention music, poetry, plague and disease) was a logic freak. He prided himself on his rational thinking and sound reasoning. He was forever telling younger brother Dionysus not to touch his carefully ordered record collection — because the…
Read MoreBig Dionysian Day
Big Apollonian Day This is the second of a two-part post. The setup is explained in part one, Big Apollonian Day. * Sunday, May 14, 2023, 8am: Naxos, Greece As church bells gong, and waiters set up breakfast tables on patios on the beach, Mad and I jog through the narrow streets of the Chora,…
Read MoreA Horrible, Hideous No Good Very Bad Day
From time to time my congenital optimism — the emotion that underpins this whole project — gets pierced by sadness. Awful things happen. When the awfulness unfolds on a single day, you could call it a Big Day. Even though only thing “big” about it is the hole it leaves in your life. ** On…
Read MoreStart Me Up: How winning a hackathon changed Max Macaro’s life
The low points in our lives can break us. Or make us. In the fall of 2014, Max Macaro, a student from small town in Siberia, was right up against it. From a young age he’d had big tech dreams. He’d learned English through a mail-order program, taught himself coding, been accepted into an accelerator…
Read MoreBig No-Sugar Day
Recently, my friend Debra Jang, who’s a certified health and life coach, launched the Five-Day No-Sugar Challenge for her clients and any interested guests. It seemed a worthy project: the addiction to refined sugar is a scourge of contemporary Western life. This stuff, at scale, is making us fat and clouding our brains and killing…
Read MoreCollege Scouting Trip
The life of every parent is shot through with an awareness that the kids will one day fly the coop. And you’ll be left rattling around in an empty nest held together with pride, melancholy and regret about how you bungled the little stuff. (All those “petty treasons we commit against the ones we love,”…
Read MoreE-BUG for a Day
Most days pass so unremarkably that one blends into the next in the compost of memory until they’re just gone. But very occasionally comes a day you never forget. Because it’s a day you’ve been dreaming of since you were a little kid. Around 6pm on October 15, Alex Bishop — a 24-year-old U of…
Read MoreEmily Carr Pilgrimage
Deep bow to the artists who were ahead of their time, whose talents were overlooked in their day but whom the zeitgeist is now rounding up. Like: come back, right now. We need you. Emily Carr is so overdue for a second run. I’ve come to think of her as the first real Canadian whose…
Read MoreBrian Doyle Day
Since we last spoke, I’ve tried angel dust. Or whatever it is that Brian Doyle sprinkled into his short essays about the natural world. I’m late to the party on this writer, who died of brain cancer in 2017 at age 60. My initiation came this past weekend. I’d stumbled on his hummingbird story while,…
Read MoreSight Singing for Dummies
The best answer I’ve heard to the question “What is one skill we should all learn in quarantine?” was this from the writer Jia Tolentino: How to make someone feel loved from a distance. But here’s a pretty close second: singing. Yes! Who wasn’t inspired by all the Italians belting it out from their apartment…
Read MoreBack-Pocket Day
“I thought I was a hoarder. Turns out I’m a prepper.” That New Yorker cartoon captures the spirit of the last three months. Everybody holed up, thinking long thoughts, mentally bracing for what might be coming — while at the same time rueing that we didn’t snap into prep mode sooner. (It’s not like we…
Read MoreStuck in the Airport
Edited Jan 14, 2020 On August 28, 1998, Merhan Nasseri’s plane touched down at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, and the Iranian refugee strode into Terminal One. In the departure lounge he found a seat. And there he remained until July of 2006, when he took ill and had to be hospitalized. For 18 years,…
Read MoreMake a Killer Halloween Costume
Halloween is like Ocean’s 11: You’re in you’re out, right now. “Half-in” doesn’t really fly. Like wearing sweatpants in public, making a lame last-minute costume broadcasts a depressing lack of both imagination and initiative. Why bother? On the other hand, we’ve all had the experience of going all-in on a great costume that ended up…
Read MoreThe 10,000 Steps of Leopold Bloom
Lisa Simpson: “Oh, it must be Bloomsday. Every June 16, lovers of James Joyce follow the route traveled by Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses.” Bart Simpson: “What you’re saying is, we’ve run out of fun things to do.” … Even if the Irish family vacation planned by that other Homer, the dim one, failed…
Read MoreIn ‘N Out Surgery
“Count backwards from ten…” The Uber driver rolled to a stop at the co-ordinates he’d been given. It was a strip mall in the Maples district, a subdivision in the north end of Winnipeg, Manitoba. A realtor might charitably describe the neighbourhood as “emerging.” Wait, thought Ron Robinson. Can this be right? He and his…
Read MoreConstruct a Perfect Day
Is such a thing even possible? Lou Reed thought so, though sinking into a heroin fog probably isn’t the soundest strategy for long-term fulfillment – or even short-term happiness, if remembering what you were happy about is part of the deal. Not long ago, Melbourne-based writer Madeleine Dore wondered if you could construct a Perfect Day by…
Read MoreRaise a Ruckus
Certain unwritten rules have governed the Internet. One of them — which the Obama administration actually made a written rule – is Net Neutrality. It means that the Internet should be free. Everyone should have equal access. Think of the Internet as a public good, like clean water. The faucet is your web browser. What…
Read MoreApply for a Grant
Thunk! Her final arrow pierced the foam target across the gym, and my 11-year-old daughter smiled the smile of the just. Then she thanked the member of the local archery club who’d been giving her instruction. This was the end of her free lessons. It was time to join the club. I didn’t know how…
Read MoreAssemble a Barbecue
One Saturday morning not long ago, I popped down to Canadian Tire to buy a barbecue. There they all were, out on the floor, in their gleaming stainless steel hoods. I found one that looked pretty good. The cooking surface was huge – like the deck of an aircraft carrier. And the price was right. I thought,…
Read MoreBe a Movie Extra
There are a lot of rabid fans of The X Files. They’re probably called X-Files-philes. Jill Gardiner isn’t one of them. Okay, she wouldn’t kick David Duchovny off the pick-up soccer team for removing his shirt. But neither the show nor its star was the big draw on this particular day in September. Jill was…
Read MoreOne Big Day Journal
I’d always thought Big Days were especially apt for writers, musicians, artists – creatives. Because they’re the ones most vulnerable to interruptions from the Man from Porlock, right? Paul Graham set me straight. He isn’t an artist. He’s a British computer programmer, venture capitalist and start-up guru — but a programmer first and foremost. Programmers…
Read More >Photograph by David Niddrie “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” So wrote the poet Mary Oliver. In that spirit, I ask people, “What would you do with your one wild and precious day?” — your Big Day? A lot of people have trouble coming up…
Read More >“What are you raising money for?” Two people asked that question after hearing about the all-day bike ride. I get where they’re coming from: it’s a cultural reflex. From walkathons to telethons to hackathons, we now understand that any quirky, marathon-like undertaking must be raising money for something. Otherwise why do it? It’s kind of…
Read More >Photograph by David Niddrie “This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.” — Maya Angelou There’s a certain kind of person who, should he accidentally wander into the self-development section of a bookstore, will recoil like a terrier jolted by the forcefield of a buried electric fence. This guy’s with Seinfeld in…
Read More >One grey morning this past May I sat staring out the window at a white van parked outside. At the words “Wet Woof” in big letters on the side. Our retriever pup Penny was inside getting a wash and nail clipping and ear cleaning and scissors-trim. The Wet Woof guy is busy; we were thrilled…
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