Bits and bobs

Random thoughts about random things by a random person

Tag Archives: perspective


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Day 7 (Sept 18/19): Irish VAT rate – Why I may never complain about HST again!

(I just discovered that I hadn’t actually posted this last night when I wrote it…Oops! Not hard to tell why I’m not blogging for a living! 🙂 )

When I was purchasing some things in a gift shop this morning, the lady asked if I’d be claiming the tax back. I said I had planned on it, but didn’t know the process.

She helpfully explained it to me and gave me the card I would need.

She said it’s worth doing because even though I would get the full 23% back, it would definitely add up.

23%!!! I almost choked.

Before you ask, no I didn’t already know the tax was that high. Everything I’ve bought to this point was the price that was advertised so I had no idea how much of that was tax.

Anyway, it makes our 13% HST in Ontario seem rather paltry now…

I guess all things really are relative!

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Putting the right perspective on other people’s opinions

When it comes to this topic, the most common thing I hear is that we should never let other people’s opinions influence us.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true, or healthy.

And I don’t think the opposite is true, or healthy, either.

Other people can provide a distanced perspective on things in our lives and help us see things slightly (or even sometimes completely) differently than we see them.

Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees and we keep waltzing deeper and deeper in.

Even unasked for advice can provide some valuable insight on something – even though it can be as annoying as all get out.

That’s not to say that we should always follow the advice we are given. Listening and following are two completely different things.

If we are able to sit and really listen to what is said and allow ourselves to be distanced a little from the situation, we can evaluate what has been said a little more objectively. We can pull out the things that we accept and then push aside the things we don’t want to accept.

It might help us with some of the decisions we have to make – or possibly even help us extricate ourselves from some situations already-made decisions have put us into.

Of course, it’s easier to write those two paragraphs than it is to put them into action!

It takes a certain amount of, I would say, emotional maturity to do that. Depending on the situation – or the person giving the advice – we may have more or less of that than in other situations, or if we are hearing it from someone else.

A few things that could help in determining if we should listen or not are listed below. This is not an exhaustive list. And you may already have your own formula for how to deal with other people’s opinions. These are just some things that have helped me sift through the occasional morass of opinions.

1. What do I want and why do I want it? What do I expect to accomplish or get from it?

We can be very easily influenced if we don’t have a solid idea of where we stand on any given thing. Before we start listening to what other people have to say, we should at least have an idea of our own position on it and why it’s important.

2. What is the intention of the person speaking to me?

If we know that the person genuinely loves us, then we can assume that they are speaking from a place of concern. For me, that makes them more worth listening to than someone whose motives I’m not so sure about.

3. How much do I trust that person?

This is related to #2.

If the person is someone we trust, then why wouldn’t we listen? Even if it’s something we don’t want to hear, it might be that we need to hear it. I would rather hear something like that from someone I trust than anyone else. Or worse, not hear it at all and make a really stupid decision because I was maybe too stubborn to listen to another perspective.

4. How many people are saying the same thing?

If everyone around us is telling us practically the same thing, that’s a really good sign that we should stop and at least think about it.

Unless we’ve completely surrounded ourselves with awful people (and why on earth would we do that??), at least some of those people should be people we know and trust. If that’s the case there’s a good chance that what they are all saying has at least some value.

5. What do I want and why do I want it? What do I expect to accomplish or get from it?

Hopefully you have paid enough attention that you have noticed that this is the same as #1. 🙂

That’s because after we’ve heard what everyone has had to say, we should re-evaluate our own thoughts and position.

Has anyone said anything that shows that we won’t actually achieve our goal by following our current plan?

Or maybe has someone articulated a fear that we already had – or a consequence we hadn’t though of – and, hopefully, even provided some suggested solutions?

After all that, though, ultimately it is our own decision, whatever comes of it.

What’s that saying? Something to the effect that

We are free to choose, but we can’t choose the consequences.

So we have to accept everything that comes with those choices – the good, the bad and the ugly.

In a nutshell: Don’t dismiss what others have to say just because you don’t want to hear it. And don’t automatically do what they say just because they want you to.

Easy-peasy, right? 😉

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It’s not what you see…it’s what you SEE.

This is my view when I’m working or crafting in my den.

Your first thought might be, “Well, that’s nothing to get excited about – it’s a parking lot.”

And, technically, you would be correct.

But it’s also a voyeuristic peek into the theatre of life.

“Whoa there! You’re getting seriously corny now. Back off with the hyperbole, would ya??!”

I know…but it’s true.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, on a Friday afternoon, I saw a big SUV pull up. A couple of young women got out and a couple of other young women from my building came out, laden with backpacks and such. To say they were excited would be a serious understatement.

It was a beautiful day – the start of what promised to be a beautiful weekend and I immediately thought, “Girls trip!”

I couldn’t help but be affected the excitement of their moment. I was immediately thrown back in time to girls’ weekends I have participated in and a flood of wonderful memories washed over me.

My main cast of characters, though, are of the “lower” orders of Kingdom Animalia. Squirrels, birds, chipmunks, caterpillars, flies, and – oddly, for apparently a one-day-only showing – two cats.

The caterpillars were a fleeting seasonal thing, but when they were here, boy oh boy, were there a ton of them. I don’t normally mind caterpillars – I enjoy watching their furry little bodies inching along. But there were so many that I would have to say that their show bordered on the Stephen King side of things. But still, it was a free show and they didn’t eat all the leaves off the trees, so who am I to complain?

The birds – robins, mostly – have their annual shows in the spring. Wherever they’ve been before that, they have most definitely been well-fed. No scrawny, starving actors in that troupe! They proudly show off their red rotundity for all to see!

The chipmunks are the primary stars, though. They are around from spring, through summer and into fall. They are quite active and constantly alert! I don’t know how many of them are around – there might just be one or two repeats or there could be a bunch of different ones. They flit around so much that it’s hard to notice individual markings. In my head, though, there’s just one and, with my genius creative mind, I have named him Chippy.

Just yesterday, though, Chippy perched on the window well for quite a while and had a LOT to say in his monosyllabic chirpy voice. His favourite place seems to be at the exit of the downspout, though. Frequently my attention will be grabbed as I see his head pop out and up from there. (I’ve tried to get a picture of him – them? – but he’s just too fast. They’ve all come out blurry.)

The weather can be a character in and of itself, too. Beautiful, sunny days show the traverse of the sun – through shadows, as my window faces mostly north. Wind and rain or snow evoke a sense of coziness and gratitude for the warmth inside. Fog reminds me of growing up. Even if there are no living characters in the scene, weather can inspire feelings as strong as the most populated stage!

All that to say, while the parking lot, in and of itself, ain’t no great shakes to look at, the view from where I sit is really quite grand after all.

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The ocean – the ultimate battery charger!

My ocean view, growing up in St. Lawrence, NL

I grew up in a small town on the southeast coast of Newfoundland, a beautiful, rugged island jutting out into the North Atlantic. The ocean was a very strong presence in my youth and it has stayed with me throughout my life, even though most of my adult life has been spent away from in.

It is no surprise, then, when I say that my favourite place to recharge is by the ocean. I’m not a total snob about it – any body of water will do in a pinch, but the ocean is where it’s really at for me.

I spent almost 14 years living in Calgary, Alberta, on Canada’s prairies, about 40 minutes from the Canadian Rockies. People I knew who had grown up there got the same thing from going to the mountains. Others, who had grown up further east, fully on the prairies, got it from the vast openness of the horizon that they offered.

After having lived there for so long, I can understand both perspectives. There is something truly majestic about being in the mountains. Taking the gondola up Sulphur Mountain in Banff gives you a view and perspective that you can only get in the mountains.

I also really valued the open expanse of the prairies. There are lots of jokes about it – your dog runs away and you can see him for days and so on. Obviously, that’s not how it is, but it sure can seem like it – horizon and sky for days! It, too, offers a perspective on our place in the universe that can’t be achieved the same way in the mountains or by the ocean.

One of the things I miss the most about living on the prairies is being able to watch a storm from miles away as it crawls along the landscape – a curtain of snow or rain, or even just wind and dust, moving along the horizon like a separate living thing in and of itself. It’s truly beautiful.

Yet still, for me, it’s the ocean. I love the smell of it, the sound of it, the look of it. Standing on Signal Hill or at Cape Spear, facing east and seeing nothing but the vast expanse of blue (or steely grey on a cloudy day), knowing there’s nothing between you and Ireland except the rolling deep, gives another perspective of how we fit into this world.

  • Me, at Cape Spear, with Signal Hill in the background
  • An unruly sea at Cape Spear
  • Beautiful majesty at Cape Spear

You can even almost feel the pull of the swells. Even when it looks flat and calm, you know that beneath the surface there are currents constantly moving, moving, moving. The iiiiiin-out, iiiiiin-out, iiiiiin-out push and pull of the waves is hypnotic.

It was a similar feeling when I stood at Point Loma in San Diego and faced west out over the Pacific Ocean.

  • Pacific Ocean from Point Loma
  • Point Loma Lighthouse

But it wasn’t quite the same because it wasn’t “my” ocean. The Atlantic is where my heart is, so yeah, I do play favourites. 🙂

Here are some other favourite ocean places and pics for your perusal.

  • Shoal Cove Beach, NL, near where I grew up
  • Middle Cove Beach, NL
  • A beach in Conception Bay South, NL
  • The shore near Petty Harbour, NL
  • An iceberg off Petty Harbour, NL
  • A humpback and her calf

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I have regrets – and I’m glad

I used to buy into the whole “regrets are bad” thing. It sounds good and it makes sense: Regret is a bad feeling, so not having regrets would be a good thing, right?

When I sat and really thought about it, though, asking myself if I have regrets, I realized that I do – many, in fact. Most are small – things like wishing I hadn’t said something to someone or said it in a particular way. But there are a few big, life-impacting decisions, too. And I genuinely regret them.

At first I felt badly about that. It seemed like I was doing something wrong, given the pervasiveness of the “no regrets” movement.

For example, when I just Googled “live without regret”, the following three items were the top results:

  • How to Live Your Life Without Regret
  • 40 Ways to Live Life Without Regrets
  • How to Start Living Life Without Regret Right Now

There are also a kajillion memes and quotes about it, in case you are interested.

So, I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t regret those things. “Regret is bad” seemed to be everywhere and so many people I knew were adherents. Many people, in fact, talked about it as thought it were a badge of honour. “I regret nothing I’ve ever done!”

But I couldn’t quite convince myself to really get on board.

Maybe it’s a matter of semantics. For me, regret is about wishing I hadn’t done something (or in some cases, wishing I had). A couple of definitions I found online says pretty much the same thing:

  • Merriam-Webster: to be very sorry for
  • Cambridge Dictionary : a feeling of sadness about something sad or wrong or about a mistake that you have made, and a wish that it could have been different and better

From what I’ve read and heard, though, regret seems to have been equated with dwelling on things. If that’s where you’re coming from, then I agree: We shouldn’t dwell on things to a negative degree.

For me, though, regret and dwelling on things are totally separate items.

The things I regret, I regret for very specific reasons: they either hurt other people or myself.

As such, I’m glad I regret them because the regret reminds me why I don’t want to repeat those actions (or inactions).

I still wish that in those moments I had made other choices and I’m glad I feel that way. They weren’t OK choices to make. Honestly, to me, I should regret them.

Yes, I learned lessons from them, but me having an opportunity to learn a lesson isn’t a valid reason to excuse those decisions – decisions that caused hurt and pain.

Learning the lesson, rather, is the way to turn a bad thing into a not-so-bad thing. It still doesn’t turn it into a “good” thing (to me), but it kind of makes the best out of a bad situation.

The important thing is that I don’t dwell on those things. I don’t use them to torture* myself or to paralyze myself from moving forward. And I have forgiven myself for them.

I could be wrong, but (going by the “I wish I hadn’t done that” definition) I don’t think it’s truly possible to have absolutely no regrets about anything ever.

Setting an expectation of “no regret” seems, then, to be setting ourselves up for failure. (If you are one to beat yourself up about poor choices, you probably don’t need another “failure” to add to your list. 😉 )

I think it’s just another one of those things where the pendulum seems to swing entirely to one direction or another.

Generally, we land, I think, somewhere in the middle.

We recognize we shouldn’t have done something, we learn from it, we take that learning with us and move on, with the regret in the perspective in which it was perhaps intended:

“Hey – that wasn’t so fun. Let’s not do that again, K?”

Want to learn more?

In finishing up this post, I thought I’d go back to the ol’ Google machine and see just how off-base I am with this whole “embrace your regrets” thing, and found an interesting article in the Huffington Post. It contains some comments from Brené Brown, if you are interested.

*There are times, yes, when my anxiety is on overdrive and my brain decides to replay every poor decision I’ve ever made (from decades ago even) and every unkind thing I’ve ever said. It even throws in several moments that weren’t poor decisions or unkind moments – it twists normal, everyday interactions and interprets them negatively. But that’s not about regret. That’s about brain chemistry. When I’m not in the throes of anxiety, I know the difference. But that can be a whole series of posts in and of itself. 🙂

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Where are you from? (And why you might want to rethink asking that question.)

 “Where are you from?” About two years ago I would have thought that was a great question to ask – a great way to make conversation and get to know someone. Over my lifetime, I’ve asked it dozens of times. Probably over a hundred. And even that might be conservative.

It turns out, though, that those four little words can be quite loaded – and I had no idea.

To me where I am originally from (the island of Newfoundland, on the very east end of Canada) is a huge part of the person I am. There are vast linguistic and cultural differences there from even other parts of Canada. Where I live (Ottawa, Ontario) is very different from where I am from. Ottawa is part of my current life; Newfoundland is my cultural heritage.

I’ve always been interested in cultures and love learning about them. It’s not what’s the same about us that makes people interesting to me – it’s what’s different. It’s in the differences that I learn and grow and come to appreciate so many things.

So for me, asking someone where they are from has always come from a place of wanting to respect a person’s heritage enough to ask about it and wanting to increase my own understanding of places around the world.

I have learned, though, that to the person on the receiving end of that question, it might not come across that way.

One of my friends here is of African descent, by way of Barbados. She grew up in Manitoba, one of Canada’s prairie provinces. She’s the one who opened my eyes to the potentially darker side of this question.

For her and, I have learned since, many people who don’t sound or look like they “belong” in Canada, that question can make them really feel like they don’t, in fact, belong. She explained to me that when she answers that she’s from Manitoba, there is frequently a follow-up of, “No…but where are you really from?” Because a person of her colour, obviously, couldn’t possibly be “from” Manitoba.

We had a really good conversation about it that day and it made me uncomfortable. I wanted to resist it. I even thought to myself, “That’s ridiculous. She’s being over-sensitive.”

I realized later that I thought those things simply because of how uncomfortable I felt. I had flashbacks of times I had asked that question over the years. I didn’t like the thought that when I thought I was showing interest in them, I may actually have been insulting them. I didn’t want that to be the case, so I resisted the idea.

We often do that, don’t we? In so many situations it’s easier to put the “fault” of something back onto someone else. And my initial, defensive reaction was to do just that.

Since that conversation about two years ago, I have thought a lot about this idea. In fact, I’ve tried to write this post a bunch of times already and have never really been able to get it to where I’m comfortable with it or to write it in a way that readers would be comfortable with it.

Today I realized that making people (myself or others) comfortable with it shouldn’t be part of the equation.

That’s not to say I’m intentionally dismissing your feelings. What I mean is that it’s normal for this to be an uncomfortable subject, especially when it’s new to you and if you are an asker of that question.

Plus, sometimes it’s good to be made uncomfortable and if you are uncomfortable right now, please read on.

In today’s world, I think we need to be uncomfortable more often. Reading only things that already match our thoughts and ideas – things that we are comfortable with – only serves to more firmly ensconce us on that particular “side” of an issue. We will only learn and progress – as individuals and as communities – when we allow ourselves to learn about and try to see the other side of things. Frequently that means we will be uncomfortable. And, seriously, that’s OK – even more than OK.

Before I go further, let me explain that for me this is not a question of “political correctness”. I don’t even like that term. It might just be a question of semantics, but to me it implies that something should be changed solely to appease one group or another because politicians are afraid of that particular group. I get that laws need to be changed sometimes in order for changes to happen and particularly for rights to be given, but changing individual attitudes and behaviours is more than that.

For me when we change how we act, what we say and what we accept from those around us – it shouldn’t be because it’s the “politically correct” thing to do, but because it’s the right thing to do, out of simple human decency and respect.

This is one of those situations. Just because I’m curious about someone’s background and I don’t have any ill-will or malicious intent in my question doesn’t mean I have carte blanche to ask it whenever the urge strikes me. If I’m genuinely interested in that individual – and not just satisfying my own curiosity – then the first thing I should consider is whether or not my question would be welcome in the first place. (Another one of those reminders from the universe that it’s not, for some reason, all about me. 😉 )

Interestingly, I have even realized that I have not always enjoyed being asked that question myself.

As I said, I grew up in Newfoundland. European settlement of Newfoundland, which began in the 1500s, was primarily by English and Irish settlers, with some pockets of French communities depending on what was happening between Britain and France at any given moment. There are almost as many variations of English spoken in Newfoundland as there are communities. It is, I’m sure, a linquistic academic’s dream. (For more information about that, see the Wikipedia articles Newfoundland (island) and Newfoundland English.) In my “natural state”, I have an accent.

I lived almost 14 years in Calgary, Alberta. More often than not, as soon as someone heard me speak, they invariably asked either the general “Where are you from?” or the specific “Are you from Newfoundland?”

When I confirmed that I was, indeed from Newfoundland, the reactions were generally (in the other person’s mind, no doubt) very positive: “Oh! I love Newfies!” or “Newfies are the hardest workers!” There were also the comments about us being the biggest drinkers, too, which always came up when people found out that I was from Newfoundland and didn’t drink. “How is that possible???” they would ask with sincere incredulity. Happily, I never ran into the stereotype of “stupid Newfies”.

I either had to learn to just laugh it all off and take a 10-minute detour to every conversation when I first met someone or I had to learn to hide my accent and stop using those colourful expressions. Luckily, I have a knack for languages and accents and could hide that pretty easily. I also learned fairly quickly to avoid expressions that non-Newfoundlanders wouldn’t understand. (I should be clear: I never did this because of any sense of shame of being from Newfoundland; it was strictly because of how annoying and bothersome the interactions were.)

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t equate those experiences with the experiences that people of colour or who have immigrated to Canada deal with. Hardly. For one thing, I at least had a choice to be able to hide my linguistic identity. That choice is not available to people of a different colour or who aren’t able to blend in with the language so easily.

But thinking of my own experiences with that question has given me a bit of a different perspective into what it might be like for others on the receiving end of it. It also helped me realize that, even if there isn’t a sense of being made to feel like you don’t belong or perhaps of being “less than”, not everybody even wants to talk about where they are “from”. So I try to be respectful of that now.

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

Maya Angelou

If you’d like to learn a bit more about this, please check out this TED talk by Taiye Selasi and this Huffington Post article by Isabelle Khoo.