The Moose

Career / The Moose — 2 Comments
12
Mar 10

Six inches

I wear size nine-and-a-half shoes. I’m five-foot, nine-inches tall. I weigh 168 pounds. I wear size medium shirts. My waist is twenty-nine inches. My IQ is somewhere around 135. I got A’s in college, but really, I deserved B’s. I swear sometimes. I try to be nice to everyone I meet. I drive a few miles per hour over the speed limit, and I’m rarely late. I try to floss every day, but sometimes every other day is all I can manage.

I’m not overly handsome, nor overly homely. I don’t do any better or worse with women than the next guy. I rarely go out to eat, but when I do, I go to places like Applebee’s and Chili’s. When I’m feeling fancy, I’ll eat at Macaroni Grille or The Cheesecake Factory. I drive a Jeep. I get embarrassing pimples usually a half-dozen times a year. I get less sleep than is required. When I chew gum, I get that white stuff in the corners of my mouth. If I fart in public, I make that disgusted look like someone else around me did it.

I’m divorced, which I guess is normal. My marriage lasted just two-months longer than the marriages of my counterparts who get divorced their first go round. I couldn’t have 2.5 kids, so rounded up to three beautiful children. I am possibly changing careers for the first time in my life, which statistics say will be the first of six career changes for me.

By all accounts, I’m average, or at least that is the way I have been living. That’s what I have been telling myself.

Average is safe. So long as I’m not the worst, no one can ridicule me, and, until recently, my attitude and belief has been that there is always someone better than me. We use averages to determine our social norms so that we can function as a society. It’s good to know that on average, the cost of goods and services increases annually by three to four percent. That is a useful average. It’s good to know that my average amount of my average pay check. The process of adding everything together and divvying up is quite a useful function, but it has created a culture that inhibits people becoming their best; it has created a culture that on average, has kept me average.

I’m not being fair to society, It’s not society’s fault that there are elite and derelict. It’s not society’s fault that one man chooses to be a homeless alcoholic while another chooses to create a software company who’s annual sales are greater than some country’s gross national product. It’s not society’s fault that the majority of the people straddle some bell-curve and never deviate from the standard deviation. It’s not society’s fault that when I stand naked before a mirror, all I see (sigh) is average.

I choose to believe that my life, and my circumstances are those of my own making. I mean that on a much deeper level than it may readily seem. I mean, everything about my life is my own making. From my financial state (considering the current recession and my present career—average), to my physical health. All of it is my own making. My anxieties, fears, hopes, dreams, my mid-life crisis; all my own creation, all average.

Average doesn’t just happen to someone, they choose it, I chose it. No one just winds up poor or sick or depressed or an alcoholic, they chose it. Bill Gates, did not just happen to become one of the most wealthy men in the world. He chose that life. On some fundamental level we all choose our outcomes. We chose our outcomes, consciously or not, but choosing out present thoughts and attitudes. Me? I have chosen to be average; until now.

“Men do not attract that which the want, but that which they are. … Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.”
- James Allen (1864-1912)

There is no one on this planet better at being me, than me. Today, I think that instead of being average, I’ll just be myself. I’m pretty sure that Jack Ensor does not live at the top of some curve; but rather, in the extremes. I will be great or I will be awful, a total success or a total failure. Good, fair, mediocre, average: these just wont do.

To be continued…

The Moose — Comments Off
8
Feb 10

Soliloquy

I’ve heard that one of peoples’ greatest fears is the fear of dying alone. What a stupid fear. Of course we are going to die alone. Everyone dies alone.

Perhaps that is cynical, but it’s the truth. Even if I were to die with 50 other people on a tour bus, the experience of death and dying is all mine: I am dying. I am dead.

The transition from life to death is perhaps quite scary. What happens next? What about my friends? My family? My obligations? One might lie there on his deathbed, proclaiming in soliloquy, a story of woe to himself, and despite his pleas and the count of his audience, he alone will die; he will die alone.

He lived alone, in fact.

Regardless of his ability to multiply, or the number of his children, grand children, wives or friends, he lived alone. When he smelled flowers, or sang songs or cried for joy or sadness, he alone did those things. Though his choices affected many, none of them affected anyone as much as him. They were his choices alone.

When he spoke precious words to one or to thousands, it was he that spoke the words. When he told her of the love he had for her, he told her of his love, and he loved.

All men live and die and act alone. Every man’s life is a soliloquy.

The fear is not that he die alone; but rather, that he die unnoticed.

The Moose — Comments Off
11
Nov 09

We Remember

Though I never knew him, my grandfather, Jack Parks Ensor, was a military man. He retired from Her Majesty’s service a light colonel, and he himself orchestrated many campaigns and played a very important role in the second world war. My dad has all the history books, and has told me all the stories about the man for whom I am a namesake.

Every November 11, Rememberance day, was a big day for my dad. We’d go to the community centre or the Catholic Church or some other venue and watch as the Legionaires would march in slowly with reefs of poppies, and crosses of rememberance. Some of the retired men carried their colours, others just carried tears for men they’d lost in Italy, Poland, Germany and other stages where we fought. We fought.

It seems easy for historians to say that “we” fought a war. I suppose that identifying ourselves as one of them is the only way to preserve our history as a country. But every year that my dad took me to a Rememberance day service, the numbers of veterans was smaller. They fought the war. The war ended in 1945, and I reckon that the oldest to survive couldn’t have been much younger than twenty, being replacements for those who fell ahead of them. Survivors now are pushing ninety, and surely many of their minds and memories are waning, just as their bodies are failing. In just a decade, all those who fought in the last world war will be gone, and we will remain.

I’ve never fought in a war and I don’t know many people who have. A handful of my friends are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’m sitting in a hotel in Fresno, complaining because there’s no grocery store close by.

No one knows for sure how many people died in WWII. Conservative estimates range from 50 million to other guesses upwards of 70 million. Million. If you think about that, that’s the current population of Canada wiped out twice over. That’s one quarter of the US population. Those were all people with hearts, and dreams, and fears and girlfriends, and love, and tears. Each one of them had a mother who birthed them, and loved them and prayed for them. Each one hoped they’d live. They didn’t.

I never fought, and I hope I never have to; and as for you, I wish the same. Remember the wars gone by. Remember the hearts broken as telegraphs came in saying that our loved ones were killed in action or missing or taken prisoner.

They fought the war. We remember.

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