There’s a strangeness to the first few days after landing in another country, even one that you are familiar with and that you consider home. It’s perhaps best described as a form of defamilarization, of the type Russian Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky write about. In everyday life, through habituation, what we see and our interpretation of it are run together, so that we instantly and unknowingly no longer see

Over the last month I’ve been drafting a short story, progressing, as I tend to do these days, very slowly. Most days I return have to force myself back to the coal face of writing. When I’m there I look around. I read back through the story, editing it. And then I get into flow, and add a paragraph or two, a few hundred words at most. At some point,

In Vancouver now, the leaves are very full in the West End. The weather’s been cool, with some rain, but on sunny days there’s that familiar intense play of light and shade, especially when you cycle on Haro or on Cardero in and out of the shade of horse chestnut and oak trees, and have to be very careful that car drivers see you at junctions. In the park, azaleas

On my return to Canada, I’ve been thinking a lot about land. Most talks or performances in Vancouver begin with a land acknowledgment that the city is built on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. If at times this becomes performative, as Cliff Cardinal’s provocative show As You Like It Or the Land Acknowledgment,  which we saw last year, showed, it’s also important as a first gesture, at

I’m writing this in Singapore, amid the heavy rain of a monsoon surge. I’ve made my last trip to the National Archives at Fort Canning, umbrella extended but my feet still soaked through. When this post goes live, I’ll be in Vancouver, in the spring, catching one of the waves of cherry blossoms on the trees in the West End. We’ll return to a very different Canada, with the first

We’re now in the last month of our time in Singapore, just that time when I start thinking with some longing for that other place in my life: Vancouver, and the space, the scenery, and the exposure to the natural world. I’ve written before about that sense of self-regulation in retirement. How you want to have time to live in the moment, but also push yourself, too, in new directions,

This month, buffeted by an unusually cold and wet monsoon, I’ve again started facilitating the Guided Autobiography group for NUSC alumni that I run each year. It’s something I enjoy doing very much. As a practice, guided autobiography brings together two important pieces my life: psychological practices (in the largest sense of the word) related to care and growth, and processes of writing and reading. As I facilitate the groups,

Ageing is an unlooked-for process, one that’s perhaps difficult to put into narrative form. When you’re young you acquire more skills, quickly in your teens and early twenties, and then more slowly in your middle years. This is the romance narrative, a hero on a quest of self-development. Then, in your fifties and increasingly in your sixties, your ability in some areas begins to slowly erode, imperceptibly at first. No

I’m back in Singapore again, and feeling, despite my transitions in Canada, very much at home. Often in movement between continents I find that there’s a day or two when you haven’t quite adjusted, and when you see with a kind of double vision. This time we flew direct, on the sixteen-hour Air Canada flight. We arrived at eight in the morning and tried, successfully, to stay up all day

In the recent provincial election, I voted for the first time as a Canadian citizen. Then, a few days later, I was a ballot issuing officer at a polling station on election day, waking very early in the morning darkness. The first major storm of fall had arrived, what is now referred to as an atmospheric river, and it rained continuously for two days. When my partner drove me to