The Citizen, 2012-09-06, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2012. PAGE 5.
Once upon another lifetime it was my
honour to address the graduating
students of a private school. When I’d
exhausted my repertoire of pieties and
platitudes the headmaster asked me if there
was one piece of advice I could offer that
would guarantee success in whatever they
chose to do.
“Sure,” I said. “I can tell you how a simple,
easy, healthy, dirt-cheap alteration in your
daily life will guarantee success. I can also
guarantee that 99 per cent of you will scoff and
reject it the moment you hear it. Still game?
They were.
So I gave it to them in three words: Get. Up.
Early.
How early? Crack of dawn early, I told
them. Get up early and work on your dream.
Read, paint, sing, sketch, write, knit –
whatever. Do just an hour or so early every
day. They groaned and recoiled as if they’d
been clubbed with baseball bats.
For once, I knew what I was talking about.
Thirty-five years ago, when I was a husband, a
new father and a holder of a full-time job it
occurred to me that if I ever wanted to be
anything more than the above, I needed to find
some extra hours in my day.
It was summer, and I lived in a part of the
country where the sun was already up and
blazing at five in the morning. And so, after a
few coughing, spluttering mornings, was I.
It’s a grand time to get things done, the early
morning. There is nothing on TV, no
colleagues to drop by and chat. The rest of the
family is asleep, the phone isn’t likely to ring
and it’s ‘way too early for Jehovah’s Witnesses
to be knocking at the door. Best of all the mind
is fresh, rested and – after a jolt of java –
frisky, even.
So I got up and wrote. Not absolutely every
day (I took Sundays off and there was the odd
morning compromised by flu or travel or a
hangover that made it too painful). But almost
every day – and I got more writing done in
those precious one or two hours than I did in
the rest of the week.
Productive? Well, 13 books, five seasons’
worth of TV scripts, uncountable TV and radio
commentaries and a raft of speeches – all
written in the early hours of the day. Oh, yes
– and 35 years worth of weekly newspaper
columns. Thirty-five times 52 … that means
this is my 1,820th column, give or take.
I’m not boasting about this, because it’s no
big deal. I didn’t erect a cathedral or compose
a symphony – all I did was get up early most
mornings and sit down in front of a keyboard.
It’s like building a home or walking 100 miles;
it doesn’t get done overnight; it gets done a
brick or a step at a time.
Ah, but what about the hard part? What
about rolling out of the sack at an hour when
most folks are in deep sleep (and some are just
rolling in from a night on the town)?
Yeah, there are compromises involved. An
early riser doesn’t get to close the bars or
watch the Late, Late Show. People who get up
at dawn tend to go to bed earlier than most
which means your social life takes a bit of a
hit. But there’s nothing on television that you
can’t tape and watch at your convenience. And
having one or two fewer beers with the gang
won’t do you any harm. Au contraire.
Best of all, you get to have some time to
yourself to Get Something Done. Read your
favourite author, complete a correspondence
course, paint a watercolour, write those letters
you’ve been putting off. Move your life along
so that you’re not merely putting in time.
Just do it.
There are other rewards, often unexpected.
Some years after I gave my talk at the private
school I got a phone call from someone whose
name I didn’t recognize. She was a film
producer, working in Edmonton. She had also
been a member of the student body in the
school where I gave my talk.
“I just want to tell you,” said the voice on the
phone, “that I took your advice – about getting
up early. It made all the difference in my
career.”
Yes!
Arthur
Black
Other Views Get up, get something done
Last week marked another chapter in the
saga of the Brussels Library and for
many people in the community, it must
have felt like the movie Groundhog Day when
the suggestion of going back to the drawing
board was made.
I have always felt that if the story of the
Brussels Library ever made its way to national,
or even international significance, that I could
be one of those journalistic authorities who
could be brought in to tell the story.
Everyone has seen examples of this before,
when a story breaks on a large scale and some
of the world’s biggest news outlets are
covering it, national journalists are searching
for local journalists who have been there since
the beginning to fill them in on the details.
Granted, I haven’t been covering this story
since its very beginning, but I have been
covering it for quite a while, and I, like many
others in the Brussels community, feel like I
have seen this scene play out before.
Architect John Rutledge was brought in to
bring his vision to a project that Huron East
Council had acknowledged was near and dear
to the hearts of many local residents and he
worked on several different drafts that he
hoped would preserve the integrity of the
original design, while making the library
accessible to all in the 21st century.
However, here we go again as council
received just one tender for the project and it
will be delayed again until next year. The
tender was turned down as it was between 20
and 25 per cent higher than Rutledge’s highest
estimate.
Mayor Bernie MacLellan said the
municipality was the victim of tendering the
project at the wrong time.
Others, however, are taking the opportunity
to attempt to alter the project completely. At
the Aug. 28 meeting, Councillor Bill Siemon
said he’d like to see the original entrance to the
library continue to be used. According to
Rutledge’s current plans, this is no small
alteration and it would change the entire scope
of the project.
Siemon says it is a cost-cutting measure,
however, it has the potential to be another
example of members of Huron East Council
bringing in an expert and paying him for his
opinion, only to suggest that they know better.
The same thing happened when heritage
restoration specialist Thor Dingman brought in
his plans for the municipality’s town hall in
Seaforth and suggestions were made to alter
his entire slate of plans.
This also comes across, to me, as too little
too late. Over the past eight months, Rutledge
has made numerous presentations to council on
the layout and everything was approved. No
concerns about the layout were raised at that
time. However, now, in the 11th hour, there are
some who want to reinvent the wheel.
If this request were to be factored in, it could
very likely set the project back even one more
year. The current motion is to re-tender the
project in November, which is less than two
months away.
I have been at council meetings that led to
public meetings, I have been at public
meetings where there were no members of the
public and I remember the days when a new
library was scheduled to be built. The Brussels
Library has gone through many steps and just
when it looked like a solution that everyone
seemed to like had been found, the rug may get
ripped right out from under us.
With momentum in the community and
residents once again excited about the project,
now is not the time to play architect.
Here we go again
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
When I was younger everyone
watched the sitcom Friends on
Thursday evenings.
I was never really into the show that much; I
was a Seinfeld fan and would be more likely to
be found doing pretty much anything else on
Thursday nights.
That said, the show was kind of like
mosquitos in summer to me. Annoying to hear,
annoying to see and severly agitating if it ever
got under your skin.
There was, unfortunately, no way to avoid it
for the 10 years that it plagued the airwaves
(and the years after 2004 that it stayed in
heavy rerun rotation) so I, through sharing
televisions with other people, have found that
like that annoying song you can’t get out of
your head, quotes and story lines often bubble
to the surface of my conscious mind from the
show.
Most recently I found myself remembering
when Ross, who, if memory serves me right
(and no, I will not fact check this, I don’t want
to dedicate any more of my limited memory
storage capacity to the bloody show), was
married several times, wed someone outside
the group and due to past relationships she
made him move which resulted in him having
a commute.
He said that the time he would have going
to, and coming home from, work on the
subway would give him “the gift of time” and
enable him to accomplish things he otherwise
might not have found time for.
Unfortunately for my deep-seeded hatred for
the show, which is the pulpiest of fictions if
you ask me, he may have made an apt analysis
of having a commute in the morning and at
night.
I’ve always endeavoured, sometimes
unsuccessfully, to keep my work life and my
home life separated enough that the two
couldn’t adversely affect each other. If there
was some benefit to a crossover, I would
gladly allow it to happen, like finding myself
finishing my work day in Brussels on a Friday
afternoon and getting to visit the Brussels’
Farmer’s Market at the end of the day.
I’ve always felt that my job and my work
suffers if I let stresses from outside it get into
my head too often at work and I’ve always
hoped to try and keep the two separate.
It’s not an odd idea, I know; many
workplaces have rules about fraternizing (to
varying degrees) with co-workers for exactly
that reason; home life can have a negative
impact on job performance.
I’ve found that (sure it’s only been three
days, but this isn’t the first time I’ve
commuted for my job either) since I moved to
Goderich I’m able to compartmentalize myself
better in the mornings and wind down better at
night.
So, in vacating my home in Blyth I’ve found
that I’ve been given the gift of time and,
maybe it’s just because I expected my
commute to take so much time out of my life,
but having that extra 25 minutes to just listen
to some music and drive makes the rest of the
night seem to pass even slower. Having a
geographical barrier between my office and
the tiny bedroom serving as my fortress of
solitude seems to have made the time I spend
at home not so rushed and hurried and allows
me to relax a little bit more.
Of course it could just be a matter of
comparison. For the past two weeks I’ve had
my head buried in boxes, moving plans,
moving dates, moving costs and an uncertain
future and I’m just now getting the opportunity
to extricate myself from the whole moving
thing since all that’s left is the unpacking and
the liquidation of surplus assets. For the two-
to-three months prior to that I was also running
around trying to get a house sold. Having
nothing to worry about except getting to and
from work and whether I’ll have spaghetti and
meatballs or hamburgers for dinner could just
be a liberation from what has been about three
to four months of stress.
Alternatively, when you spend 12 hours on a
Tuesday moving from one house to an
apartment, then from that same house to
another house, the following Wednesday,
Thursday and Friday (and the long weekend
after that, thank goodness for that) would
probably seem pretty relaxing providing, like
me, you’re ignoring the pile of boxes yet-to-
be-opened.
Of course it could pertain to the fact that for
several years, moving to where I did marked a
summer vacation in Goderich. While I’d like
to say that meant sitting and chilling on the
beach, what it actually meant was seeing old
friends and spending far too much time
indoors for my own good. Maybe the
compartmentalizing and unwinding I’ve
managed are more related to nostalgia than
they are to the cool-down periods my
commute provides me with.
I, however, like to believe that it’s my
original idea because then that means the sense
of calm that has invaded my home life over the
past few days will remain throughout the year,
or, at least until the commute from Goderich to
Blyth becomes riskier due to the snow falling,
flying and eventually drifting across one of the
multitude of different ways I can take to get
from home to the office.
Even then, however, the white-knuckle drive
home in my little go-kart (or piggy bank, as
my father and brother like to call it) will
provide some form of break between my work
at the office and putting my feet up when I
eventually do pry my fingernails out of my
steering wheel cover.
Either way, the extra hour that I spend on the
road each day has not been as much of a pain
as I thought it would. There’s been quite a bit
of auto-pilot driving as I enjoy songs on the
radio or pop in an old CD to accompany me on
the drive. Maybe this whole living far from
work thing won’t be the headache I envisioned
it to be when I first decided where I was
moving to.
Commuting and the gift of time
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den