Why do we do this? Why do most of us cling to this path even though it is so painful or so obviously unsustainable for the long run? Why do we want to saddle our kids with this type of legacy? Daniel Quinn, in his classic book Ishmael “examines mythology, its effect on ethics, and how that relates to sustainability. The novel uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution. It posits that human supremacy is a cultural myth, and asserts that modern civilization is “enacting” that myth.” If you are interested in learning more about his eloquent and compelling examinations, I urge you to read these amazing books “Ishmael”, “The Story of B”, “My Ishmael” and “Beyond Civilization”. He has more and I read most of them, but these four provide a solid foundation for a new thinking. I can tell you that I can separate my life into the moment before I read Daniel Quinn and the moment after I started.

My new paradigm is about freeing myself and my family to stop living life inside the box of this cultural myth that we humans are here to do as we please with the world and the world will just accept that. We have to know by now that any species who overruns the world as we have, who causes hundreds and thousands of species to go extinct, who treat the world in this deplorable manner with little care for the great responsibility entrusted to us is going to be made extinct. We, man, who is the first species on earth to think and therefore act beyond our instincts have been entrusted with the care of the world, to work within the boundaries of laws such as gravity and the laws of nature, to protect this biosphere and leave it better than we found it for future generations of humans as well as other species of animals and plants.

We, as in any leadership venture, are going to face an uphill battle. It won’t be easy to change the flow of choice, ritual, habit, life from the direction we are in now to a whole new direction. If we succeed in changing this direction over the next few hundred years, we will be able to survive and eventually thrive as a whole biosphere. If we don’t change, we will be extinguished, as so we should. I am willing to face the uphill battle and the unknowns…. it won’t be easy… I know this much for sure…but I know we have to change. Who else is willing? The toughest part is not knowing the solution, we have to keep digging deep and utilize the most creative potential we have to change this flow. One thing we humans have been great at is using our imaginations… not all of us, not all the time… but history has shown that we can be immensely creative. This is one of those times that more of us need to be creative and more of the time… we have to stay on and keep thinking and more importantly doing action to help move us in the right direction. We cannot be paralyzed by the feelings on not knowing what to do.

Deep Practice:

My perspective has changed quite drastically on the subject of practice. Even though I have always know the adage “Practice makes Perfect”, I guess I never took it seriously enough, or I did not understand how excellent perfect has to be or I didn’t understand how practicing is a constant on-going thing or maybe a bit of all three. As most people, I have many talents, but they have largely gone untapped because of my ignorance of the importance and concept of ‘deep practice’. As David so eloquently explains it, ‘deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted way – operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes – makes you smarter…. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities, to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn’t help. Reaching does.”

I first understood deep practice from Shin’ichi Suzuki’s books about teaching violin and Ed Sprunger’s book called ‘Helping Parents Practice’. Dr. Suzuki eureka moment was noticing deeply how children learn their mother-tongue with no formal training. Suzuki found this to be a miracle, while most people took it for granted. He went on to create the Talent Education philosophy that “Every child can” and his vision was to grow the children of the world with noble character through the violin as the means, to teach them discipline, hard work, persistence, how to overcome obstacles, etc. His thoughts were that just as elegantly and simply as the child learns the mother tongue, the child will learn the violin. The child has to listen to beautifully articulated recordings of the repertoire and build their ear. They learn their pieces by ear. They are also expected to do a lot of repetition with repertoire they have already learned. Practice is about repeating something over and over again to reach excellence. Another important reason for practicing known repertoire repeatedly is that one can reach for change, target a failure and turn it into a skill while playing pieces thoroughly known to the student.

Anyone curious as to how and why this style of practicing works? Why is it that Suzuki believed that ‘every child can’? Isn’t talent something you are simply born with? David traveled the world to talent hotbeds to gauge what the common factor is between them. He traveled to see talented soccer players in Brazil, violinists in New York, tennis players in Russia, etc. The commonalities were that they practiced differently (deeply) , and were passionate enough to put in the hard work, the struggle over the long haul. There were hardly any geniuses or prodigies to be found. Also, the missing link as David Coyle explains is a wonderful substance called myelin.

Myelin (the deep practice cell):

Myelin is the insulation that wraps the nerve fibers in our brains and increases signal strength, speed and accuracy. According to Dr. George Bartzokis, who spoke with David ‘Myelin is the key to talking, reading, learning skills, being human.’ We used to attribute these functions to neurons, but what has been evolving is this new understanding that as skill develops, it builds thicker and thicker myelin around the nerve fibers, which make the skill better and more efficient. All the talent hot beds practice deeply and therefore in turn myelinate at a higher level over the long term. This builds mastery. Building myelin takes time, and putting ourselves in a position to fail, fix our mistakes and fail better and continue this process until we accomplish the task is one of the quickest and most efficient way to build myelin. Skill can now be redefined as ‘myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals’, the two are married together.

What has this information taught me? I must do daily what I love to do and develop skill in those areas that matter to me. Deep practice can be applied to careers, learning a language, writing, playing an instrument, playing a sport, etc. I think it is critical to establish what it is I am passionate about, focus on those few things, not waste my time and energy on obligations rather than priorities, and be willing to work hard, struggle and attain mastery in my special talents. I think more importantly that I must teach my children to do the same. It is so easy to entertain ourselves to oblivion and waste what little time we have on this earth. I believe that there is no one right way to live, we have to each blaze our own trail, but it is vital we live our life with some purpose and poise. Myelin through deep practice gives us the opportunity to develop our own special uniqueness and share it with world. Are you willing to take this opportunity?

So again … what is the price? Well, of course it depends on what you are trying to master, each idea/concept will have specific nuances to conquer. Here are the common threads however. It turns out that there is a 10 000 hour rule. According to the Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller ‘Outliers’, he demonstrates what masters like Bill Gates,
Mozart, Picasso, Michael Jordan have in common, despite the differences in the content of their mastery. They all put in the required minimum 10 000 hours of hard work, of diligent practice in their area and were prepared and shaped by those fires. This led to their ultimate mastery and success in their field. You can be the smartest person on earth and/or the most talented, but if you do not have those 10 000 hours of practice, you will not be prepared when your many BIG opportunities for success arise. You have to become what John Maxwell calls a ‘talent plus’ person. The talent is not enough and without some effort at mastery the opportunities will pass you by, unfruitful.

Success through mastery will only be possible when your talent meets opportunity after thorough preparedness. The other thing to remember is that whatever you are trying to do is going to be hard for a long time until it gets easier. Of course, then you will ascend another learning curve and you will go through the hard labor until it gets easier again. When you overcome obstacle after obstacle, growth spurt after growth spurt in your endeavor, whether it is playing an instrument or creating your business, you will eventually achieve the ability to create splendid masterpieces. At that time, others will look at your work in awe and talk about your overnight success. Only you and other masters like you will truly understand that growing any sort of talent takes a similar tough journey, in the body, mind and spirit. The actual journey of becoming a master is as important as the the technical skills necessary to become a master. This is because the journey shapes your habits, your ability to persevere and your belief in yourself as well as your actual love and passion for what you do.

Another important thing to remember if this… 10 000 hours works out to be about 3 hours/day, 365 days/year for 10 years or 6 hours/day, 365 days/year for 5 years. This is not trivial. Think about it, this explains how a baby becomes amazingly fluent in his/her mother-tongue. The baby is spoken to when awake which is more than 6 hours a day and the 10 000 hours adds up really easily and quickly. The baby becomes a mother-tongue master, intuiting complicated and simple grammar rules by him/herself and is able to articulate thoughts and feelings by the tender ages of 2, 3, 4, 5 years. This is truly amazing. What this non-trivial fact also tell us is this… we cannot become masters of too many things. The saying ‘Jack of all trades.. master of none!’ warns that if we spread ourselves too thin on what we want to focus on, we will end up mediocre in some and maybe good in others…. but alas we will never become great in a single one or two things. We only have so many sets of 10 000 hours, so we must choose wisely where to spend that time, our effort and money for growth.

The last angle I want to discuss is our children. For our children to gain mastery in something they love, they need three ingredients… yes you guessed it 1. 10 000 hours in the area to study, 2. love and encouragement to cheer them through those tough times… and .. what is the last of the three? Well, it is actually the hardest… we have to draw out what special talents were given to them, something they are interested in and help them cultivate it in the first place.

Good luck digging and unearthing yours and your children’s beautiful special talents.

I am thankful to Kyle and Amelia for suggesting this video from youtube called The Story of Stuff. Chuti watched it, I watched it and so did our 4 kids. In fact, we’ve watched it multiple times. It is well made, funny and full of insights. We have been living counter-consumption the way this video suggests for a while, in line with other things we have been learning. This video and its information will now drive us to high levels of simplifying and minimizing our consumption.

I urge all of you to watch it and contribute to the dismantling of our consumption-driven culture.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a beautiful story written to evoke a truly questioning spirit in each one of us as to how we, by changing our thinking regarding philosophy and ecology can positively impact the earth. This book is for those who are interested in the daunting dilemmas that beset our planet. Truly, one person can make massive change. Here is a great review of the book.

I am on the journey to do my part to help our earth heal… will you join me?

The process of building our dream house was exactly that, a process. We started by selecting our custom builder recommended by a friend. We selected the plan and were pretty settled. This was around April, 2005, the time we sold our house to be moved. Then, our house did not move right away. If you’re wondering if you read correctly, yes I did write OUR HOUSE DID NOT MOVE. Read the first part of dream home to know what I am talking about. The house move happened 4 months later, plenty of time for us to start playing with the design of the new house and plenty of time to make changes and more changes and then some more.

Eventually, things did not work out as planned with that builder and so went through iterations of changes with an architect to design our own house and then plans after plans until we finally hired a top custom builder in Winnipeg and let them do their job. By the time we were ready to start building, a whole year had passed. During the period we worked with Huntington Homes, we did a lot of research into what we wanted. I mean this was to be our dream home after all. It was built with a structural wood floor and all sorts of other constructionally superb choices as Chuti is a structural engineer and knows about this stuff. We planned for it to be able to accommodate our parents if they wanted to move in with us. We ended up with 4 bathrooms, if you can imagine!

We stopped by strangers’ homes if we saw something we liked to ask them questions. Somehow, we were so compelled by our vision that we had no fear. You might think that people might have politely answered our questions for a few minutes before dismissing us or even that they chased us away. That was not our reality. In fact, no one chased us away, everyone was pretty friendly and answered our questions. Some even went to the extent of asking us to come back in a few hours during which they gave us a tour of their homes and garages and showed us the plans they had dug up. People were really great to us.

Huntington broke ground in July of 2005, six months later our dream home was ready. We had lived at my parents home for the previous year and a half and had even had a new baby – baby number 3. Just to cover all my bases, living with my parents was great. We enjoyed it and so did the kids. In fact, moving into the new home, beautiful and great as it was, was a little bit of a let down because it felt a bit lonely. I know, it sounds funny, doesn’t it. We moved into our new home, but ended up staying at my parents pretty well every weekend for another 6 months to a year.

The house was a great place to host parties and we did have a lot of that, parties usually consisting of 50+ or 75+ people. They were big and noisy and fun and the kids had a lot of room to run around and play, while the adults did as well.

On non-party days, the basement was the kids domain, except for the guest suite. There were two huge rec-rooms, one with the kids toys and in the other they used to play tennis (initially we had a mini-court with a net and then when they were a bit bigger and could hit further, they played against the wall with a special soft tennis ball to practice rallying).  Life was great, we felt we had it all, we felt we had achieved our great dream of having a beautiful home. We didn’t think about the debt we had also accumulated by creating this home. I guess we lived by the myth that a mortgage not like real debt, it was okay to have. And we didn’t have a small mortgage, it was huge. We also didn’t want to take forever to pay it off, so we had saddled ourselves with a large monthly payment hoping to get rid of it soon. Unfortunately for us, compound interest was our enemy here and we were working to pay a lot of interest on top of other things.

Thank goodness we woke up sooner rather than later and changed our dreams. Read the next installment of this post to see what exciting things awaited us once we made some difficult decisions.

All photos above except the last three were taken at the request of Gary Bachman’s company. The last three photos above and video below were taken by Gord Taylor who did the beautiful landscaping.

Let’s start with defining each of these terms;

Like-minded, according to http://dictionary.reference.com/ is “having a similar or identical opinion, disposition, etc.: a like-minded friend.”

Diverse, according to http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ is made up of distinct characteristics, qualities, or elements.

Well, I guess from where I am sitting, this is what I think and have found. In my journey, I generally have an abundance of the diverse-mind group, so I am not too concerned right now that I will  not have a mechanism to challenge myself constantly on why I am thinking what I am thinking and doing what I am doing. The diverse-minded people will constantly question me for my own good and keep me humble and constantly vigilant. They will also create a space in which I have to figure out why I believe what I do and therefore fuel my continued pursuit of that path or if I find I am in error in my choice I can then simply ditch that journey. Just to clarify, I will not tolerate the naysayer extremely negative type diverse-thinker for this reason. I have conviction in my choices, although as I have stated I have no problem getting into discussions about things. I love how eloquently these quotes describe my feelings: “If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.”  by Dale Carnegie and “Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You’ll be criticized anyway.” by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Just to clarify, when I say like-minded people, I am talking about people, who like me, are on a journey to find the truth. The people I have deeply connected with have started this journey from different entry points, some from the financial side, some wellness, still others the spiritual path and of course leadership. There are others who started from human rights and liberty path as well, just seeking to know the truth, whatever it is. What fascinates me is that there seem to be these touchstones that this journey for truth takes us on. No matter where you start, you eventually reach all the stones, as long as you continue to seek. Most people I have deeply connected with are continuously thirsty for the truth and willing to journey on.

As I am relatively new in the pursuit of my purpose, living my truth, deepening my spirituality, becoming financial free, and embracing wellness in my consumption and fitness, as well as my ever growing desire to improve as a person, lover, parent and friend, I want to have mentors in my journey to help guide me, encourage me, question me as well as challenge me to grow. I seek companions to share my stories with as well as to learn from theirs. I seek like-minded people, for example, to learn from them how to overcome obstacles I am facing in my journey to live my purpose because they may have faced similar situations. I seek them to help me see that even if I fail today, someone I respect has done what I want to do and so I can pick myself up and continue on through their encouragement. I seek them for connection. I seek them to discuss how they share their unconventional spirituality with their children. The like-minded people I am attracting these days fascinate me partly because of the different and interesting journeys they have taken to get to similar places I am in (spiritually, mentally, politically, financially, and physically). They challenge me because they are ahead of me in some paths and I want to learn from them and I challenge them because they are behind me in other paths and I love to share the information which has helped me progress.

What amazes me is how quickly we connect with these people, we are on the same wavelength, traveling a similar journey. We connect, as in individually, the adults as well as the children. Also, as a couple Chuti and I have found great kinship recently. It is great to have this community.

For me, when I look back at my life, my closest friends have usually been male. I find I connect very easily with guys. I have many women friends, but only recently have I attracted deeper relationships with women who I click with and could literally chat non-stop with for months. When I say chat, I am not interested in discussing the weather or the latest trends or movies or that kind of stuff. I am meeting women with whom I am discussing spirituality, history, the Magna Carta, the law of attraction, changing careers, starting up businesses, buying real-estate, and the list goes on and on. Of course, we also discuss leadership, favorite books, and home-schooling.

Ultimately, I think you need both like-minded and diverse-minded people around you. In the choice between being a quitter, a camper or a climber in the journey of life, I choose climber day in and day out. In order to keep climbing and reaching for bigger and bigger goals, I need like-minded people to stimulate me, encourage me, show me how to avoid or overcome obstacles in my particular path, show me things I thought were impossible or unrealistic, and just challenge me to keep going. I also need diverse-minded people who question me, my motives, my thinking and push me to clarify what it is I want and more importantly why I want it. They help me extract my deepest purpose, by helping me peel off the unwanted layers I will quickly discard under their scrutinizing watch.

At the end of the day, ultimately I want to learn from both groups, so that when I am quiet with myself, I can dig deep inside and find both the encouragement and vision I need to move forward on the right path for me as well as question myself deeply and avoid wasting my time and energy on paths which do not serve my purpose. In essence, I want this journey to lead me to self-mastery.

I will leave you with link to a great blog post by one of my mentors Chris Brady on the very subject of self-mastery, a subject I hope to tackle in a post soon.

The quote I mentioned above likened death to a period, but I would like to add that death could be a period, a question mark or an exclamation point to your life. What I mean by this is not the manner of your death, but that the perspective on your end will highly depend on how you lived that life.

The way I would classify it is this:
1. Period – would simply signify an end to a life;
2. Question mark – would reflect an end with many regrets on the part of those left, wondering and questioning for what reason the life moaned was truly on earth;
3. Exclamation – would signify a dynamic life, full and vibrant, lived such that even death cannot wipe away the far reaching legacy left by that life.

What would I choose? With deep thought, I would have to say #3. I want to influence people significantly even after my death, like the late Gandhi or Jim Rohn and many others before them. Before I started on my leadership journey, I think my choices would have led to #1. I just wanted comfort and safety, nothing too risky. Unfortunately, here is the crux of the problem as well as an opportunity: life is always changing, every microscopic part of life as well as the big picture is always changing. So being safe by being comfortable would have led me to a mediocre life and then it would have inevitably ended. My journey taught me to ask these questions instead: why not embrace change (except for the deep values aligned with your soul)? and why not opt for doing something extraordinary? I decided my life is worthwhile to do something worthwhile.

Some of the things I am doing are these: teaching my children in home school. I like to say “my children are the living messages I will send to a time and place I will never be, but will have an opportunity to influence through them.” This is a variation to the quote by John W. Whitehead “children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” I am also in constant personal study on spirituality, leadership, finances, family life, couple-hood, parenting and fitness. I am also in the process of engaging in a new career path in alignment with my purpose, totally different from my previous one in engineering and computer programming. You will have to find your own path, your own purpose. A very useful, but somewhat morbid sounding exercise I did was to write my own obituary, now. It really registers what is important deep down when one puts the thought into doing this. It helped me come up with my life sentence, which is this: “I live and love to inspire others to live their truth by living mine and I do it with joy, peace and grace; I will die for truth.”. I would love to hear your life sentences, please write me with them and more importantly start living them now.

Remember, on your tombstone, there will be two dates, your birth and your death dates (you have no control over these ultimately). But wait, there will be something else: a dash between the dates, the meaning of which you have control over. Choosing your life sentence now, living it with passion and purpose ultimately means that you give meaning to the dash on your grave stone, you choose to matter to the world, you choose to make some difference, and you choose to leave a legacy.

As the late and wise Jim Rohn has said many times “Look in the mirror, there is your problem, as well as your solution.” “You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction over-night.” So, what are you waiting for? Go, figure out your passion, create your life sentence, live it and love it.

I had said that I thought that if I had known what I know now, I think I would made different choices. Of course, this is probably true of anyone, I suppose. The reason I feel secure in this knowledge is some events that happened in my life.

One such event was the Electromagnetic class in year 2 or 3 of university. It was a tough course. I had been on the dean’s honor’s list every term and I was determined to stay there. The course felt impossible for me. The professor was tough, a no-nonsense kind of guy. There were 3 tests and the final exam. On the first test, I received an amazing 2.5/40. No, that is not a typo. I got 2 1/2 out of 40. I did not understand the subject, as was obvious. I was used to doing very well in school. I was usually good at tests, but there was that 2.5 staring me in the face, mocking me. I did two things. First I laughed. I laughed at the sheer absurdity of it and I figured it was better than crying. Then, I did something different. I made a decision that day. I was not going to let this course beat me. I was going to get an A, I saw it clearly in my head. I actually choose to practice, without knowing what I know now. I spent countless hours, going through my notes, studying the text book and doing every single question in the book. I practiced and practiced and practiced. The next test came and I felt confident. I had prepared so much and the test was such a pleasure. I actually finished in half the time. I spent the next half checking my work and dressing up and color-cordinating all my graphs and drawings. I spent the third half… just kidding… I wanted to check if you were still with me. I got 40/40. I did that on the next test as well and on the final I got 99%. The professor gave me an A and actually found me and told me how much he really wanted to give me an A+. I was so close. (He had only given out one A+ and a handful of A’s) This was one of my brushes with excellence.

Another such event was when I took a project at the Publich Health Agency of Canada. It was an amazing experience putting myself in the CNPHI project. I took on this assignment to build a software prototype. It was myself and a friend working on the project, with another friend leading the venture. We had 6 weeks, very little help and the clock was ticking. I believed in us and just did my part step by step, bit by bit, even though this could potentially have been out of my league. We worked 20 hour days on many days and pulled it off beautifully. We won the project and the project is still going strong. Of course I am no longer there, I am here.

There are a few other glimpses of my utilizing the art practicing to the heights of excellence, but most of the stories in my life end with my choosing good over great. The last story I will share with you is about Chuti and I. In 2010, we will have been a couple for 20 years. We started when I was 15 and this relationship is a work in progress, I would call it a work of art, where we are striving for excellence every day. Of course, prior to the last 3 years, the excellent choices we made regarding our relationship stemmed from the absolute committment we made to each other and so we made those small decisions daily, practicing well to build a great foundation. I am truly excited about the next 20 years, because now our daily practices are much more delibrate, driven by the vision we are created together of what we want, mainly due to the books and cds in our lives.

My perspective has changed quite drastically about this subject, that it is worth mentioning. Even though I have always know the adage “Practice makes Perfect”, I guess I never took it seriously enough, or I did not understand how excellent perfect has to be or I didn’t understand how practicing is a constant on-going thing or maybe a bit of all three. You see, as most people, I have many talents. For example, I am considered a good dancer by many people and I have to admit that I am pretty good. I had a natural talent for dancing and it came easy to me. Maybe that was part of my problem. I would learn a new dance for example for a show and sometimes I would learn it the night before (if it was something I was performing by myself). I was even recruited to do a dance where I was playing a boy. The teacher couldn’t get the 5th boy and recruited me during university exams, so I couldn’t join the group for practice until I was done. Guess when that was? A few hours before the event started was when I was finally available. I joined them and learned the dance and performed. I was actually recruited when people couldn’t dance at the last minute because I got a reputation for learning quickly, being confident on stage and being able to pull things off pretty well, at the last minute. I guess this became a habit for me.

So, even when I wasn’t in university, studying for exams or whatever, I would still “practice” at the last minute. I thought practicing dance was about just knowing the dance in order and since I was pretty fast at learning that, I didn’t need to repeat this process over and over again. Of course, this didn’t translate too well when I taught others, if they were not as comfortable as I am to get on stage after only a few practices. I would have to practice much more with them than I was accustomed to for a dance. I actually worked with a group of 3 girls at one time on a number of dances who were ideal for me in that they picked things up very fast and were confident. I guess one thing I should mention is that these girls and I had been dancing since a very young age and had practiced many of these steps many times, so that does help.

One last thing I should mention is that when I wanted to study Indian Classical dance, I had two choices at that time, or I suppose my parents had two choices regarding me and dance. I was (1990 or when) only 15 years old, where many of my peers who were doing this art form had started when they were 5. It generally takes 10-12 years at the school to get to the point of considering graduation. I did not like that option at that time. The other option was a private teacher, with whom I could finish all the repertoire much quicker and get to the graduation level (which is more study culminating in a 3 hour solo performance called an Arangetram). I’m sorry to say that we did not choose the high road. I finished my training in 5 years (but I did not do the extensive theory work they do) and did my graduation. It was all about the destination, not the journey. I love to dance, but I can only say I am good, never great. I had the talent, but like so many people did not put in the practice hours to reach excellence. Oh how I wish I had known what I know now, I think I would have made a wiser choice.

So, then I grew up some more, I got married and I had kids. I had always loved the violin and when my oldest D decided she wanted to play the violin at age 3, I called around. I was told that most kids who start at 3 tend to quit because they get frustrated by their lack of motor skills and was recommended to wait until 5 years old, so that is what I did. I learned that that doesn’t have to be the case and started my third child M at age 2 1/2 and she is doing quite well. So, at age 5, D and I started a very interesting journey. I remember my husband asking me to make sure that “this new thing” not take too much time. We had one private lesson a week with the Suzuki program (a half hour). Then we found out that we would have a group class every 3 weeks and a solo performance every other 3 weeks, so two more violin related events in 6 weeks, what a drag!!! Then there was this curious thing about practicing. She was expected to listen to her cd of repertoire (21 pieces) 5 days a week and practice 5 times a week for a half hour each, so that is 2 1/2 hours of practice. My husband and I were both working and Devika had school. Sometimes, we did 5 practices, sometimes 2, but hey I thought it always added up to 2 – 21/2 hours so wasn’t that what mattered? Apparently not!! How was I to know? This was not something I had ever learned. Things generally came easy to me, school and other stuff, so I usually looked good with very little effort.

One beautiful day in November of 2006, my husband and I made one of the best decisions of our lives and that was to put ourselves on a leadership training program. This meant we received a leadership book once a month as well as 12 cds on various leadership topics. I talk more about this in another post, coming soon. It was mind-boggling to us, the things we learned. Once we got on this system of thinking, I progressed to reading 5-7 leadership and other-like books (per month) which challenged me to think. This is how I came upon reading Shin’ichi Suzuki’s books on his ideas on teaching violin and Ed Sprunger’s book on practicing. Wow!! What a transformation I had. Dr. Suzuki really spoke to my heart. I finally understood what this practicing thing was all about. Dr. Suzuki talked about how children learn their mother-tongue with no formal training. A Japanese child in Japan or elsewhere whose parents speak Japanese will speak this language fluidly with the same dialect as his/her parents by age 3 and know more than 4000 words. He found this to be a miracle, while most people took it for granted. He went on to create the Talent Education philosophy which was that “every child can.” and his philosophy was to bring up the children of the world with noble character through the violin as the means. So just as the child learns the mother tongue, the child learns the violin (with some technical coaching obviously). The child has to listen to the music he/she is working on, has worked on and will work on in the near to distant future over and over again and build the ear. They learn their pieces by ear. They are also expected to do a lot of repetition with repertoire they have already learned, over and over and over again. I only recently realized that in Francais and Espanol, the word for practice is répétition/repetición (repetition). That surely explains a lot. Practice is about repeating something over and over again to reach excellence. Another important reason for practicing known repertoire over and over again is that when something needs to be improved in technique, those changes are always rehearsed with pieces that the student knows like the back of his/her hand. The piece is known by the muscle memory and the student can concentrate on the new technique to be learned and not have to concentrate on the piece, the notes or anything related to the piece. I went from a mom who just put in the time to one who inspired her kids to practice everyday since July 1, 2008. D and K have not missed a day, not ONE (this works out to 600 days of practicing by February 20, 2010, just 24 days away). M has pretty well done every day, but I’m sure she and I have missed about 2% of the total. 99% of the time, we do our practice in the morning, so it is prioritized and done early. Many a day, the kids have come running from bed convinced at the end of the day that they have not actually done their practice. M has in fact done two practices in one day a few times because I could not convince her that she had in fact practiced that morning. So, how did that happen or more importantly why did this happen. Before I answer that, don’t get me wrong, we are not perfect, we are constantly practicing how to practice, but we are improving constantly and we do get it.

So, why? Well, after reading this similar message in many books, finally the switch got flicked in my mind and that of my husband’s. I will get into this story in another post, so stay tuned for ‘the switch is flicked’. If we want something special to happen, we have to be willing to do the small things over and over again, over and over again. The little things over and over, may not look like much in the beginning, are as easy to ignore as to do, in fact is easier and more comfortable to ignore than to do, but will compound itself and lead to something beautiful (if one chooses to follow one’s dream). As Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Do the thing, and you shall have the power.” Also “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” And to make this a hat-trick “There is a natural progression to everything in life: plant, cultivate, harvest.” I decided to plant and cultivate and let the harvest come. I decided to do the little baby steps, day by day and trust in the effects of compounding.

In the early summer of 1999, we made a deal with Rose to purchase our first home at 318 Chalfont Road. The house was built after the second world war and was a sweet small cottage style house. Rose and Doug had renovated the main floor quite a bit. The most wonderful thing about the house was that it sat on Chalfont Road, in Charleswood (the country in the city), across from the Assiniboine forest and sat on half an acre of beautiful green space. Here is a look at the beautiful backyard with the lush green trees and the comfortable hammock hooked up.

We bought the house, despite the fact that it didn’t meet most items on our list of requirements. We bought the house because we had a future plan of building a new house in the same location. In August of 1999, we were expecting our first child and so we renovated the entire second floor of our house. Basically, 318 Chalfont had a new main and second floor now, it was too much of a waste, if we ever knocked it down to build a new house. The new house was 10 years away, we thought. I searched and searched for a picture of our old house or old-old house as the kids call it, but I couldn’t find one from when we lived there. I guess this goes to show you how important the house was to us. We do have loads of photos from the backyard however and of course from the inside of the house.

We had our second child in October of 2002 and started talking about alternatives to knocking our cottage-house down to prepare for when we would be ready to build. We wanted to be environmentally and fiscally responsible as much as we could and we felt knocking the house down would be a waste. We were up for an adventure and we thought of trying something different. We listed just the house for sale in the summer of 2003 to see what kind of interest was out there. We got a few interested parties, but because ours was a one-and-a-half story house, the cost of bringing down Hydro/MTS/… etc lines was prohibitive for someone to move it to the country. So, we had to find a piece of land close by and either move the house ourselves and renovate it and sell it or find someone who would purchase the package of our house with the new land. We were hoping to find this special person, but it wasn’t going to be easy. A lot of people thought we were crazy to do things this way. The told us to sell our Chalfont lot and house and purchase a lot elsewhere and build, but we loved Chalfont and had faith that we could pull this off.

With God’s blessing, we found a lot on Laxdale Rd., just 6 blocks away and bought it for $32, 000 in October of 2003. It was a great find. Chuti had been talking to a guy named Clemente, who he had seen working on a house project on Harrow St. and Wilton Ave. Clemente had bought the corner house, lifted it, removed the old basement, poured a new one, and renovated the house in order to sell it. Clemente had suggested to Chuti to sell our house and other land as a package and then later said he was interested in the project. Unfortunately for us, Clemente’s funds were tied up in the another project and until it sold he couldn’t commit to our project financially. He brought two financiers on two separate occasions, but in the end the deal fell through. We had an offer from someone else, but it was too low and we turned it down. It was now December, 2003 and we were starting to think that maybe this wasn’t meant to be and we would leave it for now and see what happens later, after all it was originally a 10 year plan and we were only in year 3 since we had made this plan in the year 2000. We listed the Laxdale land for sale with our agent Peter Vasko.

D knew about our hopes for the house and was always wishing that someone would just buy our old house and take it away, so we could build a new house. She would make comments like “the moon is telling the house ‘it’s time to go!!’”. On January 17, 2004, we were driving home from dinner and it was a very starry night. We saw a shooting star and I told her to make a wish, she did and told us that she couldn’t tell us what she wished for because it wouldn’t come true. When we got home, as Chuti was checking the messages on the answering machine, D told me that she had wished that someone would come and buy our house. Chuti then came to tell us seconds later that there was a call from a guy named Frank, a friend of Clemente’s, who had called to say he was interested in the project. Unfortunately, Chuti couldn’t get a hold of him and simply left a message.

Here is a photo from when we moved the house (this is explained further down). The house in this picture has been lifted onto steel beams and was loaded on a truck ready to be moved. Neat, huh?!!!

The Cute Cottage House

On Monday morning (January 19th) Peter Vasko called to say that we had had an offer on the Laxdale land and we made an appointment to sign for the sale at 9:30 p.m. that night. As we were eating supper at 6:00 p.m., Frank called to make an appointment to come by. Chuti told him that we were selling the lot and that if he really was interested, he should come by right away and if he wanted to commit to the deal, he had to give us a deposit. Frank showed up on time, looked around with his brothers and gave us $1000 in cash. We couldn’t believe it. When Peter Vasko came by that night, we explained what had happened and he suggested we sign the sale, conditional on Frank turning it down. Frank came by the next day with another $1000 and we finalized the deal on Wednesday, January 21st. He paid us $32, 000 for the Laxdale lot and another $23, 000 for the house, which was a sweet deal indeed. The mover who moved the house in August of 2004 told Chuti that usually people only get at most $5, 000 for the house. The house moved on August 3rd at 3:30 a.m. in the morning and it was a bit surreal to see your home being driven away.

What we didn’t know then, but know now is about the law of attraction and the power of a vision. Once we learned about these things, we could look back and see how we had attracted exactly what and who we visioned to get this project off the ground.

Then came the second part of the saga, to design the house we wanted to build and find the right builder.

This post will come shortly.