MINIMUM EFFORT FOR MAXIMUM GAIN: GUILTY!

 

SELF-PORTRAIT

Yikes!  Upon reflection, it seems I mostly expend only minimum efforts for the arbitrarily maximum gains at home, at work, and at play. This is in harmony with my utilitarian practice I employ everywhere and always in my life.  Yikes again!

At HOME when it is time to clean my downtown high-rise condominium, for the most part I scrub only what I (and others) can generally see. Rarely do I grab a toothpick and scrape the grime and crud from the almost invisible cracks around the light switches and cupboard handles and faucets. I scrub with hand the bathroom sink, the toilet bowl, and the shower. With broom I sweep my kitchen and balcony, and the front entrance I use the vacuum cleaner. Suffice to say my entire cleaning time is clocked at 30 minutes -- my eighth-floor condo is only 775 square feet!

Hmmm … Such a quick cleaning is good enough for company and good enough to save face. My employing a toothpick for a tool happens only on the most intrinsically motivated “cleanliness-next-to-godliness occasions.

AT WORK I am a proletarian stiff, but in a most qualitative fashion.  Stated simply, I design and deliver only programs that I enjoy. Factoid: ALL the programs I have been contracted to design and deliver with my current employer, are ALL autobiographical.  For example, when I was an all-season long-distance runner, all those clients in my charge (young offenders in a custody facility) had to join me for a minimum run of five miles daily. Within a year of the start date, those same clients not only ran every day, but right after their run, they lifted weights every day -- I was a certified Olympic weight instructor at the time. Also, within a year of the program start date, we hit the swimming pool -- I was a certified swimming instructor at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed this “autobiographical” job for seven years, ending it only when I exited the program.

My current job, again with young offenders, also delivers an “autobiographical” schedule:

Every day with a mini chess tournament – I love playing chess. Following chess, we have group discussions relating to adolescent behaviors as presented in either Psychology or English literature -- I taught psychology at the local university for 23 years, and I taught high school English for five years.

Right after a catered lunch, we partake in a play nine-ball tournament. This lasts usually for an hour, and then we embark on a ten-minute trek to the gym, where we lift weights 30 minutes, then play basketball, or practicing Muay Thai. Factoid: All of the above I love doing, except for basketball.  I am not a basketball player but my colleague, who is university basketball star, still loves the hoops.

My work is my play, keeping my social battery current amongst those marginalized group members in my charge (puns intended every in this sentence)!

Factoid: At my PLAY, I never practice, I only play which suffices for practice times.

Hmmm … EXPENDING MINIMUM EFFORT FOR MAXIMUM GAIN seems my motto and excuse for indolence.  I know that PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, or rather PERFECT PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, but I am truly not a professional player of anything. I do Muay Thai once a week; I play shinny at an outdoor rink once a week; I ski at our local ski resort once a week; I do singer-songwriter gigs at local bars once every four weeks. I like writing and I like hiking.

SOMEWHERE IN THE ROCKIES

And, of course, I like busking, but am never a brutto tempo busker, but always the fair-weather busker on windless days having lots of sun.

LAKE SUPERIOR, ONTARIO

MINIMUM EFFORT FOR MAXIMUM GAIN has been a general truth in my lifestyle to date, albeit there have been some exceptions.

When I was striving for my Royal Life and Red Cross swimming instructors, and my National Association of Underwater Instructors scuba certifications, I swam a minimum of one mile every morning, my very maximum effort for the maximum gain.

ANOTHER POOL-ANOTHER SWIM

Before formally running in the Saskatchewan Marathon, for years I recreationally ran a minimum of five miles Monday through Saturday, and ten miles every Sunday. Marathon running never allows for a minimum effort.

For every class in which I registered for Graduate Studies, up to and including defending my master’s thesis, I gave my academic all for a minimum of five hours per week.

This Christmastime past, I set forth my maximum effort for twenty hours on the snow to attain my Canadian Ski Instructor Alliance certification.

All the above rather temerarious exceptions have one thing in common.  To succeed there is no time for foozle! Also, all these exceptions were motivated from within, rather than from without. Factoid:  IF MY ENDEAVORS HAVE INTRINSIC VALUE THEN I OFFER THE MAXIMUM EFFORT FOR MAXIMUM GAIN -- IF MY ENDEAVORS ARE MOTIVATED BY MONEY I AM BACK TO MINIMUM EFFORT FOR MAXIMUM GAIN.

Introspection could suggest that I unwittingly proffered such maximum efforts in these to raise my social status a dram or two or three.

Hmmm … I know that I am the delusional proletarian. I know, too, that having adopted the attitude  

MINIMUM EFFORT FOR MAXIMUM GAIN 

has served me very well so far.

 

 

DEATH AND PUPPY COMFORT

These days, DEATH is on my mind. Since the new year, five people that I know have died, three of whom I have known since my boyhood days in Vanguard, Saskatchewan, and the other two, a former student of mine in Regina, Saskatchewan, and my cousin’s husband who has resided in Victoria, British Columbia for the last 50 years. All five expired from natural causes.

Death is inevitable I know, but rarely does it come at me in familiar fives.

VANGUARDIAN, MURRAY (R.I.P)

VANGUARDIAN, JOHNNY (R.I.P.)

VANGUARDIAN, RICHARD (R.I.P.)

In life there is always much ado about death. The pedestrian idioms and euphemisms referring to death are plenty and multifarious: Passed, passed on, passed away, dearly departed, and resting in peace (RIP). And countless others even being comedic: bit the dust, kicked the bucket, met the maker, six feet under, pushing up daisies.

From a planetary perspective, 61 million people died last year. Combine this information with the fact that 134 million babies were born last year, 134 million minus 61 million means a net earth population gain of 73 million people in 2023. Or to factor this another way, 0.91%.

Factoid: In the coming decades it is expected that the number of births will continue to be around 130 to 140 million per year, while during the same time as the world population ages, the annual number of deaths is expected to continue to increase.

Another factoid: As the number of deaths approaches the number of births, the global population growth will end. Surprise, surprise! But enough of these actuaries.

As a kid, my pals and I used to kill. In our early teens we drowned out gophers in the pastures; we stoned frogs along the creek banks. In our later teens armed with .22 bolt-action rifles we shot gophers in the pastures; we shot frogs along the creek banks.

However, a view to a kill of an animal lower on the food chain is significantly different than viewing a human corpse. By presenting this food change comparison, I am certainly not suggesting that we ever killed these gophers and frogs for food. Sadly, we killed them only for sadistic sport. And while I am still ranting on the evolutionary food chain, we Homo sapiens are not the head honchos. Fittingly (Darwinian pun intended), we are surviving between the pigs and the anchovies, well below the top-seated polar bears and orca whales. All of this, true dat, according to the wildlife biologists.

But I digress.

The first dead human I ever laid eyes upon was Shorty, who had been a bartender at the Vanguard Hotel. Shorty was on display at the local funeral home on the main street in Vanguard Call it simple curiosity, but my buddy, Brent, whose family owned the hotel, and I walked into the funeral parlor to have a look. That look-see moment has been etched in my mind now for 60 years. Joe McKenny, Shorty’s drinking buddy, a look-a-like combo of W.C. Fields and Humpty-Dumpty, was duly having “guests” sign the register when they entered the funeral home to view the body. And there he was, Shorty, all five foot two of him stretched out on his back, his Brobdingnagian nose noticeably protruding above the gunwales of his coffin.

Of course, since that first view of human remains, I have seen, literally, hundreds since. Being now in the autumn of my life, deaths around me seem as common as the leaves I see falling from the trees. The five friends I listed in the first paragraph of this essay, are sadly now piles of bones amongst piles of leaves.  

If the skinny of Zen is “To live is to suffer,” then the skinny of Zen must also be “To die is to assuage.” At best, this is just a philosophic puppy comfort.

MY COLLEAGUE'S PUPPY, GEORGE