Max Roytenberg

Make the effort to celebrate

Some people hate birthdays. They don’t want to hear about them. They refuse to tell you their age, or even discuss such matters. What’s that about? Other people are different about such things. I am one of those.

When we were kids, birthdays were all about celebrations. There was the cake, the gaudier the better. And the presents! Didn’t we look forward to all that? There was all the fuss about getting friends to attend. And even hard feelings if someone you thought was a friend didn’t attend. Parents got into it and it could get all political. The “keeping up with the Joneses” adage raised its ugly head and your party had to be as spectacular as those of your friends. I remember once we had a small pony to ride at a birthday. Some kids had a clown come to entertain the kids at their party. When we were teens, they were just an excuse for a dance, with all the to-ing and fro-ing between girls and boys. And getting money from the relatives so we could add to the bank account for college was a very serious business.

In our parenting years, it was more about the kids. Birthdays, if they were marked at all, were something quiet between parental partners. At least, that’s the way it was for me. There had to be a special something between the partners for fuss to be made on birthday occasions. Many years of our lives went by with no conscious notice taken to the passage of time. All of a sudden we were at 20-year anniversaries. Pity! There is a lot to be said for marking occasions with some ceremony. There were a lot of occasions we missed that should have been celebrated. Too bad about that as I look back. Maybe things were better for you.

I find things are so much different for me these days. I try to linger consciously on the special events, the birthdays and other milestones as well. Like when we do yoga, we really concentrate on feeling the now, our presence in the instant. Birthdays are great moments for that. I track the dates and give advance notice to those who may have the faintest of interest, sending out blindcopied email messages to all and sundry alerting them to the occasion, so they can jump on the computer, the telephone, or any other communication vehicle. They can pretend that they have known about the matter all along, so the object of the interest will feel really appreciated. It helps draw all of us closer together, reinvigorating our ties.

If we can be present for a birthday, that takes the cake. Thinking of my own experience as the one being fêted, don’t we all feel good when somebody makes a fuss over us, doing something that we wouldn’t think of doing for ourselves? After all, we usually think of others. We would feel too self-absorbed, even conceited, to make a fuss about ourselves. It’s so much nicer when somebody else goes to the trouble of doing it. Doesn’t that make us feel great! It does me.

And, know a secret? I’m no longer shy about that stuff. I am totally obnoxious. I had a birthday when I was 75 and invited everybody I could think of, especially those I really wanted to see. And I made them travel, hundreds, even thousands, of miles to attend. Of course, I insisted I wanted no other present than their presence. (And I graciously accepted gifts from those who ignored my request.) All the cards and letters I received were great. And one of my daughters assembled a book of my poems, with pictures and comments, that is among my treasures today.

I held my 75th in my old hometown, thousands of miles from where I lived. I went to a place where they had a chocolate fountain for the kids. It was wonderful to see all those chocolatey faces. And my son-in-law stepped in and picked up the tab. Wow! What a gift! Yes, I remember, and am grateful. I would have been very happy to pick up the bill just the same, but it makes one feel so appreciated. It was an orgy of self-satisfaction. Aren’t I a brat! I know that. My Bride reminds me I am all the time.

I did the same thing for my 80th in Dublin, where my Bride and I were living at the time. I knew then that we would be leaving to come back to Canada, so it was a great occasion to invite a few thousand of my favourite people to say goodbye. A couple of my kids even came across the big water to be there. It was another indulgence to my ego and I enjoyed it thoroughly. We only live once, right? We have to celebrate survival. We may not be around too much longer to do it.

So, I believe in indulging in all the things now that I never gave a thought to during the years I was slugging it out, making my way through life. Many of us are too busy during those years putting one foot in front of the other. When younger, we did things the quickest way, the most economical way. We shrugged off the sentimentality we might have felt, that might weaken our resolve to forge ahead. In doing so, we surrendered a lot of what might have been very good times, but we remember the few times we weakened, now some of the best of our memories.

These days, I make a great fuss about every birthday – even when it’s not mine!

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Some thoughts on happiness

How are you feeling today? Any aches and pains you wish would go away? Maybe a good night’s sleep will do the job because your health is basically in good shape. Or not. Are you and your partner getting along? Maybe you wish you had a partner or are sad about the one you lost? Is there love and affection in your life?

Are your efforts allowing you to make ends meet and to set a generous table in a place you are happy to be in? Do you have interesting things to do in your life that are making you feel fulfilled? And the kids, if you have any, are they well, and turning out how you had hoped? Are there things happening in the world that are so distressing they are making you unhappy? Is there anything you can do about it?

I am not looking for raging joy and ecstasy. We might look for moments like that sometimes in our lives. But that is unsustainable and we would burn out. It’s not the drug high we are looking for, it’s the quiet sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. It’s a feeling of well-being and comfort in your own skin and “all’s well with my world.”

There are so many things in life that can go wrong; it’s a miracle we ever have a happy moment. Something like the bodies we inhabit, we inhabit such a complex environment. There is the great potential for one of many of the things we face to go wrong. Or, for things to come out very differently from the way we might like things to work out. Fortunately, so many of the important things about our bodies are on automatic and are mostly made to last a lifetime. The lives we get to live are not like that. A lot of it depends on chance but a lot of it also depends on what we make of it.

I am well into my 80s, alive and in relatively good health. Retired, I have time to think about these things while many of you are out there sweating the 9-to-5. Without getting into too much detail, in my life I have worked hard and accomplished satisfying things that have benefited others as well as myself. I can conclude that life has treated me kindly. I have washed up on a friendly beach, and now the living is easy. Because I know I have earned my way, I don’t have to feel guilty about my good fortune, and I am grateful for what help I received along the way. I hope those of you out there at my age and stage feel the same way.

I can contrast that with the life my father lived. His father left the family when he was a child, coming to Canada to make his fortune. (My grandfather made his living in Canada with a horse and cart, collecting junk that he could sell to dealers.) My father’s mother died of typhoid, in Russia, and my father and his brother were shuttled around to relatives. His father, already in Canada, finally sent money for him and his younger brother to join him. My father never received any formal education.

When he arrived from Danzig to England, they found that my father had pink eye and the authorities took him off the boat. They were going to send him back to where he came from. Somehow, though, he evaded them (still a teenager) and he spent two years hiding out in London before he was able to come to Canada. I don’t know what he did when he arrived in this country, but, in the years I was growing up (I was born in 1934), he never seemed to have a steady job.

His big break came when the Second World War started and all the young men were called up as soldiers. My dad was hired to shovel coal into a furnace, the heat being used for drying eggs to be shipped to England. Because the engineers were drafted too, soon he was asked to study for papers that would allow him to replace the engineers. How did they know he could do it?

All my school years, my father was studying his books at the kitchen table. When I tried reading his stuff, it made my head spin. He became a full-fledged stationary engineer by the time the war was over. All three of us kids in my family got secondary educations. My father died at 67, still on that job. He was a happy man, I think. Compared to him, I had it easy.

So, what does it take to be happy? Isn’t it about having the right answers to some of the questions I asked when we got started? It sure helps if your health is good. It sure helps if the kids you had turn out healthy and self-sufficient. It sure helps if you have had someone in your life to love, and if someone has loved you. It sure helps if you have, or have had, fulfilling work. It sure helps if you know that you have done things that have benefited others as well as yourself. It sure helps if you have earned the means to meet your needs.

You don’t have to have them all. Just having some of these things, and the proper attitude, and you get to catch the brass ring. Having a sense of gratitude for the things you do have helps a lot, too. Be happy.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Learning throughout our life

Isn’t life wonderful? It has such potential to deliver joy, beauty, poetry and music for every one of us. More’s the pity that so many of us get only a small fraction of that potential for our portion. Still, gratitude must be the order of the day because things could always be worse.

If we take the time to examine the simple pleasures that most of us benefit from, we should be able to swallow some of the less digestible bits with a little more grace. Nature is nearly everyone’s inheritance – sun, moon, sky and stars, the green around, with maybe a spot of colour. We breathe in and out, taste the sweet along with the sour, and sometimes hear a birdsong. And perhaps, from time to time, if we are fortunate, our lot allows us a warm embrace.

We start out as strangers in a world we know absolutely nothing about. We start out with only sensations: warmth, cold, discomfort, pain, or their absence, and hunger pangs. Our first lesson is the instinct to cry out in reaction to what we find uncomfortable. We soon learn whether our instinctive appeals for help are likely to be answered quickly or with an incomprehensible delay. Scientists tell us that this knowledge might play an important part in determining what sort of creature we will become in later life. (See, for example, “The Role of Parents in Early Childhood Learning” by Susan H. Landry, Children’s Learning Institute, University of Texas Health Science Centre, which was published online in 2008.)

Totally dependent on others, humans, like other mammals and many species, begin their lives in a precarious situation. We all know from our own learning that survival rates have markedly improved with living standards and advancing technology. An exploding world population provides solid evidence for that. So has the chance that the psyches present in adulthood will be healthier. By no means can it yet be said that such is a foregone conclusion.

We accept that our early years on this planet are the period when we consciously concentrate on amassing the information and knowledge that we need to negotiate our passage through life. In earlier times, that formal period of education, now increasingly financed in one way or another by the state, was much shorter than it has now become.

In the end, we often learn much more on the job, after formal education has ended, about what we must know to do our work. Life has become increasingly complicated though and even this learning will not suffice always, as the very nature of work is altered daily. Jobs disappear, never to return, and new skills become imperative.

I was born during the Great Depression. For a good number of years, my father never had a job. I don’t believe he ever had a formal education, arriving in Canada as a young man. Yet, hired as a labourer to feed coal into a boiler furnace, through self-study, he rose to be an engineer solely responsible for a vast industrial complex. He had some book-learning to get his papers, but mostly he learned his stuff from doing his work.

My degrees were in agriculture, but the only planting I ever did was in my home flower garden. I had four jobs in my career, but only one, the first, had any direct relationship with agriculture. Essentially, I became a manager and I never learned anything about doing that kind of work at school. If I learned anything at all during those years, it was certainly by doing things I had to do on the job.

So what is management? It has to do with trying to get thing done through other people. I know there are courses that try to give a head start on learning that, but I never had the good fortune to take any of them. I can’t say I was a good manager, but I certainly learned a lot about what not to do. And I am content that I learned enough to get all my work done well.

The truth is that learning on the job applies to almost everything we challenge ourselves to try and accomplish in life. This applies to parenting and partnering like everything else. This is not news to any of you out there.

What makes our current situation so much more challenging is the rapid rate of change we face in our lives. How can we give advice to our young when they know more about what is happening in our current reality than we can possibly keep up with?

Parenting may be one the most perplexing learning-on-the-job challenges we will face in our lives. And I don’t envy this generation of parents, who find their children more adept at the latest devices in every home than they ever will be. They will have to concentrate on the management skills they will have to pick up to deal with children who know more about important things in the world than they do.

From working to getting along with our partners to parenting and more, it fascinates me how much we have to learn on a continuing basis, throughout our lives.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The miracle that is our body

What do we really know about the marvelous vessel we are fortunate enough to inhabit? Don’t we mostly just take it for granted? We were popped into the world without our say so, but, in return, we inherited millions of years of human evolution in the bodies we have been bequeathed.

You will be enlightened to learn that our bodies are so filled with energy that we emit light, although our eyes are too weak to detect it. Information speeds along our nerves at 400,000 miles per hour, our brains hosting 100,000 chemical reactions per second. Blood corpuscles run through our bodies, covering 20,000 kilometres daily. We breathe 20,000 times a day to provide them with the oxygen our bodies need to function.

Our noses can differentiate three trillion different scents, and our eyes millions of different colours. Our skin has 100 pain sensors per square centimetre. Our stomachs are producing more new cells faster than those that are being destroyed by the acids of digestion. We produce one litre of saliva a day to keep things juicy. Operating all this is the work of our brains, which are actually more active when we are asleep than when we are awake.

Did we luck out or what? The most amazing thing is that, most of the time, the apparatus keeps on working for a lifetime with few or no problems. Our hearts beat away three billion times during our lives, we consume 35 tons of food on average and shed two to four kilograms of skin every year.

Women will be interested to know that their tongues are blessed with more taste buds than their male counterparts. They may be less happy to learn that we have 67 different types of bacteria in our bellybuttons and more bacteria in our mouths than the number of people on this planet.

With all of this going on in our bodies automatically, what are we in charge of? Where do we come in? Where does individual will come from? What is it that makes us the particular person we are? When do we get to be the person we think we are?

That may be where DNA comes in. That is the stuff our parents gave us, half the package from each of them. Out of the incredible hodge-podge that each of them got from their parents – millions, maybe billions, of different potentialities – chance determined the particular combination of traits we received from them. What we got influenced not just our physical heritage, but our mental and emotional elements are inherited, as well. After that, given some reasonable nurturing (something a lot of kids don’t get), each of us is on our own to make what we can of what we got.

We have five main chemicals in the brain, most of them variations of the feel-good type. We tend to pursue activities and things that make us feel good and that stimulate the flow of those chemicals in our brains.

We work because we enjoy the work, or because we enjoy having the money we will earn from that work. We pursue the company and attentions of those who make us feel good, sometimes becoming addicted (falling in love?) and desiring a permanent attachment. We strive because achieving the object of our effort will give us pleasure, be it knowledge, respect, money, power, fame, or all of them.

The vigour with which we pursue these things may arise from our DNA or from the kind of nurturing we experienced in our growing up, or both. Studies have shown that, in identical twins separated at birth, genetics accounted for 50% to 70% of outcomes and behaviours. There is little doubt that DNA programming is important, but behavioural differences between individuals can lead to different outcomes.

For some of us, all this may have relevance only to the degree it illuminates the course our own life is taking or has taken. Do we feel we got a fair shake in the lottery that landed us in the birth basket we arrived in? Did the environment we arrived in, the legacy our DNA bestowed on us, give us a fair chance to grab the golden ring(s) that satisfied our aspirations or desires? Did our grit and determination permit us to overcome the obstacles we faced in life so that we are more satisfied with where we are compared to where we started from? Are we happy?

Our lives are the body of proof.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers. The term “body of proof,” used in this article, is taken from the name of a television drama about a medical examiner that ran on ABC from 2011 to 2013.

The miracle that is the mind

So, what’s going on inside your head? Pretty important stuff, actually, because that’s where all of us are happening.

The facts are almost unbelievable, 100 billion neurons, each connected to 10,000 other neurons, processing one trillion bits per second. There are 100 trillion synaptic connections. A synapse is just that, a connection. For comparative purposes, a home computer with a 4 GHz processor does only four billion clock cycles per second. Remember that a trillion is a million times a million.

We have almost unlimited storage space, but our short-term memory is much more limited, capable of holding only five to nine pieces of information at any one instant. We continue to learn, reshaping parts of our brains with new pathways, benefiting from the body’s redundancies. What we know is that practice does make (almost) perfect, and that our body parts can take on a life of their own. Those pathways fade if we don’t use them.

Fortunately for us, our brains have some ability to repair themselves, completely up to the age of 5 and, to a degree, during our lives, through the growth of new neurons that can take over some of the functions of damaged parts. As babies, we have the same number of neurons we do as adults, but the size of our brains triples in our first year. Brain development continues until about the age of 25.

Most of us don’t realize that our brains, making up about two percent of our weight, use 20% of our energy and are 73% water. Dehydration can affect function. Sweating for 60 minutes shrinks the brain as much as one year of aging, so be sure to drink up!

Our brains are where we find the human capacity for self-awareness (located in the prefrontal cortex), what it is that differentiates us from other animals. While chimps and dolphins also show signs of self-awareness, their brains are entirely different.

What about our feelings? There are all sorts of chemicals sloshing around inside our heads. From here on in, it gets incredibly complicated, and, so, this lecture is over. What’s really on my mind is what happens as a consequence: our exquisite sensitivity to colour, taste, smell, facial expression, emotion, music, beauty, and so much more. What is in our brains, what is on our minds, is the essence of being human.

For example, imagine what is going on in a composer’s head when writing a symphony, the harmonies to be worked out between 10, 12 or more different instruments. Can you imagine how the mind of a musician is working when their fingers are flying so fast you can hardly see them? How about the conductor, who has the whole score in their consciousness as the orchestra players are led through a piece?

Each of us has a brain box where incredible things are happening during the ordinary course of lives. Just running the machine we call our body is the product of eons of evolution and development. All of what we are is centred in our minds. We are only beginning to understand parts of it, but we have a long way to go. The explosive expansion of computing power we are witnessing is helping us roll back the mysteries behind our functioning. But the mind and its workings, repairing things when they go wrong, remain among our greatest challenges. What is marvelous is how many things go right most of the time.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Our past prepares us for now

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last for which the first was made …” begins the poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning. Meanwhile, his wife, Elizabeth, immortalized their relationship in her poem, “How Do I Love Thee?” which is an exquisite expression of love, and how it can change a life.

The couple met when Elizabeth was 38 and Robert was 34. After a courtship carried on primarily through letters, they married secretly in 1846, and Elizabeth ran away with Robert to live with him in Italy. Her tyrannical father disowned her – the family was fabulously wealthy from Jamaican rum and slaveholdings, and he thought Robert was a gold digger. The Brownings had a son in 1848.

Elizabeth died in 1861 after a brilliant literary career that, for a time, eclipsed her husband’s – she was considered for the post of England’s poet laureate after the death of William Wordsworth. Robert died in 1889.

“Rabbi Ben Ezra” was published in the collection of poems Dramatis Personae in 1864. Very briefly, it says that, whatever has come before in our lives is but a prelude to what our lives are, and will be.

How many of us have had some event in our histories that we can point to as a crossroad, such as that the Brownings experienced? For most of us, it is hard to think of our past as merely leading us to something even more important. And yet, there is a germ of truth here, whatever our experiences.

For me, I have reason to find some contentment in what I assess are my accomplishments after a life spanning eight decades. And yet, and yet … I know that the things I cherish as worthwhile are known best only by me. There are no plaques or monuments, no citations, few remembrances of my name. The physical evidence of my passage lies in the offspring I contributed to bringing into being. They, every one of them, are self-made, the products of the sum total of their individual efforts to which I can make only a small claim.

Truly, for most of us still around to gaze at life’s battlefield, all we have is what we can make of the day that lies ahead. We can take pleasure in the comfort of a leisurely day in the sun. We can intervene in the life of someone near and dear, or even a stranger, and try to help. We can become active on an issue of public import that we have in the past supported in our minds alone. Given our life experience at any moment in time, we have appreciations and understandings we never could have had before that time, even though our past is what led us to where and who we are.

Like Robert Browning, I do have a momentous event in my life to announce from the rooftops. And I take full credit for being an important party to the life-changing event. Truly, for me, it was “the last for which the first was made.”

For most of us, the lives we arrange do not turn out as we hoped. For example, we all seek relationships in which we can love and be loved in return. Regardless of the positive outcomes that come from pursuing these relationships in good faith, our aspirations are not always fully met.

I was entranced by a creature of the opposite sex in my teenage years, but a lack of self-confidence and courage prevented me from advancing my offering. We both passed on to other partners, and I did not seriously develop a plan of action until I reached widowerhood at the age of 70, some 55 years later. Knowing my intended was also unattached, after planning my approach, almost a year later, I strongly pressed my case. It was my good fortune that I was accepted as a marriage partner.

One does not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear without a good deal of re-engineering. We have now been together for more than 12 years, a period of learning by both parties.

What’s happening at your house?

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Let’s hear it for camp!

(photo from teenlife.com/summer-program/urj-camp-kalsman)

Going to camp was a rite of passage when I was growing up. Everybody went to camp. In my day, it was the B’nai B’rith camp that all Jewish kids went to, in Sandy Hook, past Winnipeg Beach.

I don’t recall much detail of my really young days as a camper, but we never missed a summer. As small kids, we went with our mothers. It all had to do with getting away from the oppressive summer heat and time at the beach, wading and swimming, sunning on a blanket, playing the games on the boardwalk. I would have an ice cream cone every day, even though, back then, all you could get were vanilla and strawberry flavours. There may have been chocolate, too.

I enrolled in Young Judaea in my early teens. In the heady days leading up to and after Israel declared its independence, movements of every political stripe in Israel had a youth group and camps in Canada and in the United States.

At camp, we built our Jewish consciousness and reinforced our Jewish identity. We were part of larger society, of course, but the one that was becoming central to our lives was the Jewish one, and the camp experience strengthened all that. Everything around our activities focused on our life as Jews, intellectually and emotionally, in our developing teen years. It was easy to pick out the future leaders – assertive, confident, basing their arguments on material accepted as fact. That was the stuff we brought forward into our adult years, colouring what we would become and the messages we would transmit to our children.

Aliyah to Israel was an enormous focus of the Zionist camps I associated with. This possibility, went the argument, was why we had to study our history, our customs, our holidays. We were building a new kind of Jew, unapologetic for his striving nature, determined to never again be a victim. History’s lessons were clear and we had to take heed and take our future into our own hands. The camps I attended were the educational vehicle.

In those days, we pretended we were chalutzim (pioneers), so we went out into the bush and made like we were going to live off the land. We built lean-tos to sleep under, chopped down trees, built things, learned how to make a campfire even without matches, and engaged in marches, canoeing, the whole megillah.

The years I spent as a camper – learning to be a scout, learning to create things with my hands, to develop myself physically, to compete for excellence – we were modeling the new Jew. We were not content with just being students, we knew we could do that – we were going to be doers. We were building pride in ourselves and in our accomplishments.

In turn, I became one of the leaders trying to transmit the messages I had absorbed to others. The young people I grew up with at camp worked in their own communities in the same way. All across the country and across the United States, we were a network fighting assimilation, building loyalty to Israel and a consciousness of being Jewish and the values it represented.

One of the best experiences I had was when I was invited to be a Camp Shalom program director in Gravenhurst, Ont. I spent six months preparing programs and then threw them all out on my second day on the job. I spent the next two months preparing different programs on the fly, built around Jewish holidays or events in Jewish history. We organized camper teams, choosing names, uniforms and cheers, and had athletic competitions, colour wars, talent competition skits, swimming competitions or just fun at the beach. I don’t know about the campers, but I had a great time exploring my creative capacities. We set up a pattern that was followed for years at that camp.

Some of us became community leaders. A few of us even got to Israel, at least for a time. Many of the associations we made have withstood the test of time. Some of the best friendships I have today are ones I made in those years. A good number of marriages came out of those experiences, including one of my own.

What a wonderful institution camps are, whatever their nature! Bringing kids into a healthful environment with responsible supervision, living lives completely different from what they are accustomed to, meeting people they would not normally meet, exposing them to alternative behavioural norms, has to be good. And getting away from the city into a natural environment, who has to be convinced that that is a good thing? Let’s hear it for camp days. Rah, rah, rah!

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Camp’s benefits

Camp allows youth to learn meet new people. (photo from campmiriam.org)

There is something special about camps. Transporting kids out of their customary environments into something that is at least somewhat foreign is a great stimulus to change. New people and new situations over a few-week period force more rapid adaptations than would normally be required. Camp offers an environment for kids and youth to have fun and learn new skills, but also to consider who they are as individuals, without the close observation of their parents.

Some kids bloom in surprising ways at camp. They get a chance to use and develop aspects about themselves that they either never realized were there, or haven’t had a chance to exercise. For better or worse, the regime of mom and/or dad is challenged. Different rules apply, and often they are enforced with a consistency not found at home. There is no one immediately there to intervene in one’s interaction with bunkmates, for example. Kids have to work issues out between themselves as they temporarily share their world.

This is what it is like in the real world, and we learn lessons at camp that we might not learn if we just stayed home. And we get to measure ourselves against others. We get pushed to compete, to strive, to be better, because everyone else is doing that. This allows us the chance to grow in self-confidence. It’s not just family encouraging us, it’s the approval (or disapproval) we gain from those around us – strangers who can become our friends.

photo - Camp allows youth to learn new skills — Camp allows youth to learn new skills. *(photo from camphatikvah.com)*

Camp offers so many things: the chance to escape the city, to learn to swim and do other sporting activities, to be creative with arts and crafts, and to be self-sufficient in less inhabited areas. The list goes on. What about the songs and dances that we join in with others, which make us feel good, and a part of something larger than ourselves? What about the friends we make, some of whom will be there for us throughout our life? What about the chance to develop and exercise leadership and initiative?

The most delicious thing about this recipe for growing kids into grown-ups is that it’s all about fun. This isn’t about “a little bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.” It’s sugar pops all the way. And a side benefit accrues to parents, who get a little respite when they ship their kids off to camp.

Being a part of the camping experience opens up a universe of possibilities for those who are fortunate enough to have a chance at entry into that world.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The power, beauty of music

On classical favourite is Beethoven. (image from Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics)

Music, my love! Where can one start with this subject? For many, it is a highly emotional issue. Watching young people at a rave or rock concert, we can see how totally they are consumed by the sounds, the words and the experience. Though it may leave profound traces in what they become, in the person they are, other priorities will ultimately dictate their behaviour. Nevertheless, don’t so many of us retain some place in our being where the music of our youth, once recalled, takes us back to those times with immediacy, carrying with it all its emotional weight? All the good and all the bad!

Carried away by a political consciousness early in my growing up years, I missed all that. Busy, busy, busy. My attitude was coloured somewhat by having had music thrust down my throat by a mother who felt that no education was complete without a person having the capacity to play a musical instrument. To my distress, the violin was her instrument of choice – weren’t there all those famous virtuosos Jewish? But, my output was in continuous dissonance with the beautiful music I heard in my head, no matter how hard I practised. I struggled with it for a number of years, while my sister achieved some facility, until my teacher suggested I could more productively focus my efforts on attaining celebrity in basketball, where I, as a short person, also had unreasonable expectations. I did, however, gain an appreciation of how beautiful music could be when offered by those with talent.

It was the folk music of the ’60s, the music of protest and rebellion, that most marked my consciousness in those early years. I trafficked in other forms, but it was the emotional appeal of that particular material that captured me. Some of it can still bring me to tears. Over time, though, a few favourite classical works were accumulated as top of mind: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Dvorak, mainly their stuff stirred my emotions. Gershwin, some Joni Mitchell and Dylan, Joplin and Leonard Cohen round out the picture of less formal music. Do we begin to see a pattern?

I am not an addict. I can go for long periods of time without insisting on being surrounded by melodious strains. But, when the occasion arises, and the stars are aligned, I am totally captured by the music that is available – preferably one of my favourites, but no matter. I become enraptured by the immersion. I know I am an inconstant lover, but a lover I am, nevertheless.

The right sort of music can transport me to places where I feel I could remain forever, a nirvana that wipes away all the stuff that is usually filling my head. There is so much in there, catalogues and timetables, agendas and orders of priority; for the time that I am in a place of music, these things do not exist. In some ways, music becomes for me a refuge. I do not want to imagine life without it. The need for that escape accumulates within me over time until, unconsciously, I am forced to find the occasion for relief.

I know I do music an injustice. Those involved in music-making in all its forms devote the essence of their lives to it; it is their lives. I can only imagine the sacrifices that are made, the years that are spent, by those who have had music take them by throat and totally seize their souls, so driven are they. How insulting that it should descend to being merely a palliative to one like myself!

Many of the things we need in life have their devotees. Fortunately for us, what musicians/composers are offering to us is central to their lives, so they lead a life of service to others, in many ways, without their necessary volition. For us, their raison d’etre may be only incidental, but insofar as they are consumed in making music, in all its various forms, we are blessed by their commitment to finding their joy in their métier.

As a failed musician who knows how much devotion and hard work meaningful music-making takes, I can only express my gratitude. Some of the best moments of my life – and, undoubtedly, for many others – have come from their creativity.

Can we fully express our love for another person without turning at some point to music? Can we fully express our love of country without music? Would we be willing to surrender all that music brings to our lives?

Music came into being because humanity needed this medium to express those feelings that cannot be put into words. The oldest known instrument ever found – thought to be 3,500 years old – is a five-hole flute made from a vulture’s wing bone. Anthropologists estimate, according to Wikipedia, that music is 55,000 years old and originated in Africa. It has been said that humankind fundamentally changed its nature about that long ago. Maybe music played a crucial part in that.

Regardless, I have a love affair with music. I truly believe that music was invented all those eons ago so that I could get to dance with my Bride. Care to join me on the dance floor?

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

On making a new start

Why is it so hard for many of us to shake off the past and begin anew? My Bride often tells me she finds it amazing how easily I forgive myself for my errors. She holds her misgivings about past actions to her breast for eternity. For me, when I forgive myself, I find it much easier to strike off in another direction, one which may, or may not, lead to a better result.

Maybe it has something to do with my background. As an adherent to Judaism, I have always been much taken by the ideas associated with the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah, occurring in the autumn, as determined by the lunar calendar, is one of our major holidays. It is a happy holiday, a time of feasting and family gatherings, celebrating that we managed to get safely through another year. And there are lots of wishes expressed that we might do the same again next year, even marking it in our spiritual birthplace, Jerusalem.

But there is a serious side to the holiday as well. The New Year will be followed closely by the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when all Jews are assessed and judged as to what their fate will be in the year to come. So, the New Year is a time when all Jews are expected to examine their behaviours and make resolutions that, hopefully, will guide their actions more positively in the coming year.

To do so, one has to search one’s conscience, one has to admit to oneself all those things that we have done wrong, that only we know about. We have to admit to ourselves remorse for our actions that we know have not been correct in the light of our values. Then we have to decide that we will not do those things again. We have to forgive ourselves and resolve to do differently. Indeed, during this season, many individuals go out of their way to visit antagonists and others to whom they may have done wrong to beg pardon for any perceived excesses to which they may have been a party.

So, you can see that I come by my approach rightly. It was imbibed with my mother’s milk. Judaism is not unique in including this concept within its construct. It seems to be an important element within many religious and philosophical approaches as to how humans should live. The key thing to me is that we have to be able to forgive ourselves so that our contrition can motivate actions toward a new start.

I must admit I always feel refreshed when I am in the position of having cast off the constrictions imposed by ideas I have been forced to abandon. Ahead of me lie whole new worlds of possibilities. That old stuff didn’t work. What did I learn? Where can I go from here?

What about that idea that we discarded before as impractical, impossible? Could there be something in it? What about what Joe suggested, which we shouted down? Maybe we should ask him to explain it more fully. Could there be something in it that we missed? He has had good ideas before. What if we put that idea together with the one we had? Could that give us a better result? Anybody who has spent a part of his or her life confronting problems, and problem-solving, in concert with other people, will know that of which I speak.

Don’t we feel better after we have cleared the decks with an old adversary? Now maybe we can make a fresh start and work together to accomplish common goals that we share. Isn’t it great when the difference you have had with your spouse has been resolved and you have returned together to the zone of loving and sharing that you were in danger of losing? Isn’t that more important than things that may have divided you? Aren’t so many long-term relationships built by making new starts over and over again?

The Jewish New Year ethic is a part of how we can live our lives each day. Making a fresh start is what we can do every day we wake up. We all know there are things percolating on the back burner. We may not want to think about some of these things. We may push them off to the back of our minds because of their unpleasantness. But they don’t go away. They are the things we will have to tackle if we want to make a fresh start in some important area of our lives.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His recently published Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.