Hi Guys….
Remember when we first discovered the microphone on our
PC and recorded a lot of goofy things together? You were both so young … that’s
what made it so much fun. One of my favourite recordings was Christian, in one of his funny voices, saying, “Who’s
yoh daddy?” Remember my recorded
response? “Yoh Daddy, IS yoh daddy!”
That still cracks me up thinking about it ... it's a very fun memory for me.
I want you to know yoh Daddy a little better … why I think what I think, do what I do, and say what I say (I think).
Who I am today is best explained by telling you a story.
Actually, I need to tell two stories … a Tale of Two Storms.
A Very Personal Storm
I remember the event like it was yesterday. It was around
2pm. The date was Sunday February 25, 2001. It’s still so clear in my mind. A
brutal storm hit. It wasn’t the meteorological kind though. An event occurred but
it was my mind that was hit by one of the most intense storms that it had ever
experienced. My mind couldn't process the event.
The result was an emotional breakdown. My mind collapsed.
And when that happened, it seemed like the rest of my dimensions went with it. Not
a nervous breakdown, mind you … that’s different … with those you actually do
damage to the nervous system. Mine was less severe, but personally
incapacitating none-the-less. Maybe a better term is a severe mid-life crisis …
or a wicked burnout … or an epic flame-out. The semantics are really less
important than the impact … I had a holistic collapse: physically, mentally,
emotionally, socially, and spiritually.
Do you guys remember that at all? Christian, you
were 14. Faith, you
were 12.
In the months that followed, my plaintiff mentality
directed the blame for my collapse at other individuals rather than assuming
any culpability myself. It would take 9 months for the birth of any real
healing to take place. It would take a friend’s meteorological insights of
another storm before I would fully understand my own.
An Historic Storm (a real weather one)
In November 2001, a beach-front cottage on PEI was destroyed during the oceanic surge of a powerful storm. A
newspaper article the following day summarily declared the cottage to be the
victim of the storm. Our leading expert at work on storm surges was George
Parkes (do you remember him?). George was quick to point out to me that the journalist’s
conclusion was a misdiagnosis. “Peter. That’s wrong! That’s wrong! It wasn’t
the storm that brought down the cottage; it was thirty years of sea-level rise
and coastal erosion and crustal subsidence.” George then amazed me with a
series of satellite photos, taken over decades, which showed a gradually
advancing coastline, bringing the beach closer and closer to the cottage,
putting it in a position of ever-increasing vulnerability. Here's a few shots.
 |
| Destroyed cottage |
 |
| notice the proximity to the water |
 |
Satellite picture from 1974 … 26 years before the storm.
The cottage is the one with the dark roof towards the back left.
Notice how far it is from the water?
26 years later it was beachfront property and very vulnerable.
|
Quite simply, the storm was nothing more than the
proverbial, “final straw.” George described it this way … “it was like pulling
the trigger on a gun that was slowly being loaded for more than thirty years.”
When the cottage was built it was sufficiently far inland, but the creeping
effect of a rising sea level and a coastline being eroded and a subsiding earth
crust beneath it had brought the shoreline closer and closer over three decades
… until one day it was beachfront property and suddenly vulnerable in a new
way. The destiny of that event had been mapped out for decades, however, all
that we saw was the catastrophic end to the cottage during the storm.
Lesson? That which loads the gun is seldom what pulls the
trigger.
Back to My Personal Storm
When the PEI cottage was destroyed, I had already had
nine months to ponder and do a lot of soul-searching to try to figure out how
something like that could have happened to me. After all, I was a church elder
and a father … I taught other people how to live well. So, in the vulgar words
of your generation: WTF? By the time November rolled around I had stopped
blaming others for my breakdown and was really open to understanding how this
happened and how I could have prevented it. George’s story about the cottage
provided my answer; I was just like that cottage. My collapse wasn't simply the
result of a sudden massive emotional storm. The event in question was actually
quite insignificant in the big scheme of things. But my vulnerability to that
event was the result of a gun being slowly loaded over a few decades. Like the
cottage, my collapse was ultimately the culmination of too many years of
personal neglect as I had ignored rising pressures, moral subsidence and
character erosion. My destiny too had been mapped for decades, through a slow
creeping effect. People only saw the crash. I knew what pulled the trigger. But
it would be a few years before I understood how I had loaded the gun.
George was right … that which loads the gun is seldom
what pulls the trigger.
Understanding the details behind the loading of my gun became
a personal obsession for about 8 years, and ended up changing my life at home,
work and church. It changed me. My thinking had changed. The way I related to
Deb and to you guys was changed. The way I related to everybody was changed.
As I mentioned before, at work, I went from being “the
hurricane guy,” to being known as “the life balance guy.” Two years later in 2009
I moved from managing the Hurricane Centre to managing the weather service’s
Life-balance Initiative, and eventually Environment Canada’s change-management
efforts, as well as EC’s people-management training.
Essentially, my career as an applied-scientist shifted to
one where they paid me to work in the humanities? How did this happen? I had an
emotional breakdown which led to an emotional breakthrough. I'm gonna come back to this notion of a "breakdown breakthrough" in one of the summer blogs.
As you can see, very bad things sometimes have a very
good result ... if we let them (that which doesn't kill you doesn't actually always make you stronger, despite the common expression ... I'll revisit this one too under the broad category of @#$#@ my Mom told me).
My personal storm of 2001 marks a defining moment in my
life … a watershed if you will, with life being divided into BC and AD (“before
crash” and “awakening day”). It is as important to me as when God came into my
life in 1976 … as when Debbie came into my life in 1981 … as when each of you
were born and came into my life in 1986 and 1988. It marked when I finally came
into my own life to take ownership of it.
I love you guys.
Dad
Next week... I want to look a bit closer at the vulnerability thing and it's connection with disasters, both natural and man-made.
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