This is how much of a nerd I secretly am – the reward I was going to give myself for doing my tortuous taxes was an indulgent meditation around the idea that we don’t have free will and what this means for us. Like I was deeply excited to think about this, lol.

This wasn’t just a make-work intellectual indulgence for me. My preoccupation was based on this premise: if someone lacks free will to make alternative choices, how can we judge them for behaving the way they did?

Initially I had been thinking about this in terms of how this could cause us to reframe experiences with others: that thing that person said or did, the resentment you are holding onto, that thing you struggle to forgive, that asshole that cut you off in traffic. I mean you can be mad about it, I guess. But at some point you’re simply going to have to let it go. Because if there is no free will what choice did they have? How could you be anything but compassionate towards yourself and others?

But there are huge implications in believing this. I haven’t really even explored the negative issues that could result from thinking we don’t have it. And the whole subject in general begs for something much more in depth and a lot more researched than a half baked, half understood, meandering blog post. But hey, you don’t need to read it, I just need to write it. This is my platform so here we go.

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What is Free Will

So to be clear my view on free will means that we have a conscious choice over what we choose to do. This is slightly different than assuming someone doesn’t have responsibility for what they do – so from my perspective, someone still has authorship. In other words, an asshole can still be an asshole. But I acknowledge that it’s a fine line in double think here.

I don’t want to speak for people, but I imagine many people hold the idea that some things we do might be out of our general control, but from a big picture perspective, even these things not quite under our control are all still part of a more conscious direction we choose for ourselves.

For example, there are people in this world who I do not view through a compassionate and empathic lens. Not only am I aware of this choice, I am okay with it, too. So maybe a micro expression of contempt shows in my face when the subject of that person comes up. Letting my feeling leak out may have not be entirely intentional, so maybe I didn’t consciously choose to reveal that. However the decision to not frame that person through a compassionate and empathic lens could be considered an act of free because I know I could have worked to see them differently. So it could be that free will is a matter of degree.

But I wanted to emphasize consciousness in free will because that implies awareness. We think of ants acting only in service of the ant colony, however they do demonstrate self-control (i.e. the ability to choose a large delayed reward over a small immediate one). From an ant’s perspective people might find it easier to imagine that the choices might be a bit more instinctual than conscious free will. But we can’t assume that because they can demonstrate self-control that consciously making a “choice”.

So in this way the concept of free will might actually be a discussion about consciousness. And consciousness is something that still remains a mystery to us.

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Compelling Evidence There is No Free Will

Despite feeling that the belief that we don’t actually have free will could lead us to greater compassion for other, on deeply some level it’s a disturbing concept. We deeply want to feel we have control over the choices we make.

However, from a psychological level and a neuroscience level, the evidence that supports the idea that we don’t have free will is pretty compelling.

Let’s look at some ideas. The first is an idea in physics (and I am not even competent on any kind of level of physics so just bear with me) that suggests that the current state of the universe is dictated by it’s past, suggesting determinism. That is, if someone had the intellect to know the exact position and momentum of every atom, it would be possible to calculate the past and future with precision.

It’s at this stage in my musings that I want to argue for emergence – emergence being the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and it (quite literally) takes on a life of it’s own.

But logically speaking, that an atom becomes a chemical, and a chemical becomes a molecule, it’s easy to imagine that everything that emerges from that is predictable. However, when we think about a sphere of influence, does consciously making a choice affect the behavior of atoms? Physicists understand more than I do about the different forces. But in consciously choosing, what force acts on those atoms, then?

Then there was this other idea that got me excited for a bit, that chaos on the quantum level suggests that nothing is predetermined. In fact there are some theories that maybe this is where consciousness lives (based on what I can tell, this is based on absolutely nothing but an idea and maybe the fact that we don’t really understand quantum mechanisms).

But I understand that at the sub atomic level of particles we have no evidence that anything in the past dictates the behavior of particles, and that there is randomness. This is quite compelling (even if I my brain hurts when trying to learn about quantum mechanics and theories)!

But MIT physicist Max Tegmark mathematically ruled this out because there is such a scale difference between subatomic particles and a molecule. He calculated 23 orders of magnitude in the, if I got this right, scale differences.

And for us non-mathy types, 23 orders of magnitude means 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s how much the subatomic effect would have to scale up to influence a molecule. And I hadn’t thought about this, but of course what this mean is that any randomness subatomic level would be reduced to averages before they could influence the behavior of a molecule.

But then Neil deGrasse Tyson and Robert Sapolsky argue that even if you could argue the behavior of a molecule has random influence, then that’s randomness. Maybe it rules out determinism. But It still doesn’t indicate that we have any more control.

But because I have probably done more reading on the brain, the most compelling evidence to me are the studies in which fMRIs show there is activity in our brain before we are conscious of making decisions or intending to do a voluntary act. ¹

So damn.

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Why do we Feel Like We Are Making Choices

I simply can’t ignore the highly sophisticated, complex, amazing biological ways in which our bodies operate. This resulted in a philosophy around this idea that there is a biological utility that underpins our various human qualities, including our emotions and motivations. I believe these qualities have been useful for our survival and evolution as a species.

So, naturally the sticking point for me is: if we truly have no free will, why do we feel so strongly that we do?? Why do we feel it’s so important to have the freedom to choose? There must be some point to it.

Studies suggest that when we are exposed to the idea that our behavior is predetermined, we are more likely to cheat, steal, act aggressively or otherwise act in ways that is not in societies best interests. ^{2 3 4} It’s quite a fascinating phenomena. It implies that we are prone to succumbing to our worst impulses if we don’t believe we have a sense of agency over the outcome.

Why have the feeling at all? Why not just have our decision and actions built into our subconscious or unconscious and simply have this running in the background?

I thought perhaps if we believe we all have agency, then this leads us into applying pressures on those around us to behave in certain ways. My judgement will trigger your guilt and/or shame and vice versa and together we will modify our behavior accordingly. As a result we will all be a little less likely to do things that serves our self-interest at the expense of the group.

But then why didn’t our biological evolution (or God, or the Universe, random survival of the fittest, or whatever you think is responsible for our highly sophisticated biological processes) create a being then just simply serves the group (this was how I found myself reading academic papers on ants, lol)?

Based on the lens in which I view things, I can only assume our survival sometimes needed to depend on our ability to step into our lesser selves. In some cases we need to prioritize our own well being over others. Clearly we need to be influenced by those around us and act in the best interests of the group, and yet at times, act in our own best interests.

But it still doesn’t quite get to the answer of why we need to feel we are free to make a decision and how the feeling of freedom to decide is so important.

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The Feeling of Free Will, More Than Social Control

The feeling of agency is critical for us, and even dictates the level of stress we experience in certain circumstances. If the free will was only about morals (i.e. our belief that we have free will prevents us from simply giving into to to the idea nothing we do matters), I can’t help but wonder the feeling of agency bleeds into other areas of our human experience like how we handle stress.

Studies have repeatedly shown that we feel we have some control, we can handle stressful experiences much better. Studies of learned helplessness have also indicated that when we learn that nothing we do can influence the outcome of a repeated negative event, we eventually give up and do nothing even when escape later could be possible.

Additionally, people experience psychological reactance when we perceive certain freedoms are being threatened, or our choices are being limited. Psychological reactance is the phenomena of being motivated to regain a freedom after it’s been lost or threatened. When our freedom is threatened, it is usually accompanied by resistance, the feeling of discomfort or even hostility. We frequently see this in marriages, work environments and families.

We just don’t want to be pressured or compelled to do something by someone or something else. Just think about those times when someone has tried to manipulate or compel you to do something or think a certain way. We resist. It explains why the “hard sell” so often fails. It explains why teenagers rebel only to later conform to the rules once they have moved into full independence.

Either way, it’s clear that feeling like we have the free will to choose and the ability to make our own decisions whether its behalf of our selves or others, is incredibly important to us. Why? How does that serve us?

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Can We Even Live It?

In that particular interview with Robert Sapolsky, the thing that stick with me the most at the moment is how Robert hasn’t believed we have free will since he’s been 14. And yet says something to the effect that he is only able to fully experience the idea of this for maybe 3 minutes a month (don’t quote me on the exact numbers here, but enough to say for only a tiny fraction of time).

If someone compliments him, he still feels good. He still experiences road rage. Like the ego will still be the ego. This is significant. The concept we don;t have free will is so powerful that it can only influence our experiences and only to a small degree.

So damn again. If he can’t do it, then perhaps this rabbit hole for the search of easy compassion really is just an intellectual indulgence of mine.

I asked myself before I went down this rabbit hole: why not just adopt the idea we have no free will if it means I will be more compassionate with others and even myself? It’s the the first time I have encounter the idea that we don’t have free will. Why not just act as if. Look how knowing that we are not always responsible for certain outcomes have lead to greater compassion in our society (schizophrenia, homosexuality, etc.).

Just act as if. The question lead me down a path of how I feel I can’t just adopt something I don’t entirely believe in. I need to feel there is a basis of rightness and truth (even while understanding how hypocritical that is given the human tendency towards bias and rationalization and so on). Even while exploring the different ideas and concepts, I’ve been asking myself – you really have enough evidence, why not just act as if?

The real question around free will that is the impetus behind all this: Why get worked up by anything anyone else does? Why not just let go of things I am still holding on to? Those old resentments that we all have. The frustrations and aggravations. Deeper down: those self-recriminations, the little guilts, the buried shame, why not just learn to forgive yourself?

All the way skimming right by the realization that I can’t even think in a way to assume I don’t have free will.

Before I wrote about this, I felt my life snapping back to exactly what it was only moments later. After I spent some time really thinking about this, I thought it would be easier. Sure. I thought about free will and the lack of it, and how to be truly compassionate and all that. For brief moments at a time. Then snap. There it is. The distraction of regular life. People are still annoying.

Clearly this is a practice.

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How to Move Foward

I suppose that when all is said and done, the best I can hope for is to have an intellectual framework, that after I catch myself judging, being angry, being guilty, being full of myself, taking credit, not giving myself credit, blaming, perhaps a second thought will come and remind me that none of us could have written a single line of the past any differently.

There is something real to the idea that there is no point wishing things could have been different. If it was going to turn out differently it would have. If I was meant to have a different present it would have turned out that way. We did the best we could, with what we knew and had available to us at the time. A lesson I keep having to relearn over and over.

Moving forward, I think the concept of determinism can be incredibly useful to forgive the past and to encourage compassion towards others. And for sure, we are not nearly as much in control of things as we think we are. That maybe we just build this in as a practice every time we need it to regain our perspective, to make a better choice (if we can – there I go again!).

But when it comes to thinking about the future, and the impulse to make a choice, the truth is we don’t actually know where the limits of our free will lie.

At the end of the day, as adaptable as we are, we are also incredibly habitual. There is a reason why the school and university systems exist. Like with anything, any kind of change takes a system in which the things around change are introduced to us constantly and consistently, over and over. You want change in your life,? It might help to build a curriculum for yourself. Learn it, study it, turn up for it. And you’ll see, if you don’t really want change, you’ll have all sort of excuses. “I can’t dedicate the time, there are other things I have to deal with right now…, this is not a top priority right now…” Ok. You do you. I’ll do me.

But then again, maybe you have no choice.

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Footnotes

1. Are the mental experiences of will and self-control significant for the performance of a voluntary act? ↩︎
2. The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating ↩︎
3. Addiction and free will ↩︎
4. Does Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increase Cheating? Reconsidering the Value of Believing in Free Will ↩︎

Someone might take something from this as I did, Maya Angelou’s beautiful reading of her poem Still I rise. She opens this poetry reading with the following words,

“The issues that which face us all is not how to survive, obviously we are doing that, but really how to thrive. Really. Thrive with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.”

She goes on to say,

“Every person in this auditorium have gone to sleep one night or another, or gone to bed one night or another, with fear, or pain, or loss, or terror, unhappiness, grief, insecurity, and yet each of us, has awakened, and risen, seen another human being and, said, ‘Morning, how are ya?”‘, ‘Fine, thanks, and you?‘,

Now wherever that abides, whether it’s behind a kneecap, or the needs of an ebow, or between the teeth, wherever that is, lives there we will find our nobleness. Not nobility, I think that a pompous word, but the nobleness of the human spirit. That we rise.”

If you have time to listen, she brings an amazing life to this poem, and she is a joy to listen to.

Still I Rise

By Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

I wrote this as part of another post. But the reason I wrote that post at all was because of this. So it should be on it’s own.

I don’t even remember adding album Slow Air by Still Corners to my playlist. I thought my daughter introduced me to it, but no. Because it’s not house-y dance music, I often skip it in my playlist. I’m already introspective, I don’t need music to help me get there. So I had forgotten about it. But the album was waiting for me at this particular fork in the road where I realized needed to stay embedded in the tension of challenging decisions. I was searching for solutions that didn’t exist. The music saw me out the other side where I realized there is no frictionless path.

Dreamlands doesn’t have, and to my mind shouldn’t have, the complexity that In the Middle of the Night does. Instead has a kind of gentle simplicity, with its dreamy angelic voices and tonality of wistful hope. Like imagine that you deeply wanted to come to the aid of someone who was stuck, who maybe couldn’t even see they were stuck, or perhaps you became estranged with one you loved and you wished you could reconnect. For me it’s something else and perhaps it speaks to you differently. But I feel it as the dreamland of wishes and desires, of a wistful optimism, of longing, of hope and encouragement.

But the dissonance of that guitar cuts through like it’s the reality of life intersecting the dream. The guitar: murky, full of edges, slightly uncomfortable, but yearning and hauntingly beautiful in it’s own way. Maybe that section of guitar that is the long road that seems too far, maybe it’s the approaching dark.

It all goes together in my mind: this kind of hopeful optimism, the simplicity of deciding this (whatever this happens to be at the time) is the meaning I will make of it, this is the magic I choose to attach to it. All the while tempered by the harsh truth of past experiences.

I feel the dissonance of my own nature.

The pursuit of peace and happiness is almost always idealistic. And yet peace, happiness… while they may be idealistic, if you’re lucky and perhaps not looking too hard for it, can come in wafts of wind, glints of sun reflecting off the water, in fleeting moments and changing skies. B

I took this image of this sky of gold before the pandemic but it seemed appropriate and matched the album artwork.

Music and lyrics below.

Dreamlands

Lyrics of Dreamlands – by Still Corners

I know there’s a long road
They told us it is unknown
If we wait too long then we’ll never go
I know where the sky is gold

It’s getting dark but we’re so close
It seems far but we’re not alone
If we turn back now then we’ll never know
We’ll go where the sky is gold

I don’t know how I stumbled upon Hi Ren, but I was absolutely transfixed. I could image being in a darkened theatre seeing this on the stage, feeling that electrical chill of the silence in the aftermath of a performance like this would bring, the long pause before the deafening applause. I just love it on so many levels.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Hi Ren, the most obvious or maybe easy interpretation is that this is about mental health. But I think the struggle that exists within us all, acknowledged or not, whether intense or not, is the reconciling of our dark with our light.

Personally I feel the artist’s struggle with imposter syndrome. It’s all been done before. Who are you to think you have any kind of voice worth listening to?

Art can take many forms. But the best kind for me is art that digs deep, finds something that purely yours, and uses the craft to tell that story. I feel that if you can do that authentically – then your art become immune from criticism; criticism becomes meaningless. Easier said than done, of couese.

I’ve had parts of this Still Corners — Slow Air album on repeat to the extent that I thought I was dreaming it, and would catch myself with a mishmash of fragments in my head. Which one is that fragment from, the sad one? The hopeful one? And why that one? Is my subconscious trying to send me a message?

Paragraph repeated from another post: I don’t even remember adding this album to my playlist. I thought my daughter introduced me to it, but no. Because it’s not house-y upbeat music, I often skip it in my playlist. I’m already introspective, I don’t need music to help me get there. But the album was waiting for me at this particular fork in the road where I needed to stay embedded in the tension of challenging decisions, searching for solutions that didn’t exist and saw me out the other side where I realized there is no frictionless path.

The first on this album, In the Middle of the Night, was one of those songs that I had this instant reaction to. A recognition of something that I lack the words to describe and can’t express. Like something buried wanting to be seen and here it is hidden in plain sight.

It is reference in the song to the drums and the deer, and the idea of following your path in the middle of the night; the pursuit of whimsical desires and the quests for deeper experience at times and in patterns that perhaps don’t make sense to others. I keep running up against that in small ways.

It evokes my rabbit head images, or perhaps the ones that wanted to be made. What drew me to make them is from a kind of playful disturbance, a dissonance that I am interested in. In music, dissonance can refer to notes that feel unstable or unresolved — they create a kind of friction that often “wants” to move somewhere more settled. But we encounter all kind of dissonance in our lives. We often struggles between what we want and our values. Or what we believe of ourselves to be and who we actually are.

I think it’s useful to explore this, to move away from judgment and suspect rationalization and allow us to sit in discomfort, or consider the bringing together of elements that maybe doesn’t seem like to should be together. Anytime we can questions our assumptions or expectation seems like a good thing to me.

I used to show some of these rabbit head images at the occasional art fair along with my landscapes. I’ve learned that the rabbit head images either speak to you or they don’t, you either have a sense of humour or an appreciation for the bizarre or you think I’m a bit mad. If you don’t get it, well I hope you can accept that I am just different you.

But it’s the music itself, in it’s lush complex layers that forms the base of which the vocals and lyrics are nestled into that in-between feeling. If I hear it too much, I expect in time, that kind of weird dopamine hit I must be getting from it will subside. But not yet.

That it coincidentally references my nocturnal winter wakefulness this year is beside the point. 😉

In the middle of the night
Said she wanted to go
In search of a sound
She still wanted to know

She could hear the drums
She could hear the deer
In the middle of the night
It was all so clear

It’s the time of day when if you have the lights turned on, it looks dark outside.  But! If you turn the lights off, it’s dark inside.  Twilight.

It’s dark inside, but outside everything is lit with strange blue glow that makes you feel that right now is a moment that doesn’t belong to day or night.  It’s a liminal time; a time people usually don’t pay attention to, or if they do, and if they feel it, perhaps they feel a strange kind of sorrow. A friend of mine once remarked on this during a drive in the country. A confirmed urban city guy, he said, what do people do out here. At the time I thought they’re probably inside making dinner, or any number of evening activities. But I knew what he meant. It’s a liminal time, and it’s a liminal light. Civil, nautical, astronomical twilight. And the birds, they were chatty about it.

As I contemplate this light this particular evening, maybe because the time had recently changed, and so now the light had shifted in my usual day schedule, and so this almost-light captured my attention, as I contemplated, I imagine someone coming into the house then. The door must have been unlocked or maybe they had a key. And maybe it’s not someone, maybe it’s you.

And there I would be.

Not a single light on in the house. I’m standing in the dark like a crazy person.  What are you doing, you, or they, would ask me.

I would, most likely, be caught off guard, and I would feel the weight of my thoughts, and the weight of your question, and the lack of ready-made words then, and I would gesture helplessly at the window and say something kind of unsatisfactory about the light. You, or they, would be like:

the what?

But I think you, or they, would quickly realize that there was nothing very exciting about whatever it was, and would move on to whatever it was you/they were thinking about doing when you/they entered the house; before I was seen standing there; before you, or they, had their own brief flashes of wondering about what was going on; why the heck in the dark,

what are you doing, that’s weird

(but is it?), flashes of thoughts that would quickly vanish just as quickly as you/they moved on to their own thing whatever that would be. And the spell I was under would be broken, but the remements of mood would remain.

And how could I tell them, or maybe you, there was something really special about the outside light right now – can’t you see?  Couldn’t you tell?

You see it every day. What are you talking about? Every day. Nothing special. Regular day. I’m sure you must have heard the birds on some level, but your brain rendered the sound as non-essential, no reward or threat there, you do not have to pay attention to that.

the birds? What birds? Just wait. We’ll get to the birds in a moment.

The light. That intense close blueness, that …

What IS that about the light at that time of day, the almost-dark, but not quite dark, but the presence of it dark? It’s liminal light because you don’t stay out in it. You turn on the lights. You dash it away. The artificial lights blinds you to it instantly.

I am in the magic of the almost-dark.

I’ve experienced that liminal light as the light of ten year old summer children. When we were out playing, and it was getting “dark”, but the adults were doing forgetful adult things, and maybe the streetlights hadn’t quite come on yet, but we were ten, and we were out in the almost-dark, and shadows were deeper, and everything became colourless, and monochrome blue. And exciting.

As a child we felt on the edge of something, and our friends laughed just a little bit harder, and there was just a bit more frenetic energy about us all, and we knew it was just a matter of time before the adults caught on that we were out in the dark. and spoiled our fun. But us, we see, and we were safe, and as children feel, we felt we had an unnamed, unidentified superpower that allowed us to see what the adults could not in the now secret world that belonged only to us, the children of the moment.

How could I tell a person who walked into my house about the magic of that liminal light that had me captured? Light that maybe you, or they once intimately knew, but was buried in the recess of your, or their, mind.

How could I describe how I was watching the silhouette of birds fly low in the neighbours back yard and listening to the birds.

I was listening. I was thinking about how in the summer, and I saw those dark shapes dash around in the sky that I thought they were bird in the dark, but they were bats. But this evening these were birds, and I was listening to a sound that felt like spring, to a sound that felt like the birds were, just like we were as children, present, one with it.

The birds were excited.

It was almost-dark time.

But it was not summer. It was March. And the clocks had just changed. And I get to thinking about that. 

I admit, I think about these kinds of things more than I care to admit out loud, but my mind is on the birds, on wildlife in general; what do they make of the time change?

Of course, what do they know about time, you might ask, what do they know about clocks?  Or that it’s changed? That an hour, (what’s that), just went somewhere?

But at least twice a year things shift for those in the wild. They must know something is different. One day patterns in the world shifts, one day the world wakes up earlier, goes to bed earlier.   For no apparent reason. The sound of traffic, the smells, the lights, the movement of humans, the activity, all the same, all shifted.

And these animals, birds, squirrels, rodents, that only live a couple of short years, (well, their whole lives must still feel like the length of whole lives if you catch what I mean).  Their perception of time must be based on that yard stick of time. That means that it’s only a few times in their lifetime that these things shift. Mysterious events.  And I think about this, because I am captured by mysterious events. Because I like how magic is all around us if only you think about things differently.

If you, as a robin, for example, are living, say, just two or three years, and two years is the yard stick by which to slice a whole life into measurable moments, well, even a whole hour must be a significant amount of time.  And the whole shifting thing must seem so arbitrary.  And so synced. Like – all the humans, all of them, they all shifted. Do they wonder how we are all so coordinated in our chaos?

Why now, why today, the robins must wonder.  What else is going to happen?

There is something about this feeling that I imagine the birds have that I like. I come back to these feeling states again and again the way you run your tongue over a gap in your mouth where a tooth once was, a tooth you took for granted, didn’t feel, and never once thought about beyond you daily brushings and trips to the dentist, now takes up room in your mind with it’s absence.

This feeling that turns over, like when you lift a rock to see what’s underneath, like maybe when the hairs on your arms rise up or on the back of your neck, whatever it is for you, this transition. This feeling that maybe isn’t so sudden, but maybe more like the slow dawning of a realization; that creeping feeling that rises up your scalp in a wave, that realization once realized, you cannot go back. It’s not necessarily a good feeling, but certainly it’s an arresting one.

Something happened. Something is happening.

I don’t want to say it out loud because I don’t want to bring certain things into being, but these are the feelings I have a fascination for. Some kind of something, some change, some shift, some upheaval to the routine, an opportunity to experience life differently, a change. A turning point. A liminal point.

I like to think about how superstitious animals might be about events and things like this. Why did the whole world suddenly change in this inexplicable way – things all seem the same, but the light is different. We feel different. 

I like to think of what sense they try to make of it.  What were the signs that brought this change on – the weather? The thing that happened earlier — what??  How do we predict it next time? Do they have a sense of foreboding, or is it more like, ok, that’s weird.  But whatever. 

Like walking in on someone who is standing in their house doing what appears to be nbothing in the dark. What are they doing?

Or maybe for them it’s more like, in animal form, of course, am I tripping?  Didn’t this all happen at a different time yesterday?  No? I don’t remember. Ok, whatever.

I like to imagine what a life must be like not measured by external clocks, and tedious domestic tasks, and excruciating tax returns.   In the case of birds, I like to imagine just how completely different they think and perceive than we do simply because they live in the up and down, as well as horizontal planes. Like what does that do to a mind? I want to know, I try to imagine. I like to think of their freedom.

At least, I like to think about the freedom of it, at first.

I like to think of them unbound, but mapped out by the borders that shape out our lives, our driveways, our sidewalks, and lawns we don’t really walk on. I like to imagine how they perceive our backyards, not as individual enclosed rectangles of arranged space, but instead swaths of long patches of backyardness, patterns, strips of green spaces, punctuated by gridlocked fences and other random backyard things, this one with a small rectangular artificial pond, and this one with… is that thing a tent? While this one still had the most social tree.   

What is that like to think that way? Not see a fence as a fence. What was it like to ride the slide of air that slips over tree and around the shed. If we could tap into that, how would we feel about these things that are so commonplace that we barely notice them? How would that change how we think, the way our thoughts are shaped, the drifts of our dreams?

But when it comes to the wildlife, the concept of freedom inevitably evolves to its reality, for I am never that far away from the dark. I don’t like to think of a life foraging in the winter. Then the freedom doesn’t seem free at all. No, I don’t like to think of that at all for the birds and animals, even though this winter wasn’t so bad for the cold as other winters have been. 

For I tap into those moments of a trapped experience, trapped by pain, trapped by circumstance, where time crawls its slowest, when you think you cannot bear it a moment longer, and yet you must, you have to, yes, you do.

It was swans that impressed upon me the most how miserable it must be to tolerate the bite and gnashing of the Canadian winter and you have no other choice but to tolerate it.  Swans live a long time compared to a robin, somewhere like 15-20 years in the wild. That’s a lot of winters. Long, long winters – four, five times longer than ours – think of that!

I felt the misery deeply for no other reason of the sheer irritability of one swan, and the biting cold of the time I observed it. Everything about this swan said unhappy. I’ve never seen an animal in the world that just seemed so… cantankerous. That’s a hard winter.

I remember watching the ducks and geese fly in from all around at this time of day/night, the time of almost-dark where everything was so blue and close. Honking and calling, the birds came skidding down from the sky into the water from wherever they scattered to during the day. The birds would collect together in the water over the period of a maybe a half an hour around a boat slip at Bond Head or some such place like that somewhere on the edge of Lake Ontario, in the dead of winter. 

Sometimes we would feed them, delighting in the way humans delight in making an animal respond to something we’re doing. We are still children at heart.  Look at them eat! Oh, that one gets none, and try as we might, as much food as we throw to it, the bully birds don’t give that one with a missing foot much chance to eat. I remember that foot, and the slight phantom physical pain it would give me. I tossed the food into the mass, but then as quick as I could, tossed another handful farther and farther away from the hoard in the direction of the lame thing, hoping to give it a fighting chance for this night. Don’t mess with nature, but there we were, messing.

There would be two, maybe three swans in the large bird group that consisted mostly of mostly ducks and Canadian geese.  I found it interesting that they huddled together. We sat there with our canned drinks in the car sipping with the sun dipping even lower and lower beneath the edge of earth minute by minute. We watched them and we drank, for we too were in a liminal space of time, we were in a kind of inbetweening of here and there of both in time and space and life.

The aggravated swan took a dislike to one of the mallard mandrake ducks huddling nearby, and took to snatching at its chest feathers, plucking them out. I imagined that was a sensitive spot on a duck for a plucking, particularly in the freezing cold. Back the fuck up, duck.

The duck would back off, but in a short amount of time it either forgot, or hoped the swan did, and would adjust itself surreptitiously and in doing so slowly creep closer, until the swan in all its impatient irritation, went for it again, darting its head forward, to pluck out more chest feathers of the poor duck. The duck didn’t learn. It appeared to be doomed to repeat the cycle, back up, creep close, there was some kind of dysfunction there.

It wasn’t that the swan hated the ducks.  It just hated this particular duck. I thought about that too.

They all looked the same to me, but I did not have the sensitivities or sensibilities of a swan. What was so offensive about this particular duck? Because other ducks were positoned even closer to the swan. All ignored. Was it the way the particular duck held it’s head, flapped a wing, it’s obsequious way to attempt to get back into the good graces of the swan bully?

Whatever it was, the swan just could not abide by it. Perhaps when not forced in to such close quarters, the swan might not have been bothered. But it in brutal harsh winter, the swan was not having it with this duck

I don’t like to think of this winter struggle, but I do.  Petulant, huffy, testy, enraged. They’re all out there trying to survive. It’s not just, turn up the heat, add another blanket, grab a hot drink. I think about how that cold that Lake Ontario water must have been, and yet still must be warmer than the air because it was not yet frozen. That’s the warmth you were pursuing as a water bird. And once that water was frozen you would climb onto the snow, tucking your feet in, enduring because it wasn’t killing you off yet, because that is all there was, huddle up, and wait until the slightly warmer warmth of dawn. We saw that too.

I thought about how, as a glorious swan, you must slum it out with the Canadian geese and the annoying ducks and that if you were lucky enough, a drunk human or two might come by and throw down some bread and seed for those birds that were the most aggressive of them to have.  If you were lucky enough to survive the winter.

And these are the kinds of thoughts that I think in the dark of my house, when I wander around in the magic of the almost-dark, and the silhouette of spring birds swooping around, and the new spring sound of excited birds, but excited maybe because the time just changed. Excited maybe for spring. Maybe for life.

These are the kind of thoughts that I might share if I am not caught off guard or if not needing to be on guard, thoughts that seem mildly amusing or quirky when a person might first get to know me, but that maybe become perplexing and vexing, maybe if you had to live with me. Because what seemed kind of interesting then, seems like work to listen to, work to think about now. That person probably has other things to think about. Practical things. Things that need doing. I understand. I know who you are.

And I can’t explain to you that while I know the day-to-day things must, of course, be done, that this is not just the mindless musings of birds or some made up blither-blather about the light. And yes of course, there are things I should be doing, too and I bet that could annoy some people because what about my priorities, here?

But I lack the words to describe the importance of it, and why this is a priority and why the this and that that needs to be done are just the mechanical trappings of what we think life is, it’s not real life. The knowledge driving this is stuffed down so hard that the words become mashed together for a reason. And even if I could fluff them back up into words and put space into them for you, and even if I could articulate them in such a way you’d feel it and understand, you probably have things to do, and this is your life.

I will likely have a reaction then. A stuffing back down, maybe, depends on who you turn out to be. But more I might react with an unmet need to wake you up. I know we must walk around in our sleep-walk life. Things do need doing. I know we must be switched off for so much of it, know that more than you might expect. I know we cannot be turned on all the time. I cannot live in the raw state all the time.

But do not let it slip away, I want to say to you. This life. This magic. This light. This miracle of living. Be present to it. Feel it. When it comes to the end you will not care about the lists and tasks. You will care about the birds. You will care about the light. You will wish you turned on sooner. I feel the ache for those that feel it too late. I feel it.

But the person that walked in, might not have been you, it might have been them, and unknown them, or might not have been someone, it might not have been just anyone. Maybe you didn’t come in with your mind full of things that has nothing to do with the light or the birds or the changing of the time, or the things you needed to do, and the things that needed to get done. And maybe there would be no waking up to do. Maybe I would be there in the amost-dark and no one would think me very strange at all.

But maybe the person that arrived would have been M. I imagine that if M wondered what I was doing, it would have been like, what are you doing, but in a conspiratorial excited way, like I might have a secret to share, like something interesting might be going on, exciting like the raccoons were up to something fascinating, something baffling like the earth just shook, or there was something in the middle of something about something – what is it? Tell me, M might say, fully ready to join in.

These almost-light thoughts, these bird thoughts, these in between thoughts, these almost-dark thoughts are the kind of thoughts I would share with M. M who would probably riff with me on this or that, go somewhere I hadn’t thought of, or land on something I had exactly thought of and our mutual bird wonderings would wind around each other and lead us to some other place, and there we would probably be in the dark together, discussing and wondering, then when an hour went by, it’s no longer twilight and we didn’t get things done. And we’re hungry, and like almost every time we are together, we would be wondering where the time went. And damn, if there wasn’t an hour there somewhere, where did that hour go? I guess the time changed.

Really enjoyed putting this highlight together from the clinic with Ahad Raza at Pickering Squash Club. This is exactly the kind of sports storytelling I enjoy — fast-paced, authentic, and about seeing the visual moments that build the story and shaping it in the edit.

I love trying to capture what makes sport special — the energy, effort, and feeling of being part of something bigger as athletes push themselves and improve. (And of course, being about squash just makes it pure joy for me).

Thanks to Ahad Raza (who is just lovely), the players, and our Pickering Squash pros who made it a great day.

Had an amazing time capturing the energy and drama of this year’s Hanebury squash tournament at Pickering!

It’s always fun getting creative with video in such a fast-paced environment. Couldn’t be happier to combine two of my favorite things: playing squash and video editing!

Part one is here. You’ll see I strayed a ways away from my original concept.

I don’t know if there is anything I have done so far that caused me as much thinking. Of course, there is always the thinking around the concept, and then the thinking around the build, and then the shooting and post-production. And then there was the rebuilding. And the reshooting. And the re-dos in post. But I thought a lot about this. And I procrastinated when couldn’t figure out how to solve its problems.

The image looks so simple, how could it be that complicated?

Simmering in the background were some other things, too, like, am I really shooting another image where the central character is doing nothing?

Part of it had to do with where the motivation/concept came from. I actually went back over my notes and realized that it got muddy pretty much from the start.

There’s no need to read the rest of this ridiculous rambling. Maybe if you are a photographer or filmmaker or artist you’ll find it interesting. Otherwise it’s just a lot of blather…

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Where the gas station gets a new role

You see I have a thing for certain night shots. For a while there I took to prowling around the neighborhood at night to shoot. 2 or 3am would the best time. The town is asleep and everything is very quiet.

But I currently live in a suburb and there isn’t much fog here, and there aren’t many of the structures I was interested in. I talked about the original concept here, but then I discovered that the lighting changed the entire concept. It no longer looked exactly abandoned. It looked modern, futuristic even. Could it even be abandoned with the lights on? What was I thinking? Ok, maybe. But then it’s the wrong lighting.

The first dilemma was a simple one. I liked its lighting, it felt right. It felt gas station-y.

At least the first build did. These images are a result of build number two which I built to get the lighting even better and fix an issue with the poles. And I got very stubborn about sticking to what I had built because I liked it.

So maybe it’s not abandoned. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever. See, I don’t have to overthink things.

Static vs Dynamic

We all like dynamic images, right? Go for the dynamo! When it came time to shooting the self-shots I decided I’d do a variety of different poses. I got the boring old standing-around shot (again?), of course, because that was what I had envisioned, but I did other ones, too. And I came up with one that I really liked. It was dynamic, just complex enough, and so that was going to be the shot I used.

I liked the shot. One problem. Or I thought it was one problem. It just didn’t work.

The Viewer and the Relationship to Stills vs Film

In fact that kind of lonely feeling I thought I was going for wasn’t there as soon as I put the character in. Why? That was the first problem.

It lead me down a long path of musing about the nature of the viewer of a photograph vs a film viewer. See, in a film, you can create a shot with a character in a place that feels lonely. But as soon as I put my person in my image, the place no longer felt lonely.

Take the character out, it feels lonely. Put it in, you no longer feel lonely. I was unsure if it was just my image or all images. So I did a search for “lonely” and sure enough, all those images of lonely people don’t feel lonely, even if you understand the concept of loneliness is being communicated. Why? Because when you put a person into the frame, you are no longer alone anymore.

I mean, you are not necessarily any more unlonely, but loneliness is no longer your focus. If someone is there you are not alone. I wasn’t entirely sure I was understanding the effect of it correctly, but it suggested that the role of the viewer of a photograph is different than it is for a film viewer because you can feel loneliness with a character. Could that be?

I did a bunch of thought experiments which I’ve deleted because who cares.

I eventually concluded that you can’t look at these things in isolation. It had to do with the difference in the storytelling aspect of film and our relationship to the character, When we first meet a character in a film they are a stranger to us (even if we recognize the actor). Over time, hopwever, if the script and director are doing their jobs right, we begin to identify with the character, enabling us to live vicariously through them, feeling their feelings, experiencing their experiences, and experiencing that odd kind of dream-like double-think. We are them, they are us.

A character in a still image, on the other hand, in some ways is forever unknowable to us. They are “other”. So whether or not the character “knows” we’re there by looking back out at us, we remain separate. So seeing a character in an image, separate from us means their’s two of us. So we’re not alone.

So once I had that worked out, I realized that “lonely” was not going to work.

And was lonely even what I was even going for? Maybe isolated? Maybe something? Dammit, just get it done! Self-doubt has a way of creeping in slowing you down.

Get clear on the subject

What is the picture about? I used to read that when I was newly learning about photography and I found it maddening because I just didn’t get it. It’s about the thing. Right there! What are you asking?!

But now that I understand I think maybe it’s not quite the right question to ask.

A better question for me might have been, what am I supposed to be looking at, or what is the feeling of it that made you want to shoot it?

Which brought me to the next problem. I put my chosen pose, the dynamic one, into the shot. A strange thing happened. Suddenly the sense of place no longer seemed to matter as much. The place became a background, an accessory, maybe even a distraction. Sure, it lent to the feeling, I guess, but it wasn’t about the place. It became all about that character. The character upstaged the place.

And that’s when I realized that I wasn’t clear on my subject and hadn’t been from the start. I created a story, but the thing I actually wanted to shoot was the liminal feeling of the place.

And the character. But was I just being stubborn about it? So that is why this image became two. One with, one without.

The Elusive Feeling

Now it was not just the problem of identifying the subject of the image. It was also not clearly identifying the feeling of it. I thought I knew what that was.

What attracts me to the light at night was the eerie, unsettling quiet of it, combined with the man-made electric magic glow. I can’t quite find the words for it, which is why it’s an image. There’s almost an other-world component to the night when no one is around. I cam eot understand a word for it: liminal.

Had I more accurately identified that quality, I would have realized that the character couldn’t be more dynamic. The dynamic aspect of the character in the shot I liked made it unbalanced. The thing that made me like the pose simply drew too much attention. She had to acquiesce to the night. Become part of it with all that she brought to it. Quiet and flat. The night has a presence we all recognize when we are out in it alone and there is no one around. It’s bigger than us.

So, even while my self-doubt was raging over using yet another static-looking person, I knew I couldn’t put the pose I actually liked better in the shot. It just didn’t go. And with that knowledge, and with the understanding that my image was not about the gas station idea, this place of transience, but the quality of the light and the darkness, I left the pumps unfinished. I feel it’s better that way. Is it a gas station? I don’t think it is. Does it matter? It’s no longer about that.

Perspective and the Inverse law

Oh that sounds so mathy, and I feel so smart!

Except I can’t quite figure it out. The other dilemma I had was this feeling that the original image with the rain looked wrong. This is a model and I shot it, and yet as I was working with the image with the rain I had this nagging feeling the perspective was off. I’m like, how is this possible? It’s REAL(ish). Well, the reflections weren’t, but everything else was.

So I go back to the inverse square law. Usually, when you hear a photographer talk about this, they are referring to the light, and you really don’t need to know how to do the math. If anything, you just need to understand that light falls off quicker the closer it is to something. But from what little I understand of it, I think physicists might tell you the inverse square law relates to everything that has a physical quantity. Or something. Let me explain how it relates.

I am looking at that structure, and with my first shots, I’m thinking that maybe you see too much of the underside of the roof. I had initially shot it from a fairly low angle. It sort of worked, but not quite. So I re-shot it. I was happy with that until I started to put the rain and reflections in. Now it was the ground that bothered me. Why it is feeling like it’s coming too far at me instead of down when wet reflections tend to go straight down from my research and they were in the image. There was just something weird about it, and while I sensed it was the perspective, I just couldn’t figure out how the reflections I created could be making me feel that.

And I reshot it yet again this time using a variety of different reflective surfaces. I realized that I had my reflections wrong, but turns out, that really wasn’t the issue either. The nagging thing that was bothering me if anything, got worse. I became convinced it was what I could see of the tops of the base. How that be? It’s reality!

Because really, if I was a certain amount of inches away from the model, and I translate this into feet because i am working at a 1:12 scale, well, does it really even matter where I am shooting it from? It should look right. But what I haven’t quite figured out is how lenses fit into the mix, but we see things rendered differently from all sorts of different lenses. A 90mm is not going to look like a 14mm and we accept that in an image. So should it matter?

There is a math problem here, I just don’t know what it is. I started to suspect it has something to do with the inverse square law, perspective and what you see of the horizontal planes. The farther away something is, the higher it is in a 2d rendering, which means you can’t see on top of it so well, right? Assuming that a 35mm lens best represents the human eye, shouldn’t that be irrelevant? I can’t even imagine a scaled-down 35mm lens – what would a 2.9mm lens would look like? With a tiny little camera sensor?

That way leads to madness.

Finally, I went back to some shots I had taken at night of different structures and found one of the Ajax Library main branch that I had shot on a 14mm lens. I’m looking at that shot, and some others, and I’m thinking, there’s just no way you be able to see the tops the way I had them in the image I was working on and still be able to see that much of the entire structure. Didn’t matter if what I shot is real. Maybe it’s just a matter of camera angle, or maybe it’s not.

I just decided to fix it on intuition. I might not have got it perfectly but it least it’s not making me mental. Not yet anyway.

Maybe someday when I get a budget for a documentary, I’ll talk to a physicist about it. My engineering daughter failed at helping me out. She doesn’t get it either.

I find this shot amusing, both for the rickety nature of it all, and also because of the flash that’s poking its head out from behind the background.

In actual fact, I had already shot the station several days earlier and had actually taken it apart. Because the roof was still intact, I just pinned it back together so that I could get what I needed to shoot the wet surfaces and reflections. I had to carefully balance two battery backs on the top so that it would stand properly.

This image was inspired by an image shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt of a woman in a mental institute in 1937 (see below). His is better of course. His whole series is a fascinating but of photography.

The article I read said that his photos helped shape perception of mental health as the people in the pictures looked “terribly normal”.

He was quoted as saying, “they (the patients) don’t take me too seriously with my little camera.
“I don’t come as a photographer. I come as a friend.”

There’s a story right there.

In playing the character I thought a lot about what she might be carrying – what I would choose to carry in that place and why. Practically speaking moving back and forth from posing to the camera and back with my bundle of stuff it became clear to me that it was quite inconvenient having your hands full like that. I was constantly dropping stuff and reassembling my package. And it required more stuff to hold then I thought from first looking at the photograph. I concluded she probably remained still a lot of the time. That you are limited by your baggage can be taken both literally and figuratively.

Edit – Feb 2026.

I am revisiting this image. It doesn’t sit right with me, something is wrong with the scale and angles of it. And yet, I still has this bizarre experience of an unlocked memory, even though I did this. In terms of the final build, well, the miniature set was only just barely assembled and shot in peices and stitched together with photoshop. The single 3d printed was duplicated in photoshop, I spent a long time on getting the floor to blend right the lighting to look right. I can’t recall if I made another heater thing (what’s it called?) or used what I had from before.

BUt the thing I got most particular about was the floor and the depth in which the windows are set. I was, as I think I might have written about in my floor moulding post – and ironically, you can’t see it. BUt it’s a strange flashback to a place where I took an art class on Saturdays. I was going for that memory at the time of the build. It’s just particularly weird to have got something about that right and have it feel like an unlocked memory. I couldn’t have been older than 9 at the time. I don’t even know why my parents would have even signed me up for such a thing. My father was literally a professional artist. Just weird.

There is no relation to my experience there to the subject matter of this film, except to say there must have been something about that school that felt particularly cold and institutional. I don’t remember anything about the class at all. But the school. The school I did. The light, the sound, the smell, and the floors of course.

Escuminac Beach, New Brunswick