Category Archives: Life

Paper clips

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Today is overcast and cold. We had a snow storm yesterday and there is a significant amount of snow on the ground. I live in a downtown area so it isn’t a pretty, white, pristine snow, it’s the ‘cars just drove over me and spewed exhaust that made me brown’ snow. The last few weeks have been… unsettling. It’s cold but not really cold, it’s not exactly sunny or cloudy, it just seems to be in between everything.  meh.  It’s January and it’s not acting like it. It has made me… unsettled. So, I thought that I would write a post for today that was uplifting and inspiring and… I got nothin’. Plan B: I wondered what the most innocuous thing was that I could write about and I came up with the paper clip. Yep. The ubiquitous and yet rarely noticed device that has been used for hundreds of years to clip paper together. The paper clip.

According to Wikipedia:

The most common type of wire paper clip still in use, the Gem paper clip, was never patented, but it was most likely in production in Britain in the early 1870s by “The Gem Manufacturing Company”,

Nowadays the shape has changed in some. Gotten bigger, gotten smaller. Sometimes they are made of plastic. But I would bet that for the most part there are trillions of small bent wire clips in every office. Years ago, we talked about going paperless in our society but I don’t believe that’s actually a possibility and therefore we will always need to be able to clip paper together. Because we like control. And then I started to wonder about how much like life is that lowly little paper clip.

In order to become useful, little pieces of wire are bent into shapes that function. Aren’t we? We are born into a world knowing nothing and we are shaped by our education and later by our experiences into people that are functional and can contribute to society. Just like that paper clip. There are also those who are perhaps overworked and therefore become useless. Have you ever unbent a paper clip? Of course, then it is great for sticking in teeny tiny holes in our computers to make things reset. So, not all bad. How many times have you taken a handful of paper clips and clipped them together to make a chain or a strange creature. It’s amazing what we can do when we’re bored.

My Bucket List

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This is a blast from my past. It was originally written in June 2014 but I think it is still as pertinent today as it was almost 10 years ago.

‘The Bucket List’ was a movie that came out in 2007 with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.  It tells the story of two terminally ill men who take a road trip to fulfill their final wishes:  their Bucket List.

It has become quite popular for people to create their own bucket list.  It is a list of things they want to accomplish before they kicked the bucket.  My list, my bucket, is a little different.

In my bucket I’m holding tight to the memories, the emotions, the ideas that made my life as rich as it has been.  When I approach St. Peter at the gates of eternity (hopefully many years from now) I want my bucket to be overflowing with love, with smiles, with humour and yes with remembered tears of sadness that I have journeyed with throughout my life.

I don’t want to complete things and then strike them off the list to move on.  I want the pictures in my mind to be retained until my last breath.  I want to be able to recall my first kiss.  Okay maybe not the first kiss as we were young and stupid.  But I definitely got much better.  I want to remember what it felt like when my father picked me up as a sleeping child to take me to my room.  I want to remember what it felt like when I got my first praise for a short story I had written.  To know that my words could touch another was intoxicating.

I want to remember puppy dog kisses and a kitten’s purr.  I once watched a cow giving birth and many years later I watched the same process with our family dog.  Five incredibly beautiful puppies took their first breath while I watched!  It was exhilarating.  I have watched whales playing a few feet from my boat.  I have caught fish and seen bears in the wild.  I have been to other countries and have experienced a warm welcome.  I have driven through mind numbing storms and joked about it afterwards.  I have been deep in caves hoping that my guide knew the way out.  I have done so much in my life and all of those experiences are in my bucket.  I’m not done yet so I think I’d better get a bigger bucket!