Fellow travellers for the journey.
Having coffee with a writing advocate, he mentioned my pieces are getting longer – but assured me it was okay. Nevertheless, the observation was instructive to be more vigilant in assessing the breadth of material I include, its relevance to the topic at hand, as well as the compactness with which I package it.
An immediate benefit was to edit Darrell and Barbara – an encounter with fellowship and reduce it from 1900 to 1400 words. I am still learning how to discern what material is essential, is desirable, or is simply extraneous and even distracting, to the core theme of a reflection.
A small group track with me on this new journey. As needed, they offer a friendly boot in the rear to kickstart the engine, wrenches to adjust the machinery, and shots of grease to smooth the rotation of wheels in my writing. It is timely to use this reflection for a review of our collective experience thus far.
From there to here or then to now.
It was a bright sunny morning in January 2026. Sitting at my table desk in the corner of the dining room in our comfortable rental condo on Vancouver Island, a pillow compressed behind my lower back to accommodate a less-than-conducive chair, and staring in awe at the majestic mountains of the British Columbia mainland through panoramic windows just a few feet from the sandy beach of a small bay jutting off the Salish Sea and Strait of Georgia, I felt a renewed sense of wonder rising within me.
I began the journey of miles2go.ca – a forum for reflecting on all matters related to life and living – in May 2024, a year after my official retirement at age 75. In A start, a fresh start, and then, a new fresh start!, I offer a brief history of my tortuous, also torturous, writing journey over the next year and a half.
Since I am exercising self-indulgent whimsy in this reflection, I can pause to savour the double whammy of these two words. ‘Tortuous’ describes a complex, even convoluted, process of twisting and turning to find one’s way; while ‘Torturous’ expresses the discomfort and anguish, even pain, that accompanies that haphazard path. The little ‘r’ puts them together in a vivid manner.
Bouncing out of bed in the morning.
The human psyche is a marvellous and mysterious entity. How do I explain the difference in the past three months? The little ‘r’ is gone and the two ‘Ts’ are sucking air for survival. A longing ember lying in wait within me has been rekindled and fanned into a small flame that continues to burn every day.
As a child bouncing out of bed to head for the playground, I eagerly approach my MacBook Air* and dive into one of the topics waiting with embryonic anticipation for me to continue its nurture towards a shared life.
*I need to give my little computer a nice, personal name. Perhaps Arriva would work. It is already used to mark European transportation systems, Italian restaurants, and even Canadian full-service care facilities for seniors. Yeah, that sounds like something I am trying to do here. Arriva it is.
The context for my writing.
The default approach to my writing is to speak from my own accumulated thoughts on a subject. Of course, over the decades of life, I have been informed and influenced from multiple directions. But in writing for miles2go on any topic, I do not start with a review of relevant literature. I did enough of that during dissertation research and when preparing for teaching college and seminary courses.
So, if my writing appears simplistic or naive or narrow in its awareness of a subject, do allow me some tolerance. My methodology is one of experiential engagement for personal learning and growth in both myself and, hopefully, the reader, not an academic project to propose or defend a position, as important as that activity is. And I do value capable scholars who address issues with comprehensive research.
At the risk of being guilty of self-aggrandizement, I will share a friend’s recent assessment of how and why I write: “One purpose for your writing is to encourage people to think, be reflective and look for human interaction versus the AI model which works against these human traits. If/when these ‘muscles’ lose their strength, humans will be less human.”
I like that summary. It resonates with the central thesis of Allison Pugh’s book, The Last Human Job. For Pugh, the last human job is to be human. She applies her thesis more specifically to the world of work and how to preserve basic elements of humanity and community as all fields of labour undergo a massive shift to artificial intelligence.
My focus is to interact with what is happening at that human level. What are the real-life issues and narratives of people going about their daily lives? What are the themes and sub-themes of impact in how those lives are actually lived?
Miles 2 Go – a forum for reflecting on all matters related to life and living.
I think my logo – Miles 2 Go – resonates quite well with the summary words of my friend. Now I just need to keep growing in my awareness of those realities and my craft for expressing them.
Postscript.
The canoeist in my logo picture is me, taken by friend Gerald during one of our canoe trips to the Grey Owl cabin in Prince Albert National Park. Having Gerald pilot our craft with a steady hand, even through undesirable weather, all I had to do was keep paddling and look ahead into the miles to go.