Monthly Meandering #1
Writing to share my inner world. Exploring what I want to build in the world, what I value and what I consume.
Thank you everyone for wanting to be part of my journey as I meander through the world figuring out what I truly value and building towards a future that encapsulates the diversity of my values. I will stumble many, many times as I build the life, marriage, family, community, businesses, city, province and country of my dreams. I’m so incredibly fortunate to have all of you beside me to support and celebrate with.
Figuring life out
I left my job at Yuma in May. Yuma is the most inspiring place I have ever worked. I’m grateful to everyone that I worked with for their devotion to building something truly great and Guillaume and Hector in particular for pushing me to be the most ambitious version of myself, however uncomfortable that was.
It was my ambition that pushed me to leave. Hannah and I have a deal that we’re going to wait five years before re-evaluating where we live. I wasn’t really living that deal; I was living in purgatory between the idyllic life I had in Nelson, the real life I have here and the imagined life that I could have elsewhere if I moved somewhere that better supported my career. In the first few months of 2025, something in me pushed me to decide to pick one of those three lives. I chose Edmonton. I chose Alberta. I chose Canada. For all their flaws.
I cannot overstate how valuable it is to marry the place in which you live. It is freeing in the same way that my marriage with Hannah is. It closes so many doors, but it also also opens so many more when I’m not second-guessing if I’m even on the “right” path.
With my renewed focus on where I live and the building the things in the world that I really care about. I love Canada (like a lot), it’s hard not to love this place with all it’s nooks and crannies.
But it could be better. I want it to be better.
It bothers me that a many of our most talented people leave because they don’t have the opportunity to pursue their dreams here. It bothers me that we have decided as a country to stop building housing when young people and new families desperately need good places to live. It bothers me that Canadian companies decide to sell abroad because Canadians are not willing to take a chance on something new and buy from a new company. It bothers me that our governments have stopped caring about the services that they provide and whether they’re actually helping people. It bothers me that companies decide to use their government connections to
The nice thing about living in Canada is that I can choose to solve this. If I’m going to be working on problems, I might as well be working on big ones that matter.
That’s why I’m working with Build Canada to solve these problems. We are going to make Canada the most prosperous country on earth.
But before that journey, I worked with Hannah to make the best pottery studio in Edmonton.
The studio is done
One of my true joys in life is seeing Hannah make pottery; there’s a glow that permeates the rest of her soul when she’s actively making. Since we moved back from Nelson, she hasn’t had the physical space to do that. We’ve been working on making our garage a space that is inspiring and worthy of her art. Over the past year, there’s been a lot of progress towards making a space that worked for her art. We built a table; we set up a market booth; we bought, repaired and installed a kiln.
But the space felt drab. It was the epitome of a typical garage: peeling paint; spores of mould; cold, bluish-white paint; disorganized remnants of our recent move; a rusting door that still had it’s sticker proclaiming that it must be painted to be actually waterproof.
Hannah’s studio is deserving of the love and attention that a nursery would get for a parents’ first newborn. The space should be a space that draws out her soul so she can embed it into the her work; especially when the process is gruelling, when every pot is flopping, when the glaze drips and ruins a piece she has spent hours on, when the kiln overfires on the top and underfires the bottom. That is when the space must be most forgiving. It must whisper: just keep going.
This has been the most rewarding project I have ever worked on (despite how many setbacks we’ve had doing it). There is no feeling like seeing Hannah beaming from ear-to-ear over her freshly painted watermelon door. The studio finally feels done and is ready for business.
You can check out her old work at hannahsamek.com (more to come!)
The little things
Canada is so blessed. From beautiful sunsets to glassy waters for paddling to stunning mountains to rainbows. I’m so glad I get to experience it all.
Cats
I am pretty sure there is a cat-tax that I have to pay for being late on this update (this is for you Danielle). Please enjoy Stella caught in the act, Luna contemplating climbing a tree and Stella’s big eyes and bigger ear-tufts.
Video of the Month
The weather in Edmonton is incredible. One minute it’s thundering, the next there’s not a cloud in the sky. The best is the transition between them. Please enjoy this beautiful sun shower.
What I’ve been reading
Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky
With Build Canada, I want to make Canada the most prosperous country on earth. How do you even start to tackle that problem? Saul Alinsky spent his life trying to change the world one bit at a time and he explores some of his tactics behind his success in changing the system.
Why are young people attracted to communism? It’s the only major ideology who openly wrote and published about revolution and defined it in terms of fighting for communism instead of fighting against the underlying injustices of our world. The book argues for fighting for the underlying values of our society: fairness, liberal democracy, and and equity; and gives strategy on organizing how to get there.
Value Capture - C. Thi Nguyen
Value Capture explores how we submit (often unwittingly) to the values of institutions who offer us a simple metric that approximates our true values. Large institutions like things that they can track (FitBit tracking steps) to the detriment of what they can’t (the meditative peace when the paddling a kayak on a glassy day) and it’s often easy to defer to the score that they present (the number of steps vs the joy of exercise and the pursuit of better health) rather than what we truly value.
I’m guilty of this in many aspects of my life and I’m looking forward to re-evaluating the ways in which I measure what I value.
Ask
Every month, I am going to have one ask.
I want to be connected to all of you through the joys in your lives. Can you send me a picture of something that made you happy in the past month?