If you want to read about the serious accident I had at five years old, and how it helped me to learn what I teach, I cover that on the page that discusses My Approach. But for everything else not about that, read on.
I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, as the son of a homemaker/bookkeeper mother, and a roofing business owner/operator father. Having seen the devastation of The Depression, and with both parents serving in WWII, I was raised to be practical, and to see the value in having healthy, respectful, and generous relations with others.
Part of my parent’s generosity played out in us essentially adopting a young family. My foster brother came first, followed shortly thereafter by his two sisters. With my much-older brothers already out of the house when I was still really little, most of my strong bonding happened with my foster siblings, who felt completely like a real brother and sisters to me.
When it comes to parenting, life is largely a balance between our selfish and our cooperative interests. And, thanks to my parents, I learned the value of both. All us kids were all taught to be caring and to serve our fellow human beings. But we were also told to be strong and resilient when it came to representing ourselves.
Having grown up with an angry, violent father, my own father chose to parent by doing the opposite of what his own father would do—meaning he was very caring, supportive, and almost exclusively worked to help us kids, friends, or neighbours. Every kid in the neighbourhood liked my Dad.
As a young man, he needed to help on the farm, so he had to leave school in Scotland at only Grade 8. Despite that, he was remarkably clever, and he taught us a lot. He read a lot. And having grown up on the farm, he could often creatively and successfully repair something, using knowledge or spare parts from something else. And if you’re familiar with those wood puzzles with the rings and rope—Dad could solve the ones that were supposed to take 90 hours, in only two.
Emotionally, my Dad was very funny. I only saw him angry a few times in my life, and the only anger I ever saw him exhibit was righteous anger, in defense of someone else, (which is often how abused kids act in adulthood). I could not say the same thing about my mother, who had a sharp temper, and was almost certainly an undiagnosed Autistic.
Like many high-functioning Autistics, she was an extremely sharp thinker who’d do the Sunday Times crossword in ink, and she was good at all sorts of word-based puzzles, and very good at strategy games. Also, like many Autistics, she had an unwavering, courageous sense of justice and fairness.
Her temper was intense, but always very brief—after which she’d go right back to treating you the way she had before you disappointed her. No resentment, no suspicion, and there was no assumption that because we screwed up the day before, that we weren’t capable of being excellent the next day.
Despite her quick temper, we could count on her to always treat us based on what we actually did, and not who she thought we ‘were.’ She knew we each had tendencies. But she was always open to the idea that we might behave in ways that might surprise her. Now there’s an Autistic ability that most people would benefit from learning.
I remember my brother and I breaking a neighbour’s huge front window with an errant Aerobie. Rather than get mad, Mom and Dad sat down with us to strategize how we would apologize to the neighbours, and how we would repay Dad for fixing the window. They even made us handle the arrangements to get the window replaced. It was a great lesson in responsibility, decency, and home ownership.
For my entire life, my parents were active volunteers, working everything from bingos and casinos, to looking after the community rink, and working in extended care, for literally decades. I shovelled that rink a million times and, just by tagging along with them, I did over a decade of unofficial long term care volunteering myself.
In long term care, we looked after The Greatest Generation. My parents were right at the end of that, and so they identified more with The Silent Generation. My brothers were the age of my school friends’ parents, so they were Boomers. I was at the start of Gen-X, and my nieces are Millennials. My friends kids are all Gen-Z, and my nieces kids are Generation Alpha.
The value in that is that most people are rarely consciousness of how time and aging will impact who they become. But I only understand time as a moving Now-moment. That, combined with the curious patterns that my brain notices, got applied to my multi-generational experience, (especially with the much older and more experienced generations), so I saw the impact of aging in ways others very rarely do.
Understanding time and aging is why I started watching people 10 years older than myself. There was obvious, excellent wisdom available there. People older than me knew more about my future than I could. They were the ones who had most recently lived the part of life I was going to live.
Doing as my friends were doing, and asking friends my own age for advice, was asking to design my life around who I was, rather than who I would be. Paying attention to those with direct experience, (versus the theories that my friends had), meant that I had a huge advantage when it came to living a profoundly enjoyable life.
As for how I try to be in the workplace, with my father being a roofer, we were all paid by how much we got done. Later, as a filmmaker, it was the same way. And, as any adult knows, that is a great way to learn about value and work. And my father certainly modelled what it was to be a caring and supportive boss.
When my father suffered a massive brain injury of his own, I dropped my plans to attend film school, and instead I ran their company to ensure my parents could have a secure retirement, since it looked unlikely my father would ever work again. (It turned out that he did, as a Commissionaire—another job built around helping.)
Shortly after that, I accidentally married an incredible woman that probably should have been a good friend instead. We had dated for five years, it appeared we were going the same directions, and since we were having a lot of fun, and we didn’t have a huge number of issues, it made a kind of sense when she asked me to propose or move on.
I did love her, so moving on didn’t feel right. But I’ll admit, getting married was also one of the few times in my life that I’ve participated in something important, that I didn’t have a confident feeling about.
Still, we managed to last for another five years before she was wise enough to see what had happened. After our divorce, I’m pleased to report that she apparently married the wonderful ex of a former co-worker of mine, and that she is apparently very happy.
We had a ton of fun, we did a lot of remarkable things together, and a large percentage of that ten years was spent happy and in love. No regrets for me. And by having her point out the genuine mistakes I innocently made with her, she helped make me a better man and I’m deeply grateful.
Having not being able to attend film school due to my father’s accident, I began to write screenplays for film and television. I eventually also began acting, and producing, and I ran a creative non-profit before finally taking a job as the Director of Creative Affairs at a major Canadian television network.
Those roles and jobs ended up being the perfect compliment to the benefits generated by my accident, and from my meditations. Just think about it: To write any narrative means to take on both the persona—and the unwritten interior thoughts—of the characters I was writing.
Like many writers who lean other one way or the other, I was known for being strong on story, and weaker on character. And that makes sense, because my characters were all meditating in their thoughts, when I later learned that almost everyone around me does far more ruminating than meditating.
Ruminations distort our ability to connect with common sense. For that reason, everyone does things for reasons that appear to make sense to them at that time. That means that no one can credibly write a villain or a hero, without being able to explain the source of their external actions.
Even without fully understanding how others thought about reality, writing other people did wonders for furthering my sense of empathy. Today, there is literally no kind of person that I could not understand or defend.
To quickly recap: the first part of what I do emerged from my accident, and all of my meditating on the Principles of Human Experience. Stage Two was working in film, and imagining all of the sorts of thoughts that very different kinds of people would have. Then Stage Three happened, following some film work, during a sabbatical in Budapest.
It was being removed from English that helped me to suddenly became aware that other people weren’t using their thoughts to just meditate. They were primarily using them ruminate!
Never having built a firm sense of Self, it had never occurred to me that the reasons behind the strange reactions to me, and my strange reaction to the approaches I was witnessing, including all of the extended drama and emotions—was all emerging from people’s personal thinking, not from Reality.
I simply cannot stress how shocking that information was. It took me years to process what all that meant. No wonder there’s a mental health crisis. You can’t ruminate to yourself all day and have good mental health.
When I got back to Canada, having realized that people had learned to treat their thinking as though it was Reality, I started talking to people about the Principles behind our human experiences. That led to the creation of Relax and Succeed, as more and more people wanted to engage in these strange but enjoyable discussions about Reality.
I eventually started this blog, and I did a column on CBC Radio One here in Canada. Ultimately, a lot of that got interrupted when my parents starting needing care. Having volunteered in Extended Care, they were genuinely afraid of going there themselves.
In response to a fear I understood from personal experience, I agreed that when the time came, rather than just making dinners and driving them to their busy social lives, I would also move in to ensure they would not have to go to a care home. It may not surprise you to find out that that happened shockingly fast, thanks to Covid-19.
That shift in society was already incredibly difficult for all of us. And suddenly, without any time to prep, I was caring for two gently demented people, 24/7. Of course seniors and people with low immune systems needed the most protection. And there was a huge shortage of healthcare workers, and all of that made the entire process incredibly taxing.
For high risk people, Covid-19 didn’t last a year and a half—it lasted for almost three years. During that time, I was averaging only 3-4 hours of sleep a night, and yet I was still happier and more positive than almost everyone around me. My struggles with suffering were all very short-lived.
The next Stage of my learning came from seeing how my parent’s and friends dementia affected their thinking. It was extremely helpful to be able to understand exactly how their brain was misfiring. It taught me a lot about how to successfully care for them. But that couldn’t have happened with knowing a lot about the brain, and knowing my parents very well.
That’s the disadvantage dementia doctors face. They can’t know their patients well enough to understand exactly how their brain is misfiring. Rarely have they been the daily, minute by minute caregiver for someone they know extremely well, who is experiencing dementia.
A doctor could hear my mother tell a story and think it was crazy. But I knew it was a totally accurate story, but it was about my uncle, or a neighbour. So she was 95% there, and only 5% gone, not the other way around. Plus, identity is a very nebulous idea, so it’s easy to for it to start sliding around with certain types of dementia. Dad was just forgetful, but that’s pretty easy to deal with if you’re present.
Despite their dementia, they enjoyed their lives. We stayed close, and shared a lot of beautiful moments. I even had Mom wake up one night as her 10 year old Self. That meant that she didn’t know who her youngest brothers were because, to her, they hadn’t been born yet. She thought I was an elementary school friend. We talked for two hours like that and it was awesome. You don’t get a beautiful experience like that without Dementia.
The stories about each uncle painted them as younger versions of who they grew up to be as adults, so the stories were likely accurate. They just seemed strange being presented 60 years later. But time is a curious thing, because we’re always only alive Now. And in that Now, what a joy to be your Mom’s best friend as a kid. And the next day, and for two years after that? She woke up present, and clear as a bell.
That experience taught me enormously valuable things about caregiving, and about the relentless, intense Invisible Work that stay-at-home parents do. It’s made me a much better man and I’m grateful. I also got to care for my parents in their house, right until then end, and I enjoyed the enormous value that they got from that.
The last thing that both of them heard, was me telling them that they had lived well, that their parents would be very proud of them, that they were excellent citizens, friends, and neighbours. They heard about how great they were as parents, which was particularly important to Dad, whose goal was to be nothing like his own father.
I’m pleased to say they both left this Earth feeling loved, and cared about. We all doubt we deserve love sometimes. But they were both clear that they were very grateful to know that they were truly loved. And they were confident about that, because neither one of them could explain why I would be making the huge sacrifices I was making, if they hadn’t done a good job as parents.
Mom was the last to go. I spoke those words to her maybe 90 seconds before she died. We said we loved and appreciated each other. And when she was gone, I had the most powerful sense that I had just done something that profoundly human—something generations have done for each other for millennia. It was caring right up until the end. And in that moment, I knew that it felt so good because that is what we are all about.
The tribe is less without us. But without the tribe we are nothing. That means that, in Reality, our sense of personal value, and our mental health, are in truth just the byproducts of our in-the-moment care for, and our connection to ourselves, and to everyone around us.
Following their deaths, in working again with students, I realized I had learned a lot in the interim. I can now see that you guys aren’t just ruminating. The ruminations in your personal thinking end up weaving together to form tunnels that form false realities.
People routinely pass illusory ideas like those, back and forth, like the baseball scouts at the start of the film Moneyball. In essence, that entire movie is about how people learned to see past language, and into Reality. And since then, baseball is a lot less illusory, and a lot more Real.
I didn’t know it at the time but, in the end, the lessons gleaned from dementia-care, and from my parents deaths, acted as the last two lessons I needed to be maximally beneficial to all of you. And I was doing really well at helping people long before that.
So, how do I know what I know? First I had to have parents that modelled how to care for our fellow tribe-members. Next I had to have my accident, which led me to understand the brain, and thought. After that, it was necessary to understand how our sense of an external Reality emerged in the brain.
The writing work then taught me to profoundly and compassionately understand other people’s thoughts. And later, it was students questions that helped me to become more aware of what other knowledge I had, that others would find valuable.
Finally, there were the last lessons gained through invisible work, dementia care, and death. After two decades of students telling me to write a book, I feel like I finally know everything I need to know, to do it well.
I am now writing that book. But it’s all the same knowledge that I use with students. So, if you would like me to listen to you in the unique way my accident offers us, and if you would like to learn more about yourself and your unique relationship to Reality, then I would urge you to write to me at scottis@relaxandsucceed.com.
If you like, we can sit down and have a comfortable discussion about what I do. Just please don’t assume that there aren’t joys hidden in the process of getting healthier. While some are necessarily a bit challenging, most of my students find most of the sessions to be really enjoyable.
Whether it’s me helping you or someone else, I just hope that if you’re struggling, that you have access to some kind of help. If that’s me, you know where to find me.
Enjoy your day!
peace. s
NOTE: If you want to know more about My Approach, this link will get you to further information. The people who like me most are married couples seeking to understand each other better; those on or near the Autism-Asperger’s spectrum, or; people who have had this happen to them:
