When I get older

Most people dread getting older. For me time could not go by fast enough. I just want to get to the point when I can look back on it all and not give a crap any more. Secretly all old people are gloriously happy. (I know gross generalisation).

Society likes to over look old people. The general trend in the younger population is to view them as this extra set of the population that you could easily do without. So they are either lovingly dismissed or cruelly disregarded. I think I have been no different from other young people. You go through this period where you think you are never going to “be like that”, be old. Even if you picture yourself old, you try not to go that far in to the future where being elderly starts to look a bit inglorious. How could you be like that, when you have these elaborate fantastic notions of your future? You are full of ideas and no matter how cynical you may be you are still shrouded with this sense of invincibility. You know you will die one day but it seems like such a distant eventuality that there are moments when you completely forget, and the countless veils that your desires have created between you and your inevitable eventuality, tend to make you feel immortal. Say this to any young person and they will deny it. “Of course I know I am not immortal!!” However their actions speak otherwise.

So if we are all getting old shouldn't we be planning for it? What is the best way to do that? If I go by TV commercials, self-help books and all the letters my bank has been writing me then I should get lots of insurance, buy a home, set funds aside for long term investment and start taking a multivitamin. This means that when I am old I will have some money to sustain myself, maybe go on a holiday once in a while, have a roof over my head and healthy bones. If I don’t then I might be homeless, disabled and living in poverty. This is all fantastic, but how can I plan for being happy when I am old? How will these things guarantee that? This is a really bad question because you cannot plan for being happy and it sort of brings up that other horrid question is anyone ever really happy? And to complicate matters, if death is always around the corner, then should you really be planning anything at all?

When I look at it this way then all that these things are offering me is a means to placate the same fears that I have been conditioned to have when I was a much younger person. Fears that lead us to create fantastic notions of our future, leading us to deny getting old in the first place. I don’t want fear of this world to drive my decisions, although most of the time that is exactly what I am doing. Maybe we are looking to the wrong things when we plan for old age.

I know some old people that I aspire to be like. They are not famous or rich and have had their share of happy and sad over the years, but they have grown old fearless and they will die without fear.

Once such person is my mom’s aunt. She is a recent widow who cared for her husband when he was on his deathbed for years. She was his wife and is a mother of five. They live in a busy, polluted, dangerous city that according to popular worldview has no real future. Whatever their financial circumstances, health, death and birth situation and so on, they have one thing that very few people have nowadays. All their children and grandchildren and potential grand kids are in the same city, in nearby neighbourhoods. They are now a village on their own. This village raises their kids together, goes through death and illness together, argue and become distant from each other but they all stay in the same geographical community and nothing has been able to separate them from each other so far. Not the pursuit of wealth, although they all went to college and have jobs. Not the pursuit of a “foreign passport” and public health care and public education and a “better quality of life”. Of course these things determine the quality of their lives but the major contributing factors to their quality of life are very different. There is no doubt that they have had to give up lots of opportunities to sustain this proximity to each other. This did not just happen by chance. This village is a result of their decisions and their common worldview. It is a result of the values that this woman spent her life instilling in her family. Of all the families I know, this is the one that comes closest to a real Muslim family. I am not calling them ideal Muslims or anything, just that some aspects of the course of their lives appear to me to be centred on family bonds and conventions that are drawn from Islamic doctrine, more than anything else.

I dreamt of many things when I was a young girl. Those dreams were conditioned by my upbringing, what I was taught was important, and what was unfolding around me. Those dreams have been changing since K has come in to my life. Some have been beaten out of me by events and circumstances and some thanks to my own realisations and observance of Khaled’s and our family’s real needs. Now I dream of a village of my own for our old age.

(Image of a random man carrying his elderly).

All hail the conqueror of public transport

K's behavior this Friday was so astonishingly calm that I feel compelled to post about it.

K's primary stim is movement. He moves. All the time. He runs, he jumps, he spins round and round, he does most things at warp speed. So when K walks or stands or simply sits, we are in a state of uncomfortable disbelief. Uncomfortable because I fear the worst - that he may be ill.

But he wasn't ill. I decided to visit a friend who lives downtown. A bus and two really long subway rides away. I dared to be brave and did not take our stroller.

Sausages and lightning McQueen car toy packed and we were off.

Although he does absolutely love the bus and is learning to wait for the things he really likes.

I am working on trying to get K to smile when faced with a camera. Right now he just imitates me when I say "K smile, hee hee hee" and bare my teeth. I am going to fade out the hee hee hee and just ask him to smile, and then later maybe just show him a camera? But the result right now is evidently not very smile-like. We need to work on this a bit more. I think I may be pulling a scary toothy grin that he is just copying.

Luckily the train was waiting for us at the platform (and I did not have to wrestle to keep K away from the tracks in his attempts to peek inside the tunnel).

On the bus he usually repeats the announcements. I took advantage of his calm by putting my arm gently around him and rocking with him to the motion of the bus. He let me do it.
The entire train journey (40 minutes), he was sitting, calm, watching the doors open and close at the stops. Just quiet. We rocked in the train too.
I didn't have to wrestle much with him when the trains pulled up at the platform either. Just picked him up and sort of leaned.

At Yonge and Bloor there were two guys with a guitar and some whistly kind of instrument. K stopped and danced a bit to their music and they let him strum their guitar and gave us a CD. He loves music.

On the way back he was exhausted. It was his nap time and the train was packed. So I crouched on the floor and he stood. People make faces when a little kid cries on the train. I like to think they envy little children because we all want to cry on a packed train, but they obviously cannot get away with it.
Some guy made a comment about why this is the reason he always drives, which made me look up and glare at him only to realize how seriously unattractive he was. This made me feel much better and I ended up smiling at him. (Which is why you should never trust a random smile from a stranger).

We changed our carriage and a lovely woman gave up her seat for K. He rested his head against another woman next to him and fell asleep within seconds. She smiled to herself all the way to our stop. Who wouldn't want this face leaning against their shoulder and dozing off eh?

Garbage miles

Today at the butchers K was tired and decided he did not want to hold hands in the store. If I wanted to hold his hand he chose to fling himself on the floor.

Now usually I would let him do that, but I mean the butchers is a disgusting place, and this flu season makes me more anal about public-floor-rolling-tantrums. (There was some white stuff splattered all over the elevator buttons in our building which the building people later cleaned up. Seriously, I don't even want to think about what that was). Bottom line, the world is a filthy toilet and it would be unfortunate if we contracted some sexually transmitted disease by touching elevator buttons or a deadly flu by rolling on shop floors.

SO. I would not let him fall to the floor. Not letting go of K's arm has in the past resulted in pulled elbows. So every time he would start pulling I would grab hold of his jacket shoulder (yeah yeah it's one of those walmart winter coats with the stretchy collar bit) and I would offer him my hand to hold. Those were the choices and he did not like them. He proceeded to cry, pull, scream with me to the parking lot.

In the not so distant past, I would have yelled at him, and stuffed him in his car seat, maybe added a smack on the back of the head (new age hippie parents exit this blog now). No I don't think I will ever chase K around the house with a wooden spoon, rolling pin or sponge slippers (I love my mom, but she could never out run me and had poor aim). Also, now that we know he is autistic I am extra careful about even making so much as a face to his negative behaviour, because we don't want to reinforce and so on.

So the new me, waits him out.

I waited him out in the parking lot. Looking at him every now and then, gesturing to be quiet and looking at him questioningly or prompting him to say "door open". He should know that he has this choice. All he has to do is to be quiet and look at me and say nothing or just say the words. He does not have to cry and get so upset. I know in time he will learn to do these things. I would settle even for a whiny angry "door" or "open", because I knew how tired he was. Rolling on the road and throwing himself against the car is never going to be a choice. Ever.

Sure enough he whined an "open" and 2 seconds in to his car seat he was calm.

I don't know if it was effective or if I messed up and reinforced something I wasn't meant to. I don't know if I was cruel and couldn't read him properly. I still feel very incompetent around K sometimes.

When training to run long distances you are advised to avoid something called garbage miles. Basically anything that is not focused on your race or training goals is garbage. So if you are training to run 30 miles and you wake up one day and can't be bothered to move, but go out and run 3 half assed miles, then those would be garbage miles.

Maybe this is true, but I am of the opinion that even the garbage miles play a really important role in long distance training. It may not do much for your VO2max but it is important for your head. Perhaps the next time you go out again you will be a little more motivated because you did not sit on your ass with your tub of ice cream doing absolutely nothing the day before.

I know I will get the hang of more proactive versus reactive parenting a few garbage miles at a time.



That's me on the left corner with the panda ears, running the Oasis Zoo run as the Energizer Panda. I trained for this run almost entirely on garbage miles. It was only a 10K though and I ran it in 58:20.5 minutes, which is not horrible. I have done better and I know I can do much better than that.

30 years

I turned 30 years old recently. I swing between feeling 17 and 60 on various days.

So on this not so momentous occasion I am going to do a little run down of the last 30 years, quickly.

Born in house full of people. Started school age 2 ½. Changed countries 12 times, residences 15 times, 8 schools, 1 university, 3 continents, countless friends.

Call it what you will, professional immigrant, exile, I have never felt I can call any place my own. I have still not decided if this is a bad feeling. It is just a fact of my life on this earth.

As I have grown in mind and a sense of self, I feel as if I have been imprisoned in a speeding train. There is no time to make sense of what is going on because there has been a numbness of the senses akin to what you feel when on such a fast moving vehicle.

With every migration I have become a little more dispossessed. The dispossessed are a dangerous animal. They have nothing to lose. They fit really well in to the social fabric and have no power to change its course, even if they cared enough to want to.

Your immediate environment is often like an extension of yourself. Your home, your land, your roots. Human beings are not designed to live in a constantly moving environment. The old nomadic people moved as communities. However that is not the case with millions of people like me. We will not be dying in the bed we were born in because it no longer exists. Our locality has been taken away and we are enslaved by the developing world. We get a little bit of wealth and think that now we must be better off because we no longer know what it means to possess anything. It started long before my father decided to become a professional immigrant and unknowingly passed that legacy on to us. Drifting as it were like flotsam, driven by the desire to fulfil bread and butter needs. It began with his ancestors when they were uprooted along with millions being deceived by some ideology that violent revolution would somehow free you. Freedom is not and will never be attained in this manner.

Do you consider yourself a free person? Most people in the developed world would say yes. They would say they are free, to choose, to do as they please, to become whatever they want and practice whatever religion and so on. I don’t know about other people, but I am not free. Neither is anyone else I know. We are a generation of dependents.

You are a jobholder. You work for a big corporation. At the end of the month you get your paycheck. This handing of money has absolutely no connection with what you actually do for this collective. It should not be mistaken for possession or wealth, because you never owned it. You were just given this wealth as a loan so you may go out there and spend it on some perishable commodities. You never make or do anything whole. You only do bits of things, repetitively, thanks to massive division of labour. Your family, who depend on your livelihood, have nothing to do with what you do all day. You cannot pass this “job” on to them; they have no participation in it. You are not sowing any seeds, or ploughing any land, you are not there from the start to the end. You are not even a cog in a machine because a cog is important, without it the machine will break. But not this machine. This machine will keep going with or without you. When you work all your life you will die and you will be replaced. You have no real legacy. In fact in the current environment a jobholder even the most highly paid are under a constant sense of being totally replaceable.

You are judged on your economic profitability and professional achievements and a country on its efficiency for utilizing humans and producing social wealth.

(It is different for the self-employed, but this is not economically effective for the current process of collectivism. The days of a lot of small companies and businesses are going. Bigger men are swallowing the smaller men).

Enjoy this funny cartoon mocking the current state of labor and human resources in the middle east.



Your civil liberties are also fast diminishing. You need to be told what to do. Otherwise it is assumed you will behave like an irresponsible child or even an imbecile. If there were no drink driving laws you would be driving around drunk, if there were no cell phone laws you would make the decision to drive and talk on your mobile and so on. Slowly over time you hand more and more of your liberty to the increasingly powerful State. The State will take care of you when you are old, sick, alone, jobless, disabled and so on. It will reprimand and punish you when you are not behaving as a human being should. Slowly you start to forget how a human being is to behave at all except to follow rules and regulations set by another set of more powerful people.

In fact you are no different than the defenceless slave who depends on his kindly master. What if one day master changes his mind and does not wish to be so kind anymore? You live under the assumption that just because super powers have more wealth, nuclear weapons, out of the kindness of their hearts they will never use them against you. Your optimism ignores the basics of human nature. The old slave faced death if he tried to escape. The modern slave faces poverty and humiliation.
There is no escape. The walls are closing in and unlike even the slave of olden times, we cannot just hop on a boat and sail away to a free land. There is nowhere left to go.

People argue endlessly about religion and compare it to slavery to a doctrine. How is modern man's current situation so different? Just the God's have changed.

Man only has one master and He is God and the only freedom I see for myself is in striving to live as God intended. Unsure if this is even possible anymore. The moment you enslave yourself to any other entity except God, be it your pursuit for wealth, power, a family, that moment you lose your real freedom. This is the dilemma or crisis of modern man.

So here I am, my life shaped by decisions that were made (some for me, some by me) under all the above assumptions. 30 years old.

Flax Seed

I have a new friend in the kitchen. Flax seed meal. It is ground flax seeds which are low carb and full of nutrition. I got Bob's Red Mill, Gluten free from Planet Organic in Mississauga.

Apparently you make linen cloth out of flax seed plant, however it has that really popular ingredient which will sell just about anything these days - omega 3 fatty acids.

I mean we have been eating omega-3 fatty acids all our life but now it is the new buzz word, as if it is some newly discovered secret to immortality.

For me flax seed meal serves the following purposes
1) variety in taste
2) adding more fibre to K's diet
3) Nutrition

It does not have a strong taste and can be added to lots of things. I just put it in our Spinach Pulao. You can add it to pancakes. I also added 2T to my flour less almond cookies the other day and they turned out great.

Most definitely my new favourite ingredient.

K bringing it!

Imagine you are living your life just the way you like it. You have your routines and everything in the universe, most of the time, works with minimum interference. If there is a shift, you get temporarily anxious and then you adjust yourself in to a new routine. For centuries people have guarded their way of life, their routines, passionately.

K is putting up one hell of a fight. He is not going to passively let someone come in to his world and place all these demands on him, to change him. He will scream, for hours if he has to. He will do this every day. He does not have the means to do it any other way. In a way I am proud of him and I hope that we can teach him to channel his resilience and stubbornness to more productive activities. I guess we should have thought twice before naming him after an ancient warrior!

Often when you have no other means to stop change, you will do what it takes to control your environment. You rebel, you break up, you get a divorce, you even go out and kill someone.

Turn on the news channel, open up any newspaper, you will find someone somewhere resisting change. Not everything everyone is defending is good and not every change is for the better. Some things need to be preserved. But those fighting often don’t care; they want it at all costs. There are people dying for their cause. No one will go down without a fight.

The prospect of change brings with it fear and fear leads to anxiety. If you have not developed through experience, a way to cope with this fear then your anxiety will ultimately lead you to escape or an increased need to control. All of us will often escape what makes us most anxious. Some people chose to live in a perpetual state of escape. You don’t have to have autism to want to run away from scary things. I am afraid of a lot of things that make me very ineffective as Khaled’s guide because the prospect of failure makes me want to not try at all, and I will blog about them later.

I will mention however a homework assignment we had to do as part of our RDI parent training. There is an RDI acronym called MESSI (Multiple, Ever-changing, Simultaneous, Surprising, Imperfect). This is used to describe real world dynamic situations, or you could just say life is MESSI. So we were asked to list things in daily life (home or work) that we think are MESSI. Husband and I proceeded to make a list of horrible things. We assumed MESSI means bad. Our list included things like:

Getting stuck in traffic
Traffic light stops working
Lose your job
Get locked out of the house
Fire evacuation at work
Train not on time

Seriously though, it just reflects that we kind of missed the point in this homework. The point was (and our consultant helped us identify this) that sometimes even in times of seemingly negative change you feel exhilaration. There is no denying this. When I start thinking about all the times (even the bad ones) when things did not turn out as planned, there was always an element of some kind of positive feeling. Curiosity, creativity, competence, exhilaration. You feel these things in addition to the stress of any imperfect or unexpected situation. That is the point we need to make to K. We need to teach him that yes it is really scary to have to do the things his brain is NOT wired or designed to do, but there is a positive feeling that will come with it. We have to make him feel competent in the face of these difficulties. So when he is faced with another challenge he has memory of the times when he was clouded with fear and uncertainty but he survived it and he can do it again. That is RDI.

Think of the horrors you may have survived in your life. Do you not some times think of those memories with a sense of accomplishment, even though they were horrible and you would not want to have to live through those again?

I think the solution (at least to Khaled’s war on change) is appeasement. That does not mean we start negotiating with him, but we pick our battles and some things we just need to follow through on. Lasting change only comes over a long period.

"Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.” (Malik El-Shabazz - or Malcolm X).