A Blog by Tim Wade

Zoe playing. I'm on the computer. I'm there but not present. She comes over with things, one time it was something that fell off the table and she wanted to add value to me by giving it back to me... Another time it was so that I could take a sip of her drink. She was trying to bring me in. She's not even two years old. Almost, just over a week from now.  But I saw it, I realised, and I shut the computer and went to engage. I love Christmas. I love it. I love the spirit of this time of year. It's undeniable. Even Ebenezer Scrooge transformed. It's amazing. And the reason for the season is either you believe in God's gift of Jesus Christ, or it's the nearly the end of your year and that will somehow make next year better. For me, I'm both the former AND the latter on this one. Whatever your belief right now, I hope you get your Christmas presence. Not a typo. I noticed that Zoe noticed that I wasn't being present. And isn't that re...

This is your best, most positive and accurate New Year forecast... Because I'm fascinated about people's desire to read a forecast of their fortunes for the new year, I thought I'd write one, an awesome one. A strologers publish calendar year or lunar new year horoscopes all over the world, but what if it contains bad news? (The one I wrote for you doesn't: it's awesome.) D uring Chinese New Year there is enormous interest in how the coming year will pan out. In Singapore for example, huge boards go up in public areas during Chinese New Year and crowds gather to read forecasts of their health, happiness, relationships and wealth prospects for the year ahead. Now while I don't believe in any of that stuff, I do know that our expectations of the future will influence our mindset and the degrees to which we take action. So our expectations of the future can often create that future. Then surely it's a good idea to lock on to a version of the new year that ...

This morning I began reading a book I bought over a decade and a half ago. When I bought it, I thought it would be beneficial, but I didn't take the action to realise the benefits. I hadn't made the time. Until now. Why does intention to action sometimes take over 15 years to happen? How can we shrink that time delay to benefit far more immediately from the wisdom we're presented with? The book is titled  50 Self-Help Classics a by Tom Butler-Bowden, 2001. Ah, the irony. Butler-Bowden writes, self-help is "the refusal to accept 'common unhappiness' or 'quiet desperation' as the lot of humankind." He continues, "To make the most of life, we need things like vision, emotional intelligence, ethics, an awareness of history and a thirst for knowledge and ideas. These qualities can't be force-fed by education, family or religion, or even provided by your firm. We live in a time in which institutions may be able to protect us from hunger,...

Life is made up of choices. We choose to do things every day. And what we choose to do, when we choose to do it, and how we choose to do it tends to craft the quality of our life. That quality might be swiss-watch-like quality, or it might be two-dollar store quality. It all depends on our choices and how we respond to the consequences of those choices. Consider the Duck and the Spectacle. A duck is a funny, cute, awkward and awesome creature that seems to add value in everything it does and is. A duck is also an action you take to get out of the way of something hurtling towards you. So maybe it's time to get out of our own way. A duck is also one of very few creatures that can swim, walk and fly. It can live happily on the water, on the land and in the air. Maybe it's time to recognise that our funny awkwardness has an awesome uniqueness that makes us, in this life, truly special. A spectacle is both something amazing to see and something to see amazingly through. If ...