Small. Tiny. Little. Anything that describes these things, to me, are such lonely and boring concepts. Having or living in a small town, I would be bored. I would have no place to go and not a lot of options to do things, thus leading me to have a very boring and somewhat lonely life. There are no places to explore and no new places to go if a small town stays forever small. Also, there are not a lot of options in a life of a small town life. In a small town, if small enough, I would have already explored and found all the places to eat in about a month or less and be ready to move on to other exciting places, like a new town or city.

Towns, a place not like a city and yet bigger than a village; it is an in between place of life and place. In between has never been for me. I either go big or go small with everything in life but never in between. In between for me seems so boring and normal. And although towns are developed and have a community, it is such a small portion of everything I could not live there and I would get bored with the people and places. Also, most of the time people that do live in smaller towns, they do not go far in life and they keep to what they have always have done in their families and the generation goes on but, not far in life. I want to go far in life, I want an adventure and I want to see what life has to offer; I do not want to settle for just normal.

Yet, I do not disagree or think small towns should not exist, but me personally, I do not prefer them. A lot of people like small towns though; people who still would like a community, but less hectic or busy than a city or people who just want to slow down theirs lives. Maybe when I am older I might settle down in a smaller town with less drama, craziness and excitement, but I am young and want to explore and not ready to slow down, not at all. Small towns are good, though, because it does remind people that there are trees and fields on this earth and there are small, local companies that trying very hard to make it in a big corporate world and succeeding at times. So, I am not completely bashing smaller towns or towns in general, it is just not my cup of tea.

Small towns, to me, are boring and plain. Small towns, to me, are normal and ordinary. Small towns, to me, are lonely and well, not big. But, it is a life I like, exciting and large and anyone can choose the life and place they want and live, small town or big town, but to me, I want to live somewhere where the excitement never ends and people are always around. A life where there is always something going on keeps me from being lonely and boring too. But, that is just me.

Actually, I’m the only person over 14.

I think most people assume I’m a parent arriving to pick up my kid from the 7:40pm class, when I walk into the musty old classroom in Pemberton’s old community centre at 8:10pm, where 6 targets have been set up against the far wall. Until I stepped up to the line with the other five students for the last class of the night.

Two of the boys have been taking air-pistol classes since they were eleven. I’ve never held a gun in my life. Never actually even seen a gun.

Allen McEwan, our master-at-arms for the night, gives an introductory explanation, and I’m grabbing onto these words: trigger guard, muzzle, scope, sight, trying to catch them like fireflies with my bare hands.

For the first five times I stand at the firing line and activate the pneumatic lever to fill the pistol with air and load the tiny pellet, I’m shaking so much I worry the pellets are going to skitter right out of my hand and onto the floor. I keep holding the pistol down with the wrong hand. Trevor, the other supervisor, corrects me.

I’m not here to learn to kill. I’m here to learn to relax.

And that makes my husband nervous.

But this is the strange discovery I make, after my first shooting class. It is relaxing. Not a magaritas-by-the-pool relaxing. But the kind of peace of mind that comes from focussing with such discipline and mindfulness, that all the distractions and static and clutter fall away.

I load the pellet and sight the target the same way, every time, trying to remember the sequence, trying to remember not to lift the muzzle from the folding table until we get the all-clear to raise our pistols to the target. It becomes ritual. There’s a reverence in the room, me and a bunch of teenage boys, lined up between two men who are holding us to a promise of respect and discipline.

The target is a piece of paper held to a steel board by four magnets. The pellets strike the metal with a ping and fall away. Every time I hear them hit the floor, I think I’ve missed, but I hit the target every time. Even the bulls-eye.

What I experience in this classroom, ‘crashing’ the Pemberton Wildlife Association’s Junior Air Pistol Program, is so far removed from the mainstream hysteria about Constitutional rights and Sarah Palin and attempted assassinations, that I wonder if the word missing from the debate  around gun culture is ‘reverence.’ And as surprised as I am, a vegetarian, aspiring yogi, sometimes Buddhist, to find reverence through the sights of an air-pistol, I am grateful that the parents of  twenty local 8-15 year olds understand that learning to own our power, as humans, wakefully and consciously, is a basic life skill.

If you need a gadget to navigate around the mountain, post an effusive woo-hoo! to a virtual audience of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, coordinate après plans, insulate you from the tedium of chitchatting with strangers, and/or to have more fun on the hill, then I have to put it out there: maybe this isn’t the sport for you…

my tenure out on that tech-refusenik limb felt lonely and precarious.

The limb got less lonely this week, when I watched Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist, address the recent TED Women conference. Our contemporary tools, the mobile technological ones, are not extending the reach of our physical selves anymore. Case says they’re actually extending our mental selves. And the speed and scale at which that is happening means that we’re at risk of not balancing the benefits of the tools out by slowing down, taking time for mental reflection without external input, doing the long-term planning required to “figure out who you really are,” establishing what your core self is in real space.

The mountains used to be that real space. What struck me as unique and even sacred about going skiing was the way it forced that mental down-time on us. We stepped out of our bubbles the minute we stepped into our bindings and slid over to the lift-line. We stopped thinking about all the Monkey Mind shit, because skiing is technical enough a sport to require real mental focus.

It’s the mindset, the way we look out at the world. If we continue to elevate ourselves as the highest part of this whole system then we’re in deep trouble. Economics is a human creation, borders are human creations and nature doesn’t give a damn about these things. So if we really intend to be here in the long run, the mindset has to shift from human-centred to one in which we’re a part of this bigger system.

The mobile app that tells you how many vertical you have skiied, which chairlifts have the shortest lines right now, and what weather is moving in, is a kind of mental crack-candy. It tricks us into thinking we are connecting to the bigger picture, while we simultaneously shut out the real cues – the clouds scudding overhead, the person sitting next to you, and the happy-happenstance and small-world buzz of ski serendipity.

We’ll need those tools, too, but used judiciously and with some restraint, understanding how seductive and powerful they are, and that unchecked power is the dangerous human invention ever.

’Tis the season of buy, buy, buy. But more and more people are asking Why, why, why? It’s in trying to answer this question — what’s the why behind the buy? — that Iconoculture recently launched a new macrotrend, one we call Mindful Matters. The idea underpinning this macrotrend is that people are mindfully re-prioritizing what they buy, who they do business with and even how they live. They’re adding “simplicity” and “manageability” to their personal wishlists instead of iPods or flatscreen TVs.

For Iconoculture, macrotrends are a way of talking about why people make the decisions they make. And expressions of Mindful Matters play out differently depending on one’s cohort. In Iconoculture’s annual quantitative values survey, we saw that Boomers especially had embraced simplicity: They identified with the top end of the simplicity scale, defined as “I strive to live a simple and uncluttered life,” more than any other demographic group did (Wave 1, 2010).

Of course, slower living isn’t a phenomenon that’s only about Boomers. As we’ve seen in such observations as the Great American Apparel Diet, where people commit to abstaining from buying clothes for a year, Millennials have their own way of more closely considering their purchases. Nor is the idea nation-specific. We’re tracking similar examples around the globe.

For many people feeling the pull of Mindful Matters, this marks the beginning of a more considered, maybe slower life. But for marketers, that shift in people’s values means change is afoot — and it’s happening fast.

Then I got an e-mail about Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families by Ann Kroeker.  I thought I should give it a read.  I had never heard of her before, but I was pleasantly surprised by this book.  It was easy to read, but covered significant material in a meaningful way.  It’s short chapters were written with the overly-busy in mind.  Each chapter ends with Slow Notes which are suggestions for slowing down your life in keeping with the material covered in the chapter, and Live From the Slow Zone in which friends of hers share some of their stories about slowing down life.  Additionally, I found the book referring to Christ and the gospel often.  This is not a book about trying harder, or loading you with false guilt.  It is very gracious, honest and does not think this will look the same in every family’s life

” To live slower requires buy-in from the entire family.”

The basic premise is that we move too fast.  We commit ourselves to too many opportunities for ourselves and our kids.  We move from one event to another, stressed out in between, and somehow think that more is better. We are also saturating ourselves on entertainment & information as we sit in front of our TVs, video games and computers.

“To be safe, we need to anchor our choices in a person- Jesus Christ- and we need to weigh them against His Word.”

Little do we know the price we are paying for these hectic, over-stuffed lives we lead.  We suffer spiritually, having little to know time to delight in His Word, chewing on it (see Psalm 1, I’m preparing a sermon on it).  We suffer relationally, having little time to know each other.  As a result we suffer emotionally, having little/no resources to cope with the overload we experience.  We are also, as she covers in various chapters, too fast to care (for others), rest, to pray, to worship, enjoy creation, or create.  She draws on a number of studies to illustrate her points, providing some objectivity.  She also has a chapter which covers some of the “good” reasons we do this to ourselves, and helps you sort through your own reasons for pursuing this unsustainable life.

“When we understand the driving force(s) behind our current choices, we can go with humility to the Lord and seek His wisdom, direction, and instruction for how to live according to His principles and in obedience to His Word.”

But her book is not just a lament over what we are missing, or overly critical.  She helps people to recognize that each of us has different load limits.  The lifestyle changes she advocates would result in changes in how we use not just our time, but our money, enjoy people and God himself.   Again, she does not come across as critical, but as a kindly, gracious friend pointing to something better.  She wants you to know you don’t have to live like everyone else- you can get off the hamster wheel.

What she didn’t cover, which was probably beyond the scope of her book, is how churches also fall into this trap.  They can clutter our lives with so many programs that we don’t have time to be families and neighbors and evangelists because we are at church every evening.  This is part of what draws me to Simple Church and Total Church.  While Christ is my life, church activity doesn’t become my life.  This is one of the things I’m weighing as I consider various ministry options- will I have time to be a dad & husband?

So, if you are one of those people hurrying from one thing to the next, or stuck in front of some screen, life can be different.  Change for the better can take place, and sanity can be restored to your family.  Take some time while you’re stuck in traffic, waiting for an appointment or before you doze off to read this book.  You won’t be disappointed.