I have been paying close attention to my sleep patterns, aided by my Apple Watch and a new CPAP machine which is helping sleep more deeply. As a result I am becoming increasingly familiar with how sleep works, from the phases of REM, to the waves of light and deep sleep I go through. I've been surprised to learn that waking up is a normal and healthy part of sleep (although waking up because you can't breathe is not, hence the sleep therapy).
So things catch my eye, and today's rabbit hole is aided by this article which describes more ancient and natural human sleep patterns during which a period of wakefulness is common and expected.
For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.
Sleep patterns and managing the kind of light I am exposed to before bed and in the morning is radically changing how I feel during the day in the first couple of weeks of this new regime. Combined with the therapy, I am much better rested, even with less than 8 hours in bed. No midday sleepiness, less grogginess in the morning. On this trip I have handled jet lag better and recovery from a cross-country redeye has been easier on my system than usual.
Toronto Maple Leafs 1 – 3 Ottawa Senators
The Leafs' season has been over for a while now and a six game losing streak coming into this game sealed their fate. The season has sputtered to a disappointing end. It seemed to just fall apart from the very beginning with lots of two goal leads surrendered early in the season. I blame the departure of Mitch Marner, but the late season injury to Auston Matthews did help. And then down the stretch, goalie Stolarz hurt his knee. So tonight Hildby was in net, a bunch of young guys were out there and Knies, Nylander, Tavares, Cowan, Ekman-Larson, Benoit and McCabe played their last games of the season with them.
It didn't look like the Leafs would score at all during the night, but Joe Bowen and Jim Ralph did their best on the radio call in the third period to jinx the shutout. At 11:48 of the third period, the spell worked and William Nylander sneaked a backhander into the net to elicit one final "Holy Mackinaw" After 44 years, Joe Bowen is retiring. and THAT was the reason to tune in tonight.
"Holy Mackinaw" was his trademark. We all knew it. The Rheostatics built it into the chorus of a famous song. Joe made culture, and that phrase was a shibboleth for nearly forty years of Leaf culture.
Bowen called games for 44 years. Seventeen coaches, more than 700 players, thousands of goals; all got name checked by him. From a Walt Podubny goal in Detroit (which started a three goal comeback) to Nylander's poached goal tonight, Bowen called some of the best and worst years of the Leafs. Here's a selection of his best calls. My favourites are from 2002 playoffs, when the Leafs held on to a 4-3 lead against Ottawa Game 6 and in the subsequent series where they scored late against Carolina in Game 6 which tied the game and gave them a chance in the series. That team had some grit, and Joe liked nothing better than watching a group of Toronto Maple Leafs putting in a shift by playing out of their skins.
Since I was thirteen years old Joe Bowen has been the voice of the Leafs. For this century, he has been accompanied by Jim Ralph, and the two of them were as much a comedic duo as they were a commentary team. They love each other and Bowen's tribute to Ralphie and his thanks tonight was the most emotional moment of the night. "Thank you for your encyclopedic knowledge and lack of math skills. I love you," he said through tears. And Ralph returned the tribute in kind.
I have the heart of a traditionalist. I appreciate things that just stay the same. I'm in Niagara-on-the-Lake this week, revelling in an Ontario spring, serenaded by the cardinals and the blue jays and rocked by an April thunderstorm. It seems to be as it always was. And here I'm listening to the Leafs' final game of 2025-26 and the last call ever by the guy whose voice is as closely tied to this team as the birds and weather are tied to this landscape.
Plus ca change… Toronto has never won a Stanley Cup in my lifetime and as we say in Leafs-land, there is always next year. But this time, it will never be the same.
Thanks Joe.
The end of Viktor Orban’s reign had all the hallmarks of similar transitions from the authoritarian governments of Eastern Europe thirty years ago: a largely peaceful transition of power because the people finally decided that they would be ungovernable by this particular tyrant.
Autocracy runs on fear—on the assumption that enough people, confronted with sufficient consequences, will decide that compliance is safer than truth. What dismantled Orbán’s operation was the accumulation of individual decisions to the contrary.
Orban is still in parliament as opposition leader and his state apparatus still exists. But his election loss, although not the same as the fall of the former Eastern European Communist governments in the 1990s, put me in mind of the thesis championed by Havel, of living in truth. It seems that the Hungarian people, despite election rigging and gerrymandering, just got sick of being ruled by an illiberal autocrat with deep ties to the insane administrations of both Russia and the United States. My hope is that the people of Hungary have demonstrated the way, even through rigged electoral politics, to depose of a “democratic dictator.” Others may follow.
Another article about what it’s like to teach in the era of LLMs. I’m interested to read these and see how they change over time as the LLMs change, school policies and pedagogy changes and students change. The part that resonates for me about this one is “friction.”
Helen Palmer has collected a number of different voices describing the Cynefin framework and some if it’s underlying theory and practice. It’s a useful primer to where the thinking is on this particular framework
My buddy Tenneson, with whom I have been murmurating for a couple of decades, posted a quote today from Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science that reminds me why I had walked a world of theory-informed practice for the past 30 years:
Organizations are living systems (not machines).
Living systems have a way of organizing themselves (Starlings as an example — don’t seem to have a boss or a planning committee).
If we learned more about how living systems organize themselves,
what would that teach us about organizing human endeavor?
It was basically that quote that first introduced me to the world of complexity and living systems and the implications of those metaphors and ways of organizing in human systems.
In 1995 I participated in my first Open Space and in 1996 I met Harrison Owen for the first time and heard him speak about how the phenomenon of self-organization could work in human gatherings. I was reading people like Kauffman (who Harrison knew and had been inspired by) and Gleick in tandem with Capra’s work first in The Turning Point which I read in university and then later reading the Tao of Physics.
I was – and remain – interested in complexity as reality, as shared by these scientists, and complexity as metaphor, which is what Meg was doing. That is, there are very real things that happen in the world that are complex and there are also ways we humans impose order on the world that rooted in the stories and images we tell about what order is and what it should be. A lot of times these are at odds. Sometimes we try to control emergent situations because we can’t handle the uncertainty and ambiguity and we bribe that control or efficiency or accountability will “solve the problem.” Other times we might turn away from the very real biophysical, or organizational constraints or indeed stable cultural patterns of a situation in favour of dreaming about different futures. Unrealistic “what ifs…” that take us away from possibility into dream land.
I am neither a scientist, nor a philosopher, but I instead identify as a practitioner, trying always to build coherence in my practice of working with people.
It was good to re-read Meg’s quote today because it is the unanswered question that inspires me. “If we learned more…” It’s an aspirational question that contains a hypothesis and an assumption. It implies that there is a new story emerging in the new inquires of biology and chemistry and physics that looks to emergence and self-organization that supports life. It invites us to expand our frames of reference about what organization means and what it could be. And it looks at a dehumanizing world structured around mechanistic metaphors of production and in it’s us to find how complexity offers us ways to bring more life to people, organizations, communities, ecosystems, societies and the world.
That question changed my practice forever and continues to send me adrift in the world with an abiding curiosity to always learn more. After thirty years I can say that I don’t have any answers to that question, because I keep learning. It is not a question to be answered. It is a question that offers a re-orientation, that guides the senses to different places and invites one to find new things there.
Ann Linnea goes for a walk in the woods on her island home in the Salish Sea, 160km to the south of me. She loves spring, as do I. The sea lions have started to leave here and there are only a few left meaning that, for the first time since November, there is actually silence at night. And like Ann also observes, our two most common early warblers are back, the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned. On top of that the dominant sparrow call is now the white crowned. Over the past week they have been appearing and singing more and more.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of their breakfast table, Ann’s beloved partner and one of my mentors Christina Baldwin turns 80. Happy birthday dear one!
“Thunderous and well rehearsed improvisations,” relates Edward R. Murrow when telling an anecdote about how an acquaintance described a lunch meeting with Churchill. But watch until the end, when Murrow shares his opinion on human rights and the obligations of the powers that command world-ending violence.
On a related note, Peter Levine makes the case that not only has a war crime been committed with the President’s foul utterances on Monday, but there is a collective and moral guilt that flows from that. This guilt dogs generations, and extends beyond borders. His reflections on Jaspers’ types of collective and personal guilt are a good roadmap for reconciliation and repair.