Breathe

They stopped putting lead in American gasoline

in the 1970s

Someone figured out lead poisoning

I think

Twenty three years later

Violent crime is decreasing in America

And someone looks at a bunch of data

And maybe an apple falls on their head

And so we discover

That if you inhale a bunch of lead as a kid

You are more likely

To hurt someone when you grow up

And so it turns out

You can treat your kid well

You can apply new policing theories

You can work on the school system

You can vow never to harm others

And all the while have your efforts undermined your air

With each breath

It’s like challenging the Universe to chess.

L used to smile at the air as he breathed it into the world

In what ways does it matter

How we treat the air we breathe?

This summer I started having panic attacks

I would gasp for air

At first I thought it was an allergic reaction.

“I can’t...

I was in the middle of my crisis when I learned that there are five diagnoses of extreme anxiety: general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic attacks, and phobias. It was a relief to discover that the seemingly random and incomprehensible experiences I had had over the past two months had a name and class. It placed a neat box around something that had previously felt like a wild and uncontrollable monster rampaging around my life. I was having panic attacks.

I became a compulsive oversharer. I was a loaded spring. Everywhere you go people ask you: “How are you doing?” Every time I was asked, my response: “I’ve been dealing with some really bad anxiety lately.”

There was always a reaction and it was quite consistent. The eyes would either dart or focus. Some people’s eyes will dart in deference to the ugliness that has been introduced. Did they hear...

Here is a somewhat offensive piece of history you may not have heard before: when the government first began to sponsor free pre-natal health services in the United States, a lot of doctors got mad. In the 1910s, the pioneering public health nurse Sara Josephine Parker and a number of other nurses drafted a bill to “create a nationwide network of home-visiting programs and maternal and child health clinics modeled on the programs in New York”.¹ In three years, infant mortality had dropped by 40% in New York as a result of these programs.¹ There too, the services had faced opposition, with a few dozen Brooklyn doctors signing a petition to shut services down.² (Parker is quotes as saying that the only thing she would have enjoyed more would have been “a similar protest from an undertakers’ association”.²) The American Medical Association (AMA) opposed the bill. How would doctors make a...

First Post: Uncommon Sense

First World Problems

The Give and Take

Digging Holes

The Particular and the Complex

Changing Norms

Anxiety & Me

2 Poems

Coming Home

Send any questions or comments to alex.sproule@gmail.com

I am increasingly discovering that many people, especially those who have gained expertise in a particular field, find ‘common sense’ to be a thorn in their side. Enough so that they have committed to multi-year investigations or written entire books on the subject. The problem seems to be that we rarely question things that are ‘common sense’. After all, if we questioned every assumption behind everything we thought or did in a day – well, it would be physically impossible. However, once you get far enough into an area of practice or study, incorrect ideas about your area of expertise become as annoying as they are glaringly obvious.

The thing is that most common sense ideas apply in some situations but not others, and we struggle to distinguish the difference. Consider that common sense really is a reliable companion for everyday life. I successfully assumed the chair I am sitting in...

One night I dream of falling into the ground, moving through it as though it were air. There is a rock house that I live in with a rabbit and a mole. I taste the earth when I breathe.

In the morning I wake up and discover I am living on solid ground. I get up to wash the morning dirt off my face. I putter around – sipping coffee, going to meetings, driving around in my fast car. Before long, I become restless. I cannot stop thinking about falling through the ground. I tell my wise friends, and they tell me to focus on enjoying the air around me.

It is sound advice, but I seem to be a creature of the dirt. Before long I am spending a lot of time staring at the earth. Like a crazy person, I crouch on my neat square lawn and talk to the worms, making jokes they do not understand about how the weather is down there. I find myself digging small, secret holes all over my backyard. One day...

We have a society very oriented towards productivity. Our work is a big part of our definition of having a successful life. Though there is a lot of talk of the ‘old work-force’ and the ‘new-work-force’ and the different skills you need for each, something that has not changed is the value of hard-work and ambition. There are hundreds of resources the enterprising person can find on what they need to get ahead and be successful in their work. This is just as true in the social sector, where I have spent most of my short working career, as it is in the for-profit sector. You have to give 200% for what you really want – whether it is to make your fortune or change the world.

I would like to share a comment I heard the other day that left me with a lot of questions. It came from a man who was giving a talk on community with some youth mentors from the Jane & Finch neighbourhood. “For every...

My grandfather has a telescope that he keeps in front of a window facing across the lake at our family cottage. I remember fumbling around with it when I was younger, hoping to see the wonders that must exist on the other side of the lake, but perpetually stuck in a world of pretty blurry colours whose meaning I could only project. As I got to the age at which you can effectively turn fiddly nobs, and the world across the lake came into focus, I remember being a bit disappointed by how much it resembled things I had already seen before.

There are a lot of things in the world that are more exciting and enticing when they are out of focus, and as a result there are a lot of people who will give you an unfocused lens in an attempt to get your attention. With this blog post, I want to take one of those things and bring it into focus: firstworldproblems. Though this mantra peaked a few...

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.”
― Douglas Adams

There are certainly a lot of things in the world we would all be happy to admit we do not know. I have no clue, for instance, the exact number of people eating dinner at this moment. I do not know what the bottom of the ocean looks like, the number of planets in the universe escapes me, and I have often wondered, with frustrated urgency, what the heck my dog is barking out the window at this time.

What we will be talking about here, though, is not the unknown, but widely known. I want to have some conversations about those basic common sense notions any 6 year old could tell you. Because as you may already have realized, a lot of those notions are totally wrong. Some others are flawed, scrambled, or misused. And unfortunately, there is no lie harder to spot than the one you do not even know...