I’ve been studying martial arts for years now, including Judo and Kyudo (Japanese archery) in Japan. For the past two years, my kids and I have been studying Hung Gar Kung Fu and Chinese Lion Dance here in Vancouver. While I range from passable to pretty much embarrassing as a student, I love the practice. The stillness of the mind in the midst of great concentration and physical exertion give me something for which I yearn. I have surrounded myself with students and teachers who are exceptionally talented, which keeps me on my toes, literally. I have learned, along with the children, to strive, never to settle. As our Sifu says, “You feel pain? It’s because you alive!”

Other appetites include wanderlust. Because my partner is French, we spend every other summer in her homeland, and I’ve developed a love for France, and a fascination for this culture that seems deceptively familiar, until suddenly I’m out of my depth entirely. Walking the stone steps of Mont St. Michel, on that littoral space between Brittany and Normandy, eating Mere Poulain’s yogurt (the best I’ve ever tasted--35% matiere grasse), smelling buckwheat crepes frying, walking the high cliffs above the sea, breathing in the apple twang of that sea-tinged air, and then heading to Paris where everything is cobblestone, croissants, women who know how to walk in heels, elegant dinners in her family’s apartments, people who fight over literature and philosophy and physics and curtains and the relative stupidity of former American presidents—this, too, has become part of my world.