Every year around this time, I do some brainstorming about what I want to accomplish throughout the year. It’s a goal setting exercise whereby I think about what’s important to me, the achievements I want to make and how they fit into my long term goals. Then, I spend some time figuring out how I’m going to balance my goals with other important things in my life like my education, travel, relationships, etc.

At this time last year, for example, I developed a plan to write a new personal finance book for young couples aged 25 to 40. My mission was to give readers the tools to grow their net worth. I’ve accomplished my goal, and in March 2010, I plan to release my second book, Rich by Forty: A Young Couple’s Guide to Building Net Worth. In order to accomplish this goal, I had to find balance. Yes, there were many late nights where I hovered over my computer, BUT, I made sure that I did some travel, built up my personal finances, strengthened my relationships, spent time developing my career, balanced my budget every month and much more. Had I not struck a balance between these competing priorities, I’m sure I would have experienced a very unfulfilling year.

What follows are strategies on how to manage conflicting priorities for your time, money and energy and figure out what’s important to you.

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Why is shopping for shoes more fun for some people than shopping for groceries? Pscyhologists and economists have found that some purchasing decisions can buy a little slice of happiness. As Elizabeth Dunn, a University of British Columbia psychology professor told the Boston Globe, “Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness. People just might be using it wrong.” The money that is.

In “Happiness: A Buyer’s Guide,” the Globe made the analogy that treating a friend (or colleague) to lunch will make you happier than buying a new outfit. “Splurging on a vacation,” the story continued, “makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.”

A friend of mine once described a similar sentiment. “I prefer to buy experiences, not products.” (She’s a salesperson with a background in marketing, by the way.) Marketers have long picked up on this, selling the more complex, shiftier commodity of an experience for a premium. If you can make someone feel like they’re doing something good by upgrading the experience, all the better. And if you can hook they by giving them a taste of the experience – hence the neologism “trysuming” – your product, er, experience, is golden.

Happiness is everywhere these days. On mugs from Dollarama, in books (such as the new Happiness Project) and on the web (e.g. We Feel Fine). There are happy companies, happy cities and even a Happy Job Search. Tara Hunt, a Canadian social media expert working in San Francisco is even working on a book about happiness as a business model. And that’s not even getting into the niceness movement. As Slate blogger and Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin puts it, “Making people happy make people happy.” Now if only happiness grew on trees. U

“You have to promise me something,” said my friend Curtis, leaning across the table. “You have to promise that when you look back on what you went through this year, you won’t blame the city of Edmonton.”

I laughed, because here’s how it went down: I was in a relationship for 16 years. Together, we moved to Ottawa. We moved to Saint John. We moved to Fredericton. We moved to Vancouver, where for 10 years we stayed put. In 2005, we moved to Edmonton. A year later, the relationship was over.

“I never had anything against Edmonton!” I said to Curtis, who smirked. OK, I might have done some complaining here and there.

I had complained about the oppressive car culture. I had complained about the landscape blight that was South Edmonton Common. I had mocked Ralph Klein with what was perhaps an inappropriate gusto for a newcomer. And then there was the cold.

That night, for example, was minus 30. Curtis maintained his skeptical smirk as I shuffled out of my top thermal layers. He had watched my relationship with the city steadily degrade, right along with my relationship with my ex.

When we moved to Edmonton, the prospect of renting a whole house, as opposed to an obscenely overpriced one-bedroom apartment, was thrilling. Sure, there was no beach, no mountains, but we had our own backyard – with a firepit! And my partner had just been offered his first job out of graduate school. The delirious double whammy of a stable income in an affordable city – this was pre-boom, remember – made Edmonton seemed like a place with unlimited possibility. Vancouver is sometimes described as a good place to heal, and there is some truth to that. But with its easy-living, cherry-blossoms-in-February kind of lushness, the city never quite felt real. A house, a car, kids – these were all things we couldn’t have imagined in our Vancouver existence. We moved to Edmonton with few regrets.

x
You know how sometimes life gets so bad that you begin to imagine yourself as a kind of voodoo doll to the gods? After the breakup, Edmonton’s once harmless foibles started to feel like a series of long, sharp pins some gleeful cosmic intelligence was slowly working into my flesh.

The breakup was followed swiftly by the boom, followed, inevitably, by winter. Suddenly I was paying full rent and utilities on the house where I’d previously paid half. My heating bill shot up to almost the same amount as my rent. Suddenly my furnace broke, and there was no one to fix it as every labourer was busy making truckloads of money elsewhere. Suddenly, the city’s tolerable quirks seemed to take on a new malignance.

When you move somewhere to start a new life, and said life promptly flushes itself down the pooper, how do you maintain perspective? How do you keep from blaming the backdrop? A year later I had no partner, no job, no money, no family nearby, scant friends, it was minus 30 and my furnace didn’t work. The night before, I’d huddled under a duvet in my inadequately heated house and formulated a plan. It wasn’t exactly a plan; it was more of a realization, a physical urge – like hunger or the need to alleviate pain – finally being articulated: I have to get out of here.

The following three statements are uncategorically true: walking, talking human clones (to do the dishes and take out the garbage, of course) are at least a few decades away, teleportation machines do not yet exist and there are only 24 hours in a day. Until these things change, you’d better have a backup plan – at least if you want to make time for your job and the big reason you have one: • your life.

“We’re allowing the ‘work barrier’ to infringe on our family and leisure time, which are so critical to our well-being,” says Chris Higgins, a professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business and co-head of the landmark National Work-Life Conflict Study. The study identified precisely how much Canadians – whether their collar is blue or white – are clocking in and how well they balance rising living costs and increasing demands on their time. Technology is an obvious factor, but so is corporate anorexia (fewer staff doing more work) and organizations that reward long hours instead of efficiency.

Not that you can peg it all to the boss man. Higgins cites cartoonist Walt Kelly’s famous maxim, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” as a morsel of working-class wisdom. “The enemy is us!” Higgins says. “You can’t have balance if you want a high-profile career and a perfect family,” he says. In other words, there are only ever going to be 1,440 minutes in a day, so we’d better teach ourselves how to fit our work and personal lives into them. get started with this step-by-step plan.

1. STRESS LESS

THE DIAGNOSIS
Over the past 20 years, employers have cut staff and spread tasks among fewer employees. Accordng to Higgins’ research, in 1991 about one in 10 participants worked 50 or more hours each week; 10 years later that number rose to one in four. This “role overload” is partly why employers spend $3 to $5 million each year in lost productivity and sick pay, and why half the organizations in the survey reported high absenteeism (employees who miss more than three days over a six-month period). “It makes financial and productivity sense to hire the hardest worker, despite the impact on his or her health,” Higgins admits. “The employee who works 60 hours a week will certainly be referred over the one who puts in 40.”

THE SCIENCE
Studies consistently show that people under significant stress are more likely to develop life-threatening illnesses such as cardiovascular disease. Under stress, your body releases a hormone called cortisol, which increases inflammation and restricts blood flow. Your thought and memory skills are taxed, your immunity weakens, your problem-solving ability drops and your relationships are strained. Stress breeds more stress. Organizations with healthy employees produce higher quality work, report less absenteeism and workplace accidents, better staff retention and more satisfied clients.

THE TREATMENT
“A happy worker is a healthy worker” should become everyone’s mantra. Employers who encourage employees to manage their own time are likely to be more efficient. If you stay an extra hour every day, ask if you can take it later. Any organization that wants to make “Best Workplaces” lists shouldn’t overlook such employees when it comes to promotions, raises and rewards. If yours is more like a toxic friend, then seek out one that respects the work-life balance. Of course, it works both ways: Be honest about timewasters, such as updating your Facebook status at 2 p.m.

Many of us, meanwhile, should exercise discipline. If you don’t keep track of your overtime, for example, your boss might assume that you’re completing your tasks on company time. Record how often your work phone rings during that dinner with friends. Log time spent catching up on weekends and holidays. And don’t become a CrackBerry addict. (You know who you are.) It’s a cliché because it’s true: every interruption breaks concentration, wasting more time while you re-focus.

RIGHT OF WAY: Tom Yohemas lends an arm(our) to his mother, Dorene

Tom Yohemas, knighted in 2003 as Sir Thomas of Strathcona by Calgary’s Knights of the Wild Rose, doesn’t consider chivalry the stuff of myth and legend. Though the Edmontonian may have started anachronistic club Knights of the Northern Realm in 2000 mostly as justification to invest more than $3,000 in a suit of newly forged steel armour, circa 14th century Europe, a more noble mission has emerged. Despite the violence and gore of medieval times, Yohemas associates the era with honour in service. Now, with a background as an environmentalist and sights set on charity work, he seems convinced that if the Middle Ages gave us the enlightened years of the Renaissance, a revival of sorts might be worth a try. Even if wearing the armour while driving laid waste to the interior of his ’92 Grand Am. _Scott Messenger

I’m an interviewer at Statistics Canada, one of those people who calls to talk to you about labour or farming or health or the environment. I’ve been there a year and a half, almost full time. It’s to open doors. I’d like to work for charitable organizations as I have in the past. I’ve done a lot of environmental work over the years. For 13 years I worked at Edmonton’s Environmental Resource Centre. I did environmental education in schools, travelling around Alberta, working with everyone from kids in Medicine Hat to parents in Peace River. But I decided that a lot of those kinds of activities, I need to do them on my own, at home, to make sure I’m acting on what I’ve believed in since becoming an environmentalist when I was 17.

Five years ago I started my own ethical video store called Video Solutions, in east Edmonton, taking an alternative video store – you know, foreign films, Canadian films – and merging it with the social and environmental consciousness of something like the Body Shop. I gave discounts to people who took transit or worked at the food bank. A percentage of revenues went to charities like youth and homeless shelters. We tried to limit our ecological footprint through recycling and renovating with non-toxic paint and salvaged materials. But a slum landlord was the end of everything in April 2005. The walks never got shovelled, the bathrooms smelled terrible. The roof even collapsed from water damage. Sixty thousand dollars and two years of my life. It was my baby.

When I started doing the Knights of the Northern Realm in 2000, I was still at the Environmental Resource Centre. People still say to me, “You’re an environmentalist, why are you doing this knights thing?” I say, what is the difference? When you’re talking about ethics and morality and society, it’s all part of the whole to me. I saw a connection. A knight who really tried to live by the codes he swore to when knighted is really no different than the way animal rights activists see themselves, fighting for their ethics and morality. One of the things I learned as an environmentalist was that change happens on many fronts, regardless of what armour you wear, whether it’s a business suit or chain mail.

In the Middle Ages, when men were knighted they took oaths to defend the church, to protect widows and orphans, to provide for the poor, and, at least in spirit, that’s kind of what our organization still does. If we’re doing business or private events, we charge, but for fundraisers we always perform for free. We herald people as they arrive, mix and mingle, stage sword-fight performances. It’s living history. Rather than role-playing, we’re trying to reenact the real history, learn what actually happened, wear real armour, hold authentic medieval feasts, learn real sword fighting. Basically, we’re trying to relive the 14th century as much as we can.

People, mostly guys at the moment, are drawn into our group because of that. Some are interested in the medieval dancing or the old languages, others are into the martial arts or sword fighting. Guys will tell you they’ve always wanted to be knights since they were boys. Buying a suit of armour isn’t enough. Knighthood is supposed to be about achievement. Sure, it’s a lure: people are like, “Wow, I can become a knight,” but it’s not really what it’s about. You have to be committed to the group and involved in our charity work. Those ideas of being able to give back to the community – we’re more in need of that now than ever.

In our group, knighthood isn’t something you ask for, it’s something you’re granted, like any kind of distinction. We know from stories of the Knights of the Round Table with King Arthur, many of them failed on their quests, because as humans we all have faults. What matters is whether or not somebody is driven to rise above those, to do and succeed, even if we’re not knights in our real, day-to-day lives. I’d like to be. It’d probably pay more bills than my current job.

We’ve been doing school visits for six years, sometimes as many as 10 a year. Do we teach them how historical Aragon’s sword was in The Lord of the Rings films? Do we describe the rules for role-playing an elf in Dungeons & Dragons? No. None of those things are practical. But what’s interesting is that all of those things, even if they’re fantasy, have a thread that goes back to real history. One of the things we do during a school visit is a show-and-tell of historical armour and we talk about some of the weapons that came to Europe from the Crusades and use those to discuss the misnomer in the West that civilization as we know it developed in Europe, when in fact it happened in the Middle East. Besides weapons, they’d developed medicine, science, mathematics, spices for cooking. We try to dispel some of the myths the kids might have seen on TV and in movies. I’ll even often explain to the kids that the Crusades are still going on in the Middle East – of course, I do it in a tongue-in-cheek way.

We do a battle as well. But as part of the presentation, we get the kids to take an oath that they’ll never use what they see in the playground or at grandma’s. We talk about the fact that weapons were made to kill. We let them know that we don’t just get together and bash each other in the backyard, but that we have a club where we’re learning and teaching and training.

For me, I’m anti-war. People will sometimes say, “You guys are promoting war.” No. What we’re doing is learning about history, and we know very clearly from the wars that we’ve seen in the last hundred years that we’re doomed to make the same mistakes unless we’ve learned from them. The things we were doing in the Middle Ages, warring over religion, or resources, or a boundary line, are the same silly things we’re still doing today.  U

Thursday, August 7, 2008, 6:30 p.m.
Highway 63, 30 kms north of Fort McMurray (note 1)

A RUSSIAN FUTURIST’S FANTASY: The EnCana site at Christina Lake

We’re stuck in traffic – not an uncommon place to find oneself in and around Fort McMurray, lodged firmly amidst a single-file convoy of buggy-whip sporting pickups, overgrown SUVs, buses, tanker trucks and semi-trailers hauling what appear to be the apparatus (turbines, boilers) for building a spaceship. This “rush hour” began two hours ago.

My photographer friend Lorne and I are pointed south. In our rear mirror looms Syncrude’s massive Mildred Lake plant, opened in 1978 and still the largest of Alberta’s oil sands operations. Unfortunately, this narrow two-lane highway is of the same vintage. Three decades and more than $50 billion of oil sands investment later, the road has yet to be adequately upgraded to manage the behemoth loads it carries – or the steady stream of bonanza-hungry new arrivals.

This mass exodus we’re trapped inside is merely a shift change. Inside the plants, a new contingent is punching in, pushing back the night to ceaselessly exploit the resource that first made it possible to push back the night. Cheap illumination, as kerosene, is what drove the first oil boom of the 1860s. Electricity almost put oil out of business. Then the automobile came along. Which, by virtue of some human evolutionary tangent, might explain why a half-hour later we’re still lurching forward according to the jam-up’s frustrating logic.

At the top of the hour we tune into CBC Radio for the news. Georgian security forces have moved into breakaway South Ossetia, clashing with separatist fighters. Russian troops have already been mobilized to support the Ossetians and are also pouring into Georgia’s other autonomous region, Abkhazia. The confrontation is long overdue. Both zones have been nominally independent from Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, since 1992, functioning with the support of a Russia long eager to reassert authority in its “near abroad.” Notably, Georgia is also home to the only pipeline ferrying Central Asian oil to Europe that doesn’t travel through Russia.

Canada is already the largest supplier of oil to the United States, but it would seem the oil sands’ newfound prominence as a stable source of energy is reinforced daily. For much of July, rebels in the Niger Delta wreaked havoc on production in Nigeria, the world’s eighth largest oil exporter, shutting down offshore platforms and tampering with pipelines as is their habit. Meanwhile, resource nationalism has become the defining gambit of not only Russia, but also other oil- and gas-endowed nations such as Venezuela and Bolivia, making it increasingly difficult for multinational oil companies to open new fields.

Fort McMurray and the oil sands, meanwhile, are enthusiastically open for business, 24/7. All the familiar big players are here, as are the Norwegians, the Japanese, the Dutch, the French, the Chinese. Now if only this damn highway would start moving again.

9:05 p.m. RCMP detachment, downtown
With his classic handlebar moustache and barrel chest of superhero proportions, it’s not surprising that Constable Tyler Roddick-Ament is the most photographed member of the local RCMP detachment. “Whenever they need someone to wear the red serge for a picture, it’s usually me,” he says. “Fortunately, I don’t have any ambitions to work undercover.”

Tonight, Roddick-Ament is riding a desk, dealing with prisoner issues and walk-in complaints. On other shifts he’ll be out patrolling, looking for impaired drivers, executing arrest warrants, completing paperwork or following up on his own investigations. As we chat in a windowless interrogation room, I’m curious what he thinks of the over-heated newspaper prose that Fort McMurray typically inspires, journalists like me, more soft-headed than hardboiled, channelling their inner Dashiel Hammet. Roddick-Ament doesn’t bother refuting the city’s oft-reported struggles with violence, drugs and prostitution, but he does put them in context.

Growth has been nine per cent for the past five years,” he says. “Three per cent is outrageous, one per cent is manageable. But nine per cent is something we don’t have the mechanisms to cope with. We’re a city now and we have the same problems as Edmonton or Calgary: more cars on the road, more money in town, and more people at loose ends.”

We take a cable car to the top of a mountain adjacent to the famous Matterhorn. It’s still ski season, and everyone (except us) is decked out in fashionable ski attire. It’s an older crowd, their skin leathery and monied.

The most sublime aspect of this mountainous terrain, I realize as we coast upward, is the light. The hue and intensity is fluid, constantly shifting as the sun ducks in and out of the peaks. The 19th-century Italian painter Giovanni Segantini once said that people of the mountains see the sun rise and set as a golden fireball, full of life and energy, while flatlanders know only a tired and drunk sun.

Finally, we reach the peak: 12,763 feet. A sign informs us that thus “Europe’s highest mountaintop accessible by cable car.” The qualification somehow deflates our senses of adventure. It’s snowing lightly. There’s a wooden crucifix, which strikes me as odd in such a secular country. Underneath are three words: “Be more human.”

A sense of calm sneaks up on me, a feeling so unusual that, at first, I am startled by it. I don’t recognize it. But there’s no denying its presence. I am at peace.

The naturalist E.O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I’m experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Wilson argued that our connection to nature is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. That connection isn’t always positive. Take snakes, for instance. The chances of encountering a snake, let alone dying from a snakebite, are extraordinarily remote. Yet modern humans continue to fear snakes even more, studies have found, than car accidents or homicide or any of the dozens of other more plausible ways we might meet our demise. The fear of snakes resides deep in our primitive brain. The fear of the Long Island Expressway, while not insignificant, was added much more recently.

Conversely, the biophilia hypothesis, as Wilson calls it, also explains why we find natural settings so peaceful. It’s in our genes. That’s why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined.  U

From The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Reprinted with permission from Hachette Book Group, USA.

This is what it feels like to be among the uninitiated. I’m standing on a wind-swept downtown street known for its bars, donairs and late-night pizza. Yellow leaves blow past; cigarette butts and plastic wrappers swirl in the gutters. This is not a place to be reflective – it’s a collar-up, head-down kind of place, in collar-up, head-down season. I’m standing in front of a doorway. Behind it, a set of stairs ascend to a yoga studio. I have interviewed CEOs and politicians, yet I’m nervous about stepping inside.

My apprehension is rooted in yoga stereotypes. I lump devotees into two categories: new-agey types and the lululemon crowd. Yoga may be a 5,000-year-old set of stretches, breathing exercises and meditative practices born in India, but all I see is a multi-billion-dollar industry – and I’m one of the last holdouts.

Up those stairs, however, I meet Brea Johnson, the owner of Edmonton’s Shanti Yoga Studio, and am immediately at ease. Makes sense: “shanti” is the Sanskrit word for peace.

Johnson leads a small group of students – my first yoga class!- through a series of challenging poses. Her soothing voice guides us, explaining every movement in detail. After some of the poses, we’re rewarded with a few moments of lying on our backs, savouring the release. It’s not the same as “relaxing” in front of the TV. It’s letting every muscle take a breather. (It doesn’t feel like a workout, yet the next day my muscles are sore, and I realize yoga is about pushing your body to its limits so it can learn how to relax.)

Tall and beautiful, with a crown of long blond curls, Johnson is perhaps the most down-to-earth yoga instructor in the province. She expertly evades yogaspeak, dismissing my stereotypes as both cliched and cheesy. And she tells me how, four years ago, at age 24, she received an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Johnson was working as a yoga instructor when an old friend – landlord and bar owner Oliver Friedmann – called. “Have you ever thought about opening a yoga studio?” he asked.

“Um, maybe in 20 years,” she replied.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got this space and I was in your class yesterday. It occurred to me that it would make an amazing yoga studio.”

Excited about the possibility, but also conscious of the fact that she knew nothing about business, Johnson agreed. Friedman drafted the lease, writing in free yoga classes for himself. The next few months were exhausting. Johnson left her job, sought the requisite licences and insurance. Then there was the second-floor space itself: the floor was uneven, and walls had to be built. With only a few thousands dollars to work with, Johnson called in family to help. On opening day, as students arrived for the very first class, the toilet was being installed. “It was stressful,” she says. Good thing she does yoga.

Shanti’s underlying philosophy is rooted in a Gandhi quote: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Johnson’s own mantra is that yoga isn’t about being able to lift your leg over your head. “You know yoga is working if your relationships are good,” she says. “Your relationship with yourself, your relationship with others and your relationship with the environment.”

That fits with Johnson’s mandate to run a socially conscious, community-oriented business. In addition to yoga classes, she offers workshops on topics such as nutrition and non-violent communication. Her staff of five instructors organize food and clothing collection drives. They plan retreats to countries like Costa Rica, and donate a portion of proceeds to a local non-profit.

Johnson admits her studio isn’t for everyone. She doesn’t offer “feel the burn” options like hot or power yoga, and she’s comfortable avoiding the trends. “You see things like lululemon popularize and glamourize yoga,” she says. “That’s what’s so ironic. It can scare people away because they think they can’t afford the outfit.”

As a business owner, she knows what it’s like to stick to a budget. “I don’t have the luxury of knowing how much money will be in the bank every month,” she says. “But that has helped my tenacity. Like in yoga, when things are more challenging, you work through them and, at the end of it, it’s that much more rewarding.”

I tell Johnson I was nervous about coming to Shanti. She laughs and tells me a story. In one of its earlier incarnations, her space hosted Cocaine Anonymous meetings. Two years later, people were still coming up the stairs asking whether they’d found their support group. “No,” she would say. “But you can try yoga. It’s sort of the same.” U

I am an engineer, a mother, a Muslim. I am a wife and a daughter. I snowboard, I dance, I golf. I volunteer. It’s disconcerting to have parts of yourself broken into separate words, to be compartmentalized. If “we” were all at the same party, it’d be a fascinating mix. I am all these things and I am none of these things. To me it is not the individual parts that are interesting but the parts combined that make us whole.

FOLLOWING IN MY FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS – KIND OF

I ended up being an engineer, but in high school I was never one of those people who had their future profession mapped out. At the time, I wanted to study languages, but that didn’t come with a nice job attached. So I went with what I thought was the more practical option and studied engineering. It was a flip decision from which I built a career. Ironically, my dad is a civil engineer, and he tried to convince me not to go into engineering. It was my mom who encouraged me, I think mainly because she had wanted to be an engineer but was denied admission into the program at university due to her gender. That was in Pakistan. She fought the decision, but in the interim she decided to pursue physics instead and became a nuclear physicist. So really I followed both my parents’ footsteps.

I’ve had a very diverse career. I started out quite humbly as a university student, working for the Saskatchewan Department of Highways during the summers. They hired me after graduation, but that first summer I was a flag person. I remember standing at the side of the highway with a sign and thinking that parents in vehicles that passed me would be telling their kids, “Stay in school or you will end up standing on the side of the road with a sign.” Later I was afforded opportunities to work in the transportation section and became a traffic and roadways engineer. I’ve worked on projects to develop bike networks, traffic calming systems and improved pedestrian safety.

For a long time, I didn’t really embrace being an engineer. This past year, however, I finally recognized that I solve problems and build communities. That’s the modus operandi of my life. As an engineer, I have the privilege of building the physical spaces that make a community. These days, working for D.A. Watt Consulting in Calgary, I work on traffic plans for shopping centres, multi-family developments, office buildings, religious centres, casinos, parking lots, whatever. It still leaves me a little in awe to drive around the city and see projects that I’ve worked on. I now understand that the work I do has a human aspect, though most people think it’s purely analytical.

THE GIVING TREE

My parents had a very difficult childhood compared to mine and didn’t grow up with the opportunities and luxuries I had. The most important value they instilled in their children is compassion and justice. For me, this has manifested into volunteering for causes that I believe in – especially causes related to women and children. I like how this work allows me to have a part in building the social fabric of the community.

In 2000, I was part of a small team that put together a resource kit called “In My Own Skin” for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. We created a manual and a video for young Muslim women addressing issues such as gender equality, racism and family dynamics. It was a tremendous experience because I was able to work with a group of women like me from across Canada to develop something to give back to our communities and help create dialogue.

I guess I’ve always been an activist as well as a volunteer. At the mosque I attended in Regina, women and men were never separated. But things changed as the community changed, and people joined the congregation from countries where they adhered to certain traditions more strictly. As time went on, women were asked to pray in a women’s room. One particular Friday, I sat where I usually sat, and I happened to be the only woman in the main prayer hall. The sermon was going on, and a gentleman asked me to leave, and I said, “I’m not moving.” That’s when I realized that change happens when individuals take a stand.

THE PEOPLE THAT YOU MEET

My upbringing and family are non-traditional. I was born to parents of Pakistani and Indian heritage in Hamilton on December 7, 1972. My parents came to Canada in the 1960s. We moved to Saskatchewan when I was seven. That was significant. We went from a very cosmopolitan community to Swift Current, which had a population of around 16,000. We were the only Pakistani family in town, but there were other Muslims, about 50 families, mostly from Lebanon. So I grew up in a Lebanese-Muslim community, eating Lebanese food. My brother and sister and I had a really diverse upbringing and learned to get along with different types of people. Ironically, I grew up as a practising Muslim in a town known for the number of churches it has.

I graduated from high school there, studied engineering at Queen’s University in Ontario, then moved back to Regina for a job. I met my future husband in Regina and in 2002, shortly before we got married, we moved to Calgary. I married a man of Ojibway heritage, Kevin Shingoose, who’s from the Cote Reserve in Saskatchewan near the Manitoba border. We were married in a Muslim ceremony and also had a First Nations elder give his blessing. So my roots and family extend from somewhere in the northern frontier province of Pakistan to the Great Plains of Canada.

Our daughter, Azizah, was born last year. At home. With a midwife. Sounds cliché, but it was a perfect birth. It was what I wanted. “Azizah” means precious and powerful. Now that I’m a mother my priorities have shifted. I am fortunate to be able to work three days a week. Being a parent has allowed me to be just as connected to the community of future people as I am tied to the community of people who came before me. I am even more conscious of the world I am creating and leaving for Azizah and this realization has made me feel more mortal. The greatest gift I want to give her is her sense of self and to allow her to grow where she is planted. U

When an article appeared in The Economist late last year trumpeting the downfall of work-life balance as a fad that had run its course, the esteemed magazine’s esteemed editors certainly weren’t focusing on Alberta. Things are different here. The story predicted a retreat of flexible workplace policies – such as remote and part-time job arrangements – in favour of longer hours and a general reduction in willingness among employers to cater to the rising expectations of workers.

Perhaps this decline will be more apparent in other parts of the country and the United States, where thousands of workers have been laid off in sectors such as the automotive industry and unemployment numbers are double those of Western Canada. As of early July, Alberta’s unemployment rate was 3.8%, versus 6.1% nationally. Recent Alberta government figures show that out of 140 career fields, less than 10 were experiencing negative growth or decline in demand. More than 300,000 new jobs will be created in the province in the next decade; more than 12,000 new positions were created in Alberta in June 2007 alone, according to Statistics Canada. Couple these figures with an intense shortage of workers in Alberta and prospective job candidates aren’t shy about asking serious questions – often about balance and flexibility – before signing on.

The Economist piece was bang on the money on one point: longer hours. The labour shortage means that there are simply fewer people available to do an increasing amount of work. Last January, a StatsCan survey confirmed what many Albertans already knew: we collectively work more hours per year, on average, than people in any other province. Albertans worked an average of 1,880 hours a year in 2004, the equivalent of 36 hours a week for a “full-year worker.” That compares to the national average of 1,820 hours. Quebecers worked the fewest hours at 1,750 per year. In a related study, Canadians were also found to be spending less time with families in favour of working. In 2005, employed Canadians spent an average of 45 minutes less each day with their families compared to 1986 levels, working an extra half hour every day instead. We now spend about three hours and 25 minutes with family each day, compared to four hours and 10 minutes in 1986.

Working longer hours and spending less time with family, it can be argued, has been the impetus behind the Gen X/Gen Y push for more work-life balance. Enough is enough, we said after watching our parents work increasingly long hours, only to be laid off in droves during hard economic times. This caused many baby boomers to shun traditional notions of loyalty, and many young people are simply building upon that concept. Most people under 35 don’t really view work-life balance as trend or fad; it’s a built-in value that guides decisions about work from the outset, not a reclamation of anything. Priorities have changed about what makes life worth living. And a growing number of workers are beating their own path to success in a strong economic climate.

Lynn Perry-Reid, 24, and Avnish Mehta, 26, are living that ideal. Unmotivated by traditional concepts of work, they launched a Calgary-based recruitment firm about three years ago, targeting a niche they could relate to: post-secondary graduates. Their firm, Corporate Connections, is hired by large and small employers to place young grads into positions that offer flexibility and balance.

Mehta had spent a year working for a large company and quickly realized he wasn’t satisfied. “I didn’t fit in with their corporate mentality,” he says about his year of feeling overworked, unappreciated and unhappy. Perry-Reid was just starting out but instantly recognized she wanted to do something different with her life. “I always knew I wanted to run my own company,” she says, “I just wasn’t sure what it was going to be or how I was going to get paid.” Neither had any desire to work 80-hour weeks.

For people like Mehta and Perry-Reid, The Economist’s claim that work-life balance “will start to sicken and die” in 2007 isn’t a reality. “It has to be this way or we’re not going to work with you,” says Perry-Reid, echoing her generation’s mindset. “Companies need younger people, so I think companies are just starting to face the reality that they’re going to have to manage this different kind of idealism about what work is.”

From hip-hop retail entrepreneurs to engineers in the oilpatch, work-life balance has become entrenched for many Albertans in their 20s and 30s. There are always bills to be paid, but there is also life to be lived, as these snapshots attest.