Tom's Blog on Life

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In a town of 700 people, the mayor knows your name.

He probably knows your phone number too – and in Milestone, Saskatchewan, that turns out to matter enormously.

On August 18, Mayor Jeff Brown received word that one of his constituents – a farmer named Brian Williams – had died after a brief illness. Brian had left behind a wife, three sons, and approximately 640 acres of unharvested durum wheat sitting in the fields.

Jeff Brown is also a farmer. He understood immediately what that meant.

“Mid-August is go time for crops,” he said. “And if a family is in need, the community pulls together.”

He pulled out his phone and sent a text to about ten locals – asking if anyone could help. He didn’t organize a committee. He didn’t wait for a meeting. He sent a message to people he knew, in the direct, practical way of someone who understands that grief doesn’t pause for logistics and wheat doesn’t wait for grief.

Word spread from those ten to everyone who needed to know.

The next morning – the day after Brian Williams died – 20 farmers arrived at the Williams’ farm with their combines.

They didn’t need to be briefed or organized or assigned rows. They knew what needed doing and they did it.

In approximately three hours, they completed a harvest that would have taken the Williams family’s three sons several days to finish on their own. Rows that had been waiting – heavy with the season’s work, representing a year of planting and tending and hoping – were brought in. The grain was secured. The fields were cleared.

And then the farmers went home.

No ceremony. No press release. No expectation of recognition. Just twenty combines on a Saskatchewan morning, doing the work that needed doing for a family that was too broken by grief to do it themselves.

Mayor Brown, reflecting on it afterward, reached for the most honest explanation he had.

“Years ago, when the farming machines weren’t so big, families would get together more to help out like this,” he said. “It’s in our DNA.”

That phrase – it’s in our DNA – is worth sitting with.

Because what he was describing is not a trend or a movement or a viral moment. It is something older and quieter than any of those things. It is the accumulated habit of communities that have always understood, on a practical and physical level, that survival is collective. That a neighbour’s crisis is everyone’s problem. That when the season turns and the work is urgent and a family is too devastated to function, you don’t wait to be asked.

You show up with your equipment and you get the crop in.

Milestone, Saskatchewan has fewer than 700 people. There is no anonymity there. No passing by on the other side of the street and telling yourself someone else will handle it. Everyone is someone’s neighbour. Everyone’s grief is visible. Everyone’s fields are known.

And when a mayor texts ten people and twenty show up – that is not a surprise. That is a community working exactly as it was always designed to work.

The Williams family lost their husband and father in August.

They did not lose their harvest.

Because twenty people in Milestone, Saskatchewan remembered that love, in farming communities, has always been a practical thing – something you do with your hands, something that shows up before breakfast, something measured not in words but in acres completed and hours given and grain safely in.

“It’s in our DNA.”

It always has been. It always should be.

And somewhere in rural Saskatchewan, on a farm that could have been left to struggle through the worst kind of season, three sons and a mother came home to fields that had been tended – by neighbours who never asked for thanks and didn’t wait to be thanked.

That is the whole story.

It is also, somehow, everything a community is supposed to be.

Share this story – because twenty combines on a Saskatchewan morning remind us what it means to actually show up for each other. Not with thoughts. Not with prayers. With combines.

The dictionary has multiple definitions of failure:

1. lack of success.
2. an unsuccessful person or thing.
3. the neglect or omission of expected or required action.
4. a lack or deficiency of a desirable quality.
5. the action or state of not functioning.
6. a sudden cessation of power.
7. the collapse of a business.

The definitions all deliver the impression of a finite conclusion rather than a step in a process. Failure equals being wrong. Being wrong equals death. As a result, failure has an obvious and deeply negative stigma associated with it. Hence most people fear failing.

In fact many people do not even attempt worthwhile projects for fear of failure. This has been commented upon by various motivational speakers as sad and lamentable but is a natural outcome of the way we are taught to think about failure – it is bad and to be avoided.

And it is a lot easier and very simple to say don’t fear failure than it is to spend the time necessary to change our thinking about it. So what is a better way to think of failure and how do we change our thinking about it?

I don’t know how true it is but I have heard that Edison failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb before his success. Imagine if he took his first failure as an end point rather than a new starting point. In fact each failure could otherwise be described as a successful experiment to find out that a particular hypothesis did not work.

I was struck by this when I was doing some pullups in the park with 13 kg of weights on my back. I was doing my third set of 5 repetitions and on the last repetition I could not pull myself up more than 85% of my top range of motion. That was my point of failure. Despite my best effort, I could not pull my body up to get my nose over the bar. I “failed”.

Now, when you are exercising, this is something to aim for. Exercising with good form till you are close to failure (with some capacity left in reserve) builds strength and muscle mass.

At this point I realised every person doing resistance training “fails”. We all hit a point where we are at or close to where we can do no more. We are all “failures”, at different points. Some of us fail after 4 repetitions at 13 kg, as did I. Some of fail after 44 repetitions or with 50 kg. None of us stop training “because we failed”. We recognise it as a benchmark or a measure of progress rather than a destination. A “That’s where I am up to.” viewpoint rather than a “That is my end result.” viewpoint.

Which reminded me of a quote I heard about people who are successful marketers, “They fail fast and they fail often.” They try a lot of things, knowing that many ideas they try will fail and need to be abandoned quickly before wasting too much money on them. By doing that many times and quickly, they sooner or later and without too much wasted money, find that which works and can then do lots of that to huge success.

These top marketers know full well that a fear of failure will not lead to success.

They know that in marketing, as in exercising, it is very easy and natural to view failure as a marker, a peg in the board. A “This is where I am up to”.

What if we started doing that in other spheres of activity? What if every time we thought of something and got the negative thought come in about failing, we just looked at it and thought, “That’s only to be expected. Nothing unusual here. Any time I fail it is just another step toward the ultimate success.”

I heard the title of this article many moons ago now. In fact, about 50 years ago. That’s a half a century! Sheesh! Time flies when you’re having fun!

And that’s the trouble. We start out life thinking we have plenty of time. Which we do. But life is chock-a-block full of distractions and we get busy working to buy groceries and pay rent, going out socialising to have fun and to find a mate, then saving for a home, raising a family and before we know it, life is lived and we are looking at grown up grand children wondering, “Where did the time go?”

Well, it went on living. But was it the life we would have chosen if we knew then what we know now? Would we have done things differently if we could have known what was coming?

One way to know what will be the result of our actions is to be widely read, especially of people who research causes and effects, what causes generate what effects.

You may have heard the quote from Will Rogers, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

IMHO you and I cannot live long enough to learn all we need to by our own observation and experience. School is supposed to be a shortcut so we can acquire the wisdom and good judgement from a lot of other people’s experience without having to go through a lot of pain from our own inexperienced poor judgement.

All too often, when school stops, so does many people’s intensive learning. Truthfully, many people’s intensive learning stops even prior to leaving school but the failings of the education system are a story for another post.

Probably the first skill that needs to be acquired in order to learn is the ability to face the subject without flinching away from it. In one subject I have studied extensively that ability is called the ability to confront – to face without flinching.

Most people do not want to be uncomfortable. I have read that most people would rather live a comfortable lie than live an uncomfortable truth.

I have also read people say, “Once you see something you cannot unsee it.”

So if seeing something makes a person uncomfortable then the fear of what one might see and learn has the effect of reducing their willingness to look.

Obviously the answer is to gradiently increase a person’s ability to comfortably confront what is really there until they arrive at a point where they can confront anything without flinching away from it. This is a high ability indeed!

If that interests you, contact me!

She could have lived a comfortable life.

Her father was a successful merchant. Her home in Rochester, New York was always full of books, music, and warmth. She had everything most people dreamed of.

But Lillian Wald walked away from all of it.

Not once. Not twice. Three times.

The first time, she was 16 years old – bright, determined, and full of ambition. She applied to Vassar College, one of the most respected women’s colleges in America. They rejected her. Not because she wasn’t smart enough. Simply because she was too young.

Most people would have taken that rejection personally. Lillian took it as extra time.

She spent six years traveling the world and even worked as a newspaper reporter. She was curious about everything. She was watching, learning, absorbing life.

Then, in 1889, she met a young nurse – and something shifted inside her. She enrolled at the New York Hospital Training School. She graduated in 1891. She was finally on her way.

The second time she walked away, it was from medical school.

After graduating as a nurse, she started teaching home nursing classes to poor immigrant families on New York’s Lower East Side – one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the entire world. Families of ten people crammed into apartments barely 325 square feet in size. Children sleeping in shifts. Parents working in dangerous conditions. Sickness everywhere.

One day, she was called to help a young girl’s sick mother living in a filthy, crumbling tenement. What she saw in that apartment changed her forever.

She left medical school the next day.

Not because she gave up. Because she couldn’t justify sitting in a classroom while real people were suffering just a few streets away.

She moved directly into the neighborhood.

In 1893, Lillian Wald did something no one had done before.

She created a new kind of healthcare worker – one who didn’t wait for the sick to come to a hospital. Instead, these nurses went into homes, into dark tenements, into the streets. She called them public health nurses. She literally invented that term.

And then, with her friend Mary Brewster and the support of generous donors, she founded the Visiting Nurse Service of New York – bringing affordable, dignified healthcare to people who had never received it before.

A year later, in 1894, she opened the Henry Street Settlement House – a place offering not just medical care, but education, community support, and belonging for thousands of immigrants trying to build a new life in America.

She helped establish some of the first playgrounds in New York City. She personally helped pay the salary of the first public school nurses in NYC history.

The third time Lillian walked away from comfort was perhaps the most powerful.

She could have run her Settlement House quietly – kept her head down, helped her neighbors, and stayed out of the bigger battles. But Lillian Wald understood something important,

Treating sickness wasn’t enough if the system creating the sickness was never changed.

So she fought.

She helped launch the United States Children’s Bureau, pushing for the rights and protection of children across the nation. She co-founded the National Child Labor Committee, working to end the cruel practice of sending young children to work in dangerous factories and mines. She helped build the National Women’s Trade Union League, giving working women a voice.

She marched for women’s right to vote. She advocated for women’s access to birth control. She fought for workplace safety laws that protected laborers from dangerous conditions.

And when the devastating Spanish Flu epidemic swept through America in 1918 – killing hundreds of thousands of people – Lillian Wald led the Red Cross campaign to fight it, coordinating care across the country.

By 1913, the Henry Street Settlement had grown to seven buildings. It had 3,000 active members in its classes and clubs. Ninety-two nurses were making approximately 200,000 home health visits every single year.

In 1922, the New York Times named Lillian Wald one of the 12 greatest living American women in the country.

She later received the Lincoln Medallion – awarded to outstanding citizens of New York – for a life poured entirely into others.

Lillian Wald retired in 1930 and passed away peacefully on September 1, 1940, at the age of 73.

At a memorial held at Carnegie Hall, 2,500 people gathered – including the Governor and the Mayor of New York – to speak about one woman who had refused to look the other way.

She never sought fame. She never asked for monuments. She simply saw people who were suffering, and she moved closer instead of further away.

The Henry Street Settlement still stands on the Lower East Side today – more than 130 years later. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York still operates, one of the largest home healthcare organizations in America.

All of it began because a young woman from Cincinnati looked into a dark, crowded tenement apartment and decided that what she saw there was her responsibility.

Not someone else’s. Hers.

That is the kind of person who actually changes the world. Not the loudest voice in the room. The one who quietly moves in, rolls up their sleeves, and stays.

We don’t need to be extraordinary to make a difference. We just need to refuse to look away.

Who in your life quietly shows up for others? Tag them below. They deserve to be seen.

“What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh.” ― A.A. Milne