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[Speaker 1] Hello and welcome to Elsefir Slowly. I'm Tristan Lyne, and before I ask for your time, I think I owe you something I was almost never given growing up, which is a reason. When I was a kid, I asked why a lot. Why are we learning this? Why does it matter? Why should I care about the angles of a triangle or the order of the planets? Most of the time the answer was some version of because , or because you'll need this for your career someday, or because you should stop asking. I don't think anyone meant any harm by repressing me, but a child who's handed a task without a reason tends to learn one of two things. Either they learn to stop wondering, which is terrible, or they learn to go out and find the reasons for themselves. I went looking, and in a lot of ways, I've never stopped. So this first episode is my answer to why this podcast exists. The short answer is that some of you would rather listen than read. That's totally fine. Maybe your hands are busy, maybe your eyes simply can't take another minute of screen time today. Totally cool. The long answer to this story is how a very logical, very technical, fairly stubborn boy slowly became a man who can kneel beside a patch of moss and feel something close to reverence, and who wants to tell you about it. So that's the story I'd like to tell you today. Let's uh let's get started, shall we

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[Speaker 2] ? I

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[Speaker 1] grew up in Ontario in the French school system, which meant every class I took, from math to gym, was taught entirely in French. Except for English class, just to be clear. Uh it also meant that at least at school, I was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. We sang the national anthem in the mornings, which I still think is a good thing, and uh, you know, hopefully schools keep that up. Sounds like they're not for some reason, which is strange. Uh, and we also prayed. Um, and around Easter, uh and other ceremonial days, we'd take communion, which is a thin, dry, round, wafer sort of thing. that tasted a bit like paper And uh, we also had a tiny sip of mustum, which is a grape juice whose fermentation has been stopped so early that it barely carries any sort of alcohol in it. It's like 0.5%. For a while, that sip came from a shared chalice, and then later paper cups. I rarely set foot in an actual church. Maybe the odd Easter egg hunt or when I was baptized in a cute little suit and tie, but uh nearly all my religious life happened inside my school, woven between lessons and recess, and none of it ever came with a reason that reached me. I went through communion more times than I can recall and felt nothing, apart from the particular boredom of something that took time away from class, which somehow managed to be the only thing worse than class itself. I'd like you to hold on to the bread and juice for a little while, by the way, because we're gonna come back to that a little bit later. School was loud. If you couldn't answer a question, if your attention drifted, if you acted up, you got yelled at. And that was basically true from elementary right through to high school. If your work came back poorly, you got disappointment. And sometimes something colder than disappointment. A kind of disregard, probably. Um, you know, as though you'd been quietly filed away. To be fair to my school board, uh, they really did try. You know, there were sports and safety programs, barbecues and pajama days, and cultural days that made us, you know, pretty proud of learning a second language. We even had a short unit on the War of the Woods, uh the the logging protest uh that took place over here on the West Coast, which at the time was still the biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. And it was taught with surprising passion. But the one thing I needed most, a reason behind any of it, never came in any meaningful way. . So I found my own It started the way it does for a lot of kids, especially these days. Entertainment on a screen. And it grew into a hunger to understand how the world actually worked. I watched history shows constantly, and by the end of elementary school, I knew far more about the 20th century, the world wars, and Vietnam than my school had ever tried to teach me. Not that Vietnam is, you know, Canadian related, but eh, gloss over that. Uh I loved how it's made, watching machines take raw materials and turn it into something ordinary. Over and over perfectly, never getting tired of it. It was a great TV show. And then there was Mythbusters, which I think helped wire how I looked at the world. Here were two grown men, you know, whenever someone said that a thing was true, you know, it must must be true. It's some sort of myth. They decided that they were going to go answer that for themselves. And at the time I didn't realize this, but that habit of testing things was already wearing away at the faith that was being painted onto the surface of my mind. A faith that never really soaked in, partly because of all these factors. I wasn't alone in that curiosity either. Looking back, I think I was friends with the youngest engineer, the youngest audio video engineer, and the youngest astronomer that I had ever known. My friend Philip loved mechanics, sprockets and chains, springs and pulleys, axles and their bearings, every piece of hardware that moved, and his passion for it really gave me a reason to be fascinated by all of it. We spent hours assembling Lego, you know, making little like elastic band uh guns with Lego, uh, and we also made a little maze for his pet lizard, which I is a skink if I remember correctly. Another friend of mine named John was fascinated by Sound Insight. . Capturing and bending and transforming video and music and recordings was super inspiring to him And one of the earliest clips of yours truly is John and me with garden snails on our faces, thanks to his love of cameras and my curiosity of living things. At least my mom thought it was cute. Anyway, then there was Brett. Brett had a much older brother who was brilliant and had rebelled against the values of our school board long before Brett and I ever got around to it. So Brett showed up with a mind that was already bigger than the classroom, full of the universe and everything drifting around inside of it. Together, we started a YouTube channel called Canardian Gaming, and although it never grew past a couple hundred subscribers, and remained a little shy of a couple hundred videos, um, for years afterwards, we played video games, learned about computers, and we talked about science news nearly every single day. If you look at the tiny icon at the top of your browser, when you visit my website or this podcast's website, that's the Canarian Gaming Fave icon. I never replaced it. I suppose that makes this the second or maybe even third show uh that I've done, though it's taken me a very long time to find my way back to a microphone. Outside of school, I became a kid who thought a lot and knew a lot of things for his age, but for all that thinking did very poorly on paper. My mother's uh street smarts and cunning rubbed off of me, and almost every night I was on Skype with friends scattered all over the world. I had this stubborn, almost physical need to learn, strong enough that I'd make myself read Wikipedia for hours, even when it was putting me to sleep. My teachers would call my mother in, and the message was basically always the same. They weren't worried that I was stupid or clueless, they were frustrated because they could see that I was very capable. I held my own while talking with. other adults I picked things up very quickly, my presentations were excellent, and yet I handed in almost no homework and barely scraped by on some of my tests. Frankly, I thought the homework was pretty dumb. And I had other things that I wanted to learn. Most of the tests were rote memorization, but whenever a test asked me for even an ounce of logic, I did pretty well. The strange exception, shocking as it may be for those of you who know them, you know, a little bit about my career, was math and science. And to me, I, you know, reflecting on it, I think that came down to language more than anything. I was learning math and science in French during the day, and then teaching myself basically a completely different subject matter, sometimes more advanced, sometimes less advanced, uh, in English at night. So every science test was also a translation test. And what I actually knew was, you know, never quite in alignment with what was being asked of me. I was a remarkably strange student for that reason. One who was planting the seeds of what would become the forest of my career, and I could already sense which resources that forest would need most, and very few of them were on the curriculum . One summer, my mother and I moved across the country. We left our blood relatives, we left my friends,

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[Speaker 3] and I left my French education behind. From grade 11 on, I was in French immersion, which in British Columbia actually meant something, since there were so few full French schools that immersion had to carry most of the weight of the demand for French students. But it also meant that chemistry, physics, and math were suddenly in English. Perhaps understandably, after years of learning those subjects in French, uh, and trying to teach myself the same subjects at night in English, it hit me pretty hard, unfortunately. But to my own credit, thanks to all that teaching, only chemistry, physics, and pre-calculus came back as C's.

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[Speaker 1] The rest was average or

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[Speaker 3] better, you

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[Speaker 1] know, biology, uh specifically plant biology over human biology, went pretty well. Um, once again, perhaps a bit shocking to anyone who knows, you know, that I'm advanced in my IT career, because science and math seem to be the prerequisites for such a career. But uh anyway, the harder part of the move wasn't the grades. It was the people. By now, I was already familiar with this experience, and I was getting a bit worried, quite rightfully, as it turns out, that this would become a pattern. When I finished elementary school, most of my friends went on to a different high school. I lost my teachers, the people in my streets, and most of my friends within one summer. Two years later, I lost them again, this time by moving across the country all the way over to BC. And two years after that, having made a single-lasting friend from my new BC high school, I went off to college. And once again, I lost my entire daily routine and everyone hit it. Two years after post-secondary, the same thing happened yet again. So I came out with only two friends from college, who I talk to about once a year now. When you're uprooted every two years, you stop expecting people to stay. You still care about them, sometimes more fiercely than you should for such short-lived relationships, but part of you is always aware of them being interim or ephemeral. You learn to be self-sufficient, because you have to be, with few friends and just as few family members, and you learn that you are the only thing that comes with you every time that you move. I grew up with very few concrete ties to any community, and what I held on to instead were values like science, respect for others, and generosity. Those came with me everywhere, and so too, it turned out, did the land. Moving to British Columbia took 12 days, and those 12 days showed me more of my own country than I had seen in my entire life. I'd been to Florida and back, I'd driven up to see my relatives in Sault Ste. . Marie every year or two, but I'd never seen anything like this The Boreal Forest that I recognized as the periphery to my world gave way to endless fields of gold and rolling hills of dark green grasses that moved in the wind like the surface of an ocean. Eventually, those oceans of grasses gave way to mountains, so immense that I didn't have any frame of reference for them. I remember feeling small and being told the story that once upon a time my great-grandmother had come out here, and to her mind, she found the mountains quite intimidating. Whereas I found them to be quite incredible. Last of the wonders I would see that summer was the coast. The water here was bluer and wilder than anything around the peninsula of southern Ontario where I grew up, and the beaches were stunning, the forests felt ancient in a way that I'd just simply never encountered before. In that first year, I traveled the whole southern coast of Vancouver Island, from Victoria out to Port Renfrew, over to Lake Cowichan, and back to Victoria again. It's what's known as uh the Pacific Marine Circle route, which I highly recommend. Between a new high school and a rocky home life, there wasn't much that I could do out there besides stare in awe, or lie in the summer sun while the ocean gave its cool breeze over to me. But over time, those same pressures made me want to see more of where I lived. My eyes couldn't get full. I couldn't deny how beautiful this coast was, especially compared to the flat, repetitive, polluted urban sprawl that I'd come from. And even as a teenager, I understood that I'd landed somewhere I should be immensely grateful for

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[Speaker 2] . What

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[Speaker 1] I was feeling then, though, was mostly awe and hunger. The feeling of a kid pressing his face against a window. What I feel today is something much deeper, an intense love and gratitude for the depth, richness, and complexity of Canada's alpine and maritime wilderness. The rest of the story is really about how I got from feeling one to the other . As I got older, work started to consume me. I didn't find a community outside of my extended family, or

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[Speaker 3] when I did, I couldn't seem to hold on to it. So I poured myself into working and learning

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[Speaker 1] and trying to become a better person. Every job taught me something, and while I felt

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[Speaker 3] mature for my age, working jobs that people my age rarely held, and traveling often, I was

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[Speaker 1] still very capable of making mistakes, and I made plenty of them. As a teenager, I pushed through my struggles mostly by working and studying myself to exhaustion. Some days I'd be at my high school from eight in the morning until one in the morning. Because I was on the theater AV production crew and we didn't leave until cleanup was over. Later, I'd take a two-hour bus ride to college for an eight o'clock class, and then another two hours home after seven at night. When I couldn't hold it together anymore, a school counselor would witness me basically once a semester, break down in their office, and you know, I'd do my best to reset for the next semester. But it wasn't sustainable, and I knew it wasn't. It gave me, in the end, a kind of medal. M-E-T-T-L-E. That made me who I am. I learned that I I could do a great deal, and I could withstand a great deal more because of it. What really shaped me though was learning what stress and anxiety actually mean. I heard a lot about the struggles of people my age, and I don't doubt that most of them were real, but it's an emotionally charged thing to be a teenager sitting behind a 32.-channel soundboard running a theater production with a full live band More so to be an adult responsible for 500 staff who will either be paid to sit around or be sent home tomorrow if you can't get the entire computer system back online by 8 in the morning. At that point, my world had grown bigger than the one that my peers were living in, and I didn't always have room left to feel the smaller things alongside them. The emotions weren't somehow deeper or stronger because of a reason as narrow as being fired. It was the children, my customers, the patients, the people without homes, whoever that employer in particular served every day, and who wouldn't be able to serve if I failed at my job. I was afraid for and of my coworkers who'd be frustrated or disappointed, or simply out of money because of something I couldn't fix. My emotions were tied to a much larger circle of people, and to harder problems, so they climbed to heights that I could easily regret having felt, but also , as much as it's not for lack of empathy, uh I couldn't exactly relate to my peers. My empathy rested with a more serious set of emotions and circumstances than most people my age were experiencing. Experiences can't be undone, not easily, and I've come to believe that every one of them carries value, even the ones that are losses. All humans eventually feel a loss. Even from a young age, I had my share of it. My mother and I lost her father, I lost the man who had been my father figure, and then I lost my biological father. Each of those losses reached into me differently, and each one took something I didn't know how to replace, and in every case, it took away the paternal guidance that I needed throughout my life. . But, fortunately, those weren't my only experiences Through all of the complicated and difficult years that make up my life, I kept traveling, and the world around me has filled my cup every time it's run dry . It really started a few months after I lost my father figure, when my extended family, the family I found rather than the family I was born into, took me on a canoe trip into Tombstone Territorial Park in the Yukon. I helped drive most of the way from Vancouver up to Dawson City, and in a remarkably short five days. In those five days, I saw biomes and ecosystems, geology and towns, not just that I had never seen, but things that I had never known existed, like volcanoes in Canada and open tundra. While I was grieving, I didn't have much language for it, but the land didn't ask me for any. It just kept unfolding in front of me, kilometer after kilometer, mile after mile, until somewhere along the way I noticed I was breathing more easily. I learned a great deal on that trip, and I healed a lot from the distance, the adventure, and the essence of those lands. The tombstones have called to me ever since, more than any other part of Canada except maybe Vancouver Island. That calling keeps bringing me back, in winter and summer, and now this autumn of 2026 . Since that first trip, I've crossed into all ten provinces thanks to my best friend, and I've taken the train across Canada twice to return to the French culture that I grew up in. Every time I travel, I seem to bloom, and with each of these seasons of growth, I find something new I'm capable of. Time may always be finite, but I've yet to find a ceiling above my heart . When I first started traveling, the desire was fairly shallow, though I was pretty oblivious to that in my early twenties. . I wanted to see more, and seeing more felt good It was dopamine, pulled from whatever happened to reflect in my eyes, and I kept chasing the next view the way you would chase the next episode of a show . Slowly, and I mean slowly, over years, that changed. I started to admire the mosses, the way they carpet a fallen tree, and turn endings into beginnings. I grew fond of the squirrels that would scold me from their tree branches. I found inspiration from rocks, all their shapes and sizes and colors, each one holding a story that is longer than anything I can imagine. I learned to respect a place, not only by keeping my litter out of it, but by giving it my time, marveling at it while I'm there, reflecting within it, and carrying it with me long after I've left. Some people would call that communing, and without any irony, I think that's the right word. Remember the paper dry wafer and the slip of juice from my childhood, the ritual I went through again and again without ever feeling a thing. It turns out I was capable of communion all along. I just needed it to come with a reason. I still do it in my rational reasoning way, mind you. I read about the ecology of a place, what lives there, and why it matters, and then I sit with it long enough to understand, philosophically, what it's worth. The facts, to me, don't get in the way of wonder. The facts are where the wonder comes from. And that ability, taking facts and finding wonder in them, is something that I think we're slowly losing. We seem to be losing our capacity to be surprised or shocked, and alongside that, we've lost a lot of common ground, like a shared set of experiences and understandings. We see statistics every day and rarely stop to ask what they mean, and reflecting on them at all has started to feel like a waste of time. Critical reflective thought is treated as uninteresting these days, and because we practice it less, living deeply and meaningfully has become uncomfortable for a lot of people. I don't say it to scold anyone, of course. I it's just I know how much I would have missed it if I'd never learned to slow down . So that's my why. I've been lucky enough to lead a life that I know is extraordinary. But for a long time I couldn't truly appreciate it. I could see it, and I could list the places that I'd been, but I couldn't feel it the way that it deserved to be felt. Learning to do that has taken most of my life so far, and it's the most valuable thing I think I've ever learned. I write my blog for the same reasons I'm sitting behind this microphone. I have things that I've witnessed and felt that I want to share. Sharing them makes me feel good, and I believe that they can bring something unique and valuable into your life, even if it's just for a few minutes of seeing a place through someone else's eyes. These episodes will draw from that writing and from my photo archive, and they'll wander through travel, people, places, and ideas, which is to say, all things that taught me how to appreciate being alive. That's also why the show is called Elsewhere Slowly. Elsewhere because most of what I'm going to talk about happened somewhere other than where you're sitting right now, probably far, far away. And slowly because slowness is the whole point. It's what turned a hungry kid with his face pressed against the window into someone who can sit on a rock in the tombstones or kluani and feel at home. This episode is, of course, going to stand out a lot from the rest, but I'd like to make this final piece a ceremonial element. Each episode, including this one, will end with a poem. So here's the first one. The snow went off the blackstone slopes in patches, the way a sheet slides from furniture and house. Nobody's opened since October. And underneath, the mosses were already green. Green in a way that had waited eight months, under tremendous weight, somehow surviving. Sphagnum drank the

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[Speaker 3] melt until

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[Speaker 1] it couldn't hold another

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[Speaker 3] drop. Then it held it anyway. Red at the crowns, gold in the hollows, the whole valley floor, a sponge rung out. On the rocks, the lichen were brittle and old as paper. Until the afternoon

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[Speaker 1] rains came through. And then they softened, flushed, went olive and gray green, as if someone had turned bleached paper to color. They'd been alive the whole time, only willing to show it when warmed and nourished. Thank you for listening to Elsewhere Slowly. I'm Tristan Line, and I'll see you somewhere else soon.