I delayed this week's Saturday Synopsis by a day because I wanted to share my adventures in cemetery searching yesterday. I spent most of today in the kitchen, so tonight calls for a simple post that looks back on my writings this week over the past four years, including excerpts from Remembrance Day posts in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Originally posted to England, McCrae would later be deployed with his unit to Ypres Salient in Belgium. On May 2, 1915, he wrote to his mother: "Heavy gunfire again this morning. Lieutenant H. was killed at the guns. I said the Committal Service over him as well as I could from memory. A soldier’s death!" Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was a close friend of McCrae's. Early the following morning, McCrae found himself sitting near his field dressing station. He could see scarlet poppies between the white crosses in a nearby cemetery, and he could hear larks singing between the sounds of gunfire. It was in this setting that McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields." ... The poem was reprinted and circulated widely in the British Empire and the United States. But the tragedies at Ypres that inspired the poem would alter McCrae irreparably. John F. Prescott, author of McCrae's 1985 biography, wrote: "He was never again the optimistic man with the infectious smile. His friends spoke of his change in temperament in subdued voices, feeling, as one said, that an icon had been broken."

"I remember when I came back from opening the school for girls in South Africa, I was sitting at Maya's kitchen table while she was making biscuits, and I said, 'That school is going to be my greatest legacy.' And she said, 'Your legacy isn't some big grand gesture. It isn't a school with your name on it. Your legacy is every life you touch, everybody you encounter.' So people emphasize the big things, the joining, and the causes—but it's what you do everyday. It's how you live everyday as a woman citizen here on Planet Earth at this time.

— Oprah Winfrey on a conversation with Maya Angelou

If you ask yourself, "How can I help this employee be the best version of themselves?" you can't go wrong. Even if you need to have a conversation with them about where they're falling short, you will find them open to the feedback if they believe you have their best interests at heart. When employees are confident that their bosses truly want to see them succeed, they experience something called psychological safety.

1921 was the first year that the remembrance poppy was worn in Canada, serving as a symbol to honour veterans who had lost their lives in the First World War. Inspired by John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields," Anna Guérin of France conceived the idea for the commemorative poppy to support veterans and others following the war. As recounted in this video by the Royal Canadian Legion, 100 years later, the poppy endures in Canada as an emblem of the sacrifice of Canadian veterans from all arms of the military and all missions.

"Essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail back-breaking effort. Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead? By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless."

— Greg McKeown

I have long felt that empathy—walking a mile in someone else's shoes—is an antidote to us-and-them thinking. My advice to Café Jen readers in 2017 was this: "If you find yourself in a team where employees are entrenched in separate camps, take the first step toward breaking down the divisions. Be an 'us' who asks a 'them' out for coffee, who offers help, who passes on a useful resource. Have the courage to share something about yourself that might become the basis for common ground with someone from the other team." My advice to Jenesis readers in 2021 would be similar: "If you find yourself talking with someone whose views differ from yours, ask their perspective and listen to their answer—not with the objective of countering, dismissing or criticizing their argument but with the intent of understanding where they're coming from. I will make the same effort."

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

— Niels Bohr

For this year's Remembrance Day, I feature the story of Charles "Checker" Marvin Tomkins, a Métis Cree speaker who served in the Second World War. Tomkins was a Cree code talker who was part of a military intelligence unit made up of Indigenous service people. As told in a Reader's Digest Canada article about Canadian heroes you may not have heard of, Tomkins grew up in Grouard, Alberta, and enlisted in the Canadian forces in 1939. "Stationed in England in 1940, he was tasked with 'encrypting' messages into Cree. These would then be sent elsewhere in the field, where another Cree code talker would translate the information back into English. Tomkins and his fellow Indigenous encryption officers played an integral role in transmitting intelligence and protecting the troops."

[Sahil] Bloom advises that we embrace solitude and find happiness and joy in time spent alone, as we will experience a lot of that as we get older.

"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."

— Pablo Picasso

Today's message from Action for Happiness is about HOPE, which they equate to Hold On Pain Ends.... Action for Happiness provides helpful guidance to cultivate resilience. It reminds us that: "Being resilient doesn’t mean we will never feel pain, upset, hurt, sadness, fear or anger when we experience difficult times. It means in the moment or over time we can find ways to cope constructively, accept what has happened, adapt and eventually move forward." Among the organization's suggestions for dealing with adversity is something called active coping. "We can’t always predict or control what life throws at us, but there is always something we can try, even if it’s tiny. Active coping involves acknowledging the difficulties we are experiencing and finding something constructive to try to make today or tomorrow slightly better, rather than avoiding our problems."

"Her reading carried her off to a foreign land, to a war and to the story of a nurse inspired by God to save the lives of sick and injured soldiers. The year was 1854, the country Crimea, the Lady—Florence Nightingale, who would reform nursing. Then and there, Georgina decided that she, too, would be that nurse in a foreign land nursing the wounded soldiers."

— Katharine Dewar, Called to Serve: Georgina Pope, Canadian military nursing heroine

"You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love."

— Anthony de Mello

By the time I got home from my outings, it was 4:00 PM, in the waning minutes of the golden hour. Though the sun had not yet set, the overcast day made it darker than one might expect a half hour from sunset. I headed to my room and flicked on the light. Because we had eaten a large lunch, supper would be a simple affair: leftovers or a small sandwich. So instead of donning an apron to prepare a meal, I slipped out of my jeans and sweater and into soft lounge-type pyjamas and fluffy socks. I gave myself permission to declare an early Pyjama Time, for that was my whim.

I spent a good portion of the day in the country, visiting with my mom on the farm. At one point, my younger brother pointed to a tract of land where, until recently, a fence row had stood. Gone were the rocks, debris and vegetation that had littered the fence row for perhaps a hundred years. In its place was a smooth patch of earth cutting through the middle of what had previously been two fields.... Some nights, when I sit down to write, I see only the effort required to make something from nothing, that is, to come up with a topic for my blog and to write about it. Almost without exception, however, once I've published my post, I'm pleased at what I've come up with. It's like staring at a pile of rock, debris and vegetation then smoothing it out so that something new stands where once only jumbled thoughts existed.