Meaning in life’s second half

No Judgment and Other Busking Stories
by Philip Seagram  

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$24  /  9781773861616

Reviewed by Richard Butler

*

In the middle of our life’s journey, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

-Dante, Inferno

You hear it all the time from a certain kind of person: “I could never retire. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.” You see it in those who do retire and, within six months, return to work on a contract or find a job in a related field.

Author Philip Seagram has gone and done completely the opposite.

Phil, as we knew him back in law school, was a lovely man. His career path saw him become a Crown prosecutor and then a BC Provincial Court Judge. By all reports, he was very good at both. And very dedicated—as it turns out, to a fault.

One Sunday evening in 2021, he found himself alone in his office, with the usual dozen family court case files for hearing the following day, “each with its own miserable history of conflict.”

But reviewing files wasn’t—for once—what engaged his mind on that particular evening. After several months of contemplation, Phil had at last reached the decision to resign. He pressed send on the email to his boss.

It was not depression or burnout which prompted his decision, Phil says, but a conscious, personal moment of reckoning: the wood was dark, the right road for him wholly lost and gone.

Phil describes what immediately followed as akin to jumping off a cliff; except that leaving his career took seven months for him to hit the water below. Months of sincerely-meant calls from colleagues wondering if he was okay or asking him if he was out of his mind:

Those were long months…. I grew tired of explaining myself. I resented having to justify my decision. As the months dragged on, every time I was called on to lay out my reasons for leaving, my resolve to follow through on the decision was reinforced until, as in that moment when you leap off the cliff, there was no question of turning back.

As his last day of judging approached, Phil began to think he needed to do something to mark the end of that part of his life, to create distance, to help him disengage. Instead of something like walking the Camino in Spain, he decided to make his way across Canada busking with his guitar on city street corners:

I had in mind a Chautauqua journey of the kind described in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. An opportunity to work on overcoming the self-consciousness I felt when performing. A time to think, to have open, uninterrupted time, to reflect, assess and take stock. A journey. A challenge. An adventure.

But the reasons for taking this trip across Canada were not well thought out; In hindsight they were more likely rationalizations, pat justifications or hopeful aspirations. They were what I told myself at the time. From where I am now, it seems I wanted to get out there without knowing exactly why.

This book presents a daily record of those travels. The chapters are short and readable, though after a while they become a little monotonous—as the busking experience itself must have been. They capture well, and then all too well, the roughness of life on the street, the inevitable shabbiness of street corners.

But Phil, to his credit, does not pass judgment. On the contrary, he invites it upon himself—the judgment of passers-by and others in response to the vulnerable oddity of the position he has placed himself in.

He did this deliberately:

When busking, the musician puts himself into others’ lives uninvited. To me at the time it seemed more like hawking, or one step up from panhandling, and I was uncomfortable with this. The notion now seems silly to me, but a feeling maybe born of phony pride or unacknowledged false assumptions about people who busk…. So partly to soften this discomfort, I drew up a cardboard sign that invited both giving and taking. But the two sided invitation was appealing to me for other reasons as well. The idea of offering music as a backdrop for others to act with blind generosity, like paying one’s luck forward or committing random acts of kindness, was unusual and refreshing. There was something inherently hopeful about it. I wanted to be part of something like this, even on the smallest of scales.

So not merely some seedy oldster with nothing better to do.

As I intimated earlier, Phil is clearly is a lovely man. But the experiences described in various chapters also demonstrate a certain innocence. The responses of passers-by were as might have been expected. So was the reception Phil received from the people who lived on his street corners. Nothing earth-shattering. As one reads this book, it is hard to resist a sense of accumulating disappointment.

But Phil never passes judgment on any of them. He is so done with all of that. Moreover, there is nary a hint of self-righteousness, but rather a constant uneasiness in that regard which comes across between the lines of these pages.

Reaching Calgary, Phil was now within striking distance of his home. He stayed there for a couple of days and hung out with a friend and former prosecutor. He was homesick but not quite ready to end the journey. Things were catching up with him—the distance, the sights, the people, the weather, the hard nights and constant change. He felt numb and disorganized.

At some point along the way, Phil says, he had promised himself a few quiet days on his own for reflection. His brief stay at a campground in Alberta’s Police Outpost provincial park proved more challenging and much less rewarding than hoped. He left early:

I don’t remember much of the drive home … normally a six and a half hour drive [but which] took me almost 10, all pretty much a blur. I kept having to stop for fear of falling asleep at the wheel. …. Finally I pulled into my driveway. I was greeted by Dana and our dog, Emma, but it wasn’t the lengthy, joyous return I had envisioned, because I went straight to bed. It was 4:30 in the afternoon and I didn’t get out of bed for another day and a half. …. [A]nd that was that, the spectacularly dismal end to my trip.

In hindsight, Phil says, it was naive to have thought that a few days camping and hiking at the end of the trip would be enough to allow him to process the previous two months. Also, as friends and others would ask how the trip went, he didn’t know how to answer. He would say it was interesting or something about how cold it was. It felt like nothing he could say could adequately describe the experience.

Months after his return, Phil pulled out the notebooks of his rapid daily scrawling. The notes became the busking stories that made their way into this book, and led to the reflections in its final chapter. I will leave those reflections for you to read for yourselves.

There is nothing particularly profound. That reflects Phil’s complete lack of personal pretentiousness. Just a brief canvassing of his life, before, during, and after the trip; and a testament to its future possibilities:

So yes, life goes on, and it has. Trying to find the right balance, to grow and learn, and to serve others in some way. I write and play music when I can. …. Busking, I have learned, is both an expression of trust and an invitation. The busker, like any musical performer, asks the question: “Do you feel this too?” …. I don’t pass by any busker without at least some form of acknowledgement, … something to let them know, “Yes, I feel that too.”

This book is recommended for its humanity, its sharing of real life, and its hope for connection. Also, more mundanely, it is a book specifically for those contemplating retirement with some trepidation at the impending loss of social identity. How wonderful to be able to say, as with Philip Seagram, “I am a writer (or an artist, a gardener or a charity worker) finding meaning in the second half of my life.”

*

Richard Butler lives on the traditional territory of the lekwungen-speaking Peoples, a retired lawyer and sometime law professor, and more recently a writer on various Indigenous subjects. He is the author of Taking Reconciliation Personally, I Dare Say… Conversations with Indigeneity, and the recent title What Is This? Who Am I?: Culturally Informed Appreciation of Coastal Peoples’ Artworks, published through A & R Publishing. [Editor’s Note: Richard Butler recently wrote the essay An Exercise in Futility and has reviewed books by Val Napoleon, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Overstall and Debra McKenzie (eds.), Angela Cameron, Sari Graben and Val Napoleon (eds.), Adam Jones, The Honourable Murray Sinclair CC, Mazina Giizhik, Reverend Al Tysick, and John Borrows & Kent McNeil (eds.) for The British Columbia Review.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster