Let the music play

I was watching the children (ages 3 to 7) running around the yard as I was setting up the food to be barbecued. A young man, who is getting married in a few months came over and said, “Wow, I thought that children don’t know how to play anymore. I thought that they were all tied to their screens, and don’t know how to amuse themselves.  I am amazed that these children are playing.”

I stopped what I was doing and watched for a while, the children were playing a variation of hide and seek and tag. They looked like they were having a good time.

A while later, I went into the house and heard a form of music coming from the front room. Many of our guests were musicians and there were a number of guitars, banjos and bongo drums in the living room, awaiting the adults to start a jam session. While the children decided to create their own music and told me with excitement that they had formed a band. I asked them to play a song and they did, it was full of excitement and noise, and there was not one note of harmony but they were very serious and shrieked with delight when I and the other adults applauded.

Children of all ages love music, and the music speaks to all of us. A 2016 study at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute found that musical experiences in childhood can actually accelerate brain development, particularly in the areas of language acquisition and reading skills. No great melodies or harmonies were created that day, but the sounds that were created came from the heart. These children played and sang and they appeared to enjoy playing and singing just to be playing and singing. They aren’t self-conscious about their ability and most are eager to let their music roar. As we watched we could see that they were trying very hard to use rhythms with a definite beat.

If adults get out of the way, children will play, they will take advantage of the things in their surroundings and figure out what to do and they will make up games. Picking up an instrument can also help children break out of their social shell. The children did not know each other and I sensed that by picking up and becoming involved in creating a musical group or ensemble, they were learning important life skills. I watched as a leader emerged, and how they helped each other. They were learning to relate to others, how to work as a team and appreciate the rewards that come from working together, and the development of leadership skills and discipline.

The children enjoyed themselves, and while some of the adults were amazed that the children could play without a screen, proud parents watched and listened to the joy of the music created in the moment by their children.

CENTENARIANS: the fastest growing age group

I am amazed at this fact, and it bodes well for all of us who are not quite 100 but one day hope to be, that is if you are a woman. Men are not quite healthy enough to make it to 100 in the same number that women are
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Salute those 100 years and older —centenarians are the fastest-growing age group in Canada. The 2016 census counted 8,230 centenarians, an increase over the 2011 figures and the numbers are predicted to grow in the future, said Laurent Martel of Statistics Canada in July this year.
“It’s mostly due to an increase in life expectancy. Canadians are living longer,” Martel said. Only 19% of centenarians are men.

There is a continuum of attention

 Aa few days ago, I found myself walking near sunset.  The view was impressive and I stopped to take a memory picture). Once I was happy, I continued.  But then I turned around and noticed two people on the opposite side of the path from me. They were standing with their arms around each other's shoulders just watching the sun set.

 It really hit me at a deep level. I saw as sunset not event but not important, and was content to move on. They were actually watching the SUN SET as an event that was important..

I was celebrating the sunset (as a thing) they were participating in the setting of the sun (as an event).

It made me think there's a continuum of attention.

• Unaware - like most of the people walking past the sunset, not giving it a second glance.
• Appreciating - like the man who saw me take my picture, looked at the sunset and smiled as he kept walkin 
• Celebrating - like I was doing by stopping to take a picture
• Participating - like the couple was doing.

Now I want you to think for a moment about your relationships and this continuum of attention.

Maybe you never really think about occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and mother's/father's day.

Maybe you appreciate the people in your life, but you're often too busy to do anything about it.

Maybe you celebrate them by getting them a card and/or gift on the special days

Maybe you make time to actually include them in your life and to participate more deeply in theirs.

(Of course, every relationship is different and I'm not trying to tell you what you should be doing - I just want you to think about it.)

So back to the sunset... once I realized that these people were just standing there watching the sun go down, I turned and did the same.

It only took a few minutes before the sun had disappeared beyond the horizon. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the sunrise and sunset happen and it always makes me think about how quickly time is passing. And of course, that makes me think.  The next time a thing happens to you can you think of it as an event? 

Retirement planning for women and men

Men Live 79% as Many Years in Retirement as Women, because women live longer (81.2 years versus 76.4 years), according to statistics from the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Living longer and needing more money for the extra years for health care, medical expenses and long-term care needs creates serious problems for women

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), a group made up of 35 mostly highly-developed market economies keeps data on this. The OECD average in 2014 was 17.6 years of retirement for men and 22.3 years of retirement for women.

Here are the figures for six particular OECD countries of interest.

Country	U. S. A	Canada	U.K.	Australia	France
Men’s Year	17.1	18.8	18.8	18.8	23
Women’s Years	20.7	23.7	22.7	23.7	27.2
Percentage	83%	79%	83%	79%	85%

Note that this does not count people who leave the labor market before the age of 40, including many mothers with young children. The OECD thus cautions that their figures under-estimate how many years of retirement women have:

This indicator does not, therefore, capture the labour market behaviour of all women of working age, which leads to an under-estimation of the expected duration of retirement for women. The magnitude of this effect varies across countries.

The OECD data set also includes four major non-OECD countries, where the gender gap in years of retirement is much bigger.

Interestingly, simply calculating years of retirement using retirement age and life expectancy by country from Wikipedia actually yields substantially larger gender gaps in these non-OECD countries. This method tells us that Russian men get not 65% but a mere 24% of Russian women’s retirement years. The reason for the discrepancy between the OECD and this method is unclear.  the OECD’s has a more sophisticated method of calculation and just note the difference here at the end.

Living longer in retirement may be a good thing if one has saved enough money, but women don’t save as much as men.  A Wells Fargo survey of over 1,000 Millennials ages 22 to 35 found that the majority of women (61 percent) said their finances were “stretched too thin to save for retirement.” In fact, about 54 percent of women said they were living from paycheck to paycheck. Those saving for retirement are only putting aside an average of 5.7 percent of their salary, as compared with 7.3 percent for their male counterparts.

As a result, women were 80 percent more likely than men to be impoverished at age 65 and older, while women age 75 to 79 were three times more likely to fall below the poverty level than men the same age.

To understand why, consider this: Working women, on average, earn less than their male counterparts, Wage gaps among women who hold full-time jobs, are shocking. White, non-Hispanic women are paid 80% of men’s, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan group. African-American women are paid, on average, 66.8% – and Latinas just 61.5% – for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. This means that women have less money to save for retirement.

For older women, the good news in terms of financial well-being is that a large fraction of women are working in full-time jobs past their 60s and even into their 70s, according to a study, “Women Working Longer: Facts and Some Explanations,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, Harvard University economists. In fact, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by the end of this decade, about 20 percent of women over 65 will be in the labor force.