Life is not what you see...

Life is not what you see, but what you've projected. 

It's not what you've felt, but what you've decided. 

It's not what you've experienced, but how you've remembered it. 

It's not what you've forged, but what you've allowed. 

And it's not who's appeared, but who you've summoned.

And this should serve you well, beloved, until you find what you already have.

Fun Winter facts

Today is the first day of Spring in North America, and Winter is to look forward to or back on with respect. Here are some interesting facts about winter weather from the good folks at Mental Floss There are more facts so visit their site to see all of the interesting facts they post.

IT SOMETIMES SNOWS WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT.

You wouldn’t be shocked to see snow on the ground of Siberia or Minnesota when travelling to those places during the winter months. But northern areas don’t have a monopoly on snowfall—the white stuff has been known to touch down everywhere from the Sahara Desert to Hawaii. Even the driest place on Earth isn’t immune. In 2011, the Atacama Desert in Chile received nearly 32 inches of snow thanks to a rare cold front from Antarctica.

SNOWFLAKES COME IN ALL SIZES.

The average snowflake ranges from a size slightly smaller than a penny to the width of a human hair. But according to some unverified sources they can grow much larger. Witnesses of a snowstorm in Fort Keogh, Montana in 1887 claimed to see milk-pan sized crystals fall from the sky. If true that would make them the largest snowflakes ever spotted, at around 15 inches wide.

A LITTLE WATER CAN ADD UP TO A LOT OF SNOW.

The air doesn’t need to be super moist to produce impressive amounts of snow. Unlike plain rainfall, a bank of fluffy snow contains lots of air that adds to its bulk. That’s why what would have been an inch of rain in the summer equals about 10 inches of snow in the colder months.

YOU CAN HEAR THUNDERSNOW WHEN THE CONDITIONS ARE RIGHT.

If you’ve ever heard the unmistakable rumble of thunder in the middle of a snowstorm, that’s not your ears playing tricks on you. It’s likely thundersnow, a rare winter weather phenomenon that’s most common near lakes. When relatively warm columns of air rise from the ground and form turbulent storm clouds in the sky in the winter, there’s potential for thundersnow. A few more factors are still necessary for it to occur, namely air that’s warmer than the cloud cover above it and wind that pushes the warm air upwards. Even then it’s entirely possible to miss thundersnow when it happens right over your head: Lightning is harder to see in the winter and the snow sometimes dampens the thunderous sound.

SNOW FALLS AT 1 TO 6 FEET PER SECOND.

At least in the case of snowflakes with broad structures, which act as parachutes. The snow that falls in the form of pellet-like graupel travels to Earth at a much faster rate.

WET SNOW IS BEST FOR SNOWMAN-BUILDING, ACCORDING TO SCIENCE.

Physics confirms what you’ve likely known since childhood: Snow on the wet or moist side is best for building your own backyard Frosty. One scientist pegs the perfect snow-to-water ratio at 5:1.

SNOWFLAKES AREN’T ALWAYS UNIQUE.

Snow crystals usually form unique patterns, but there’s at least one instance of identical snowflakes in the record books. In 1988, two snowflakes collected from a Wisconsin storm were confirmed to be twins at an atmospheric research centre in Colorado.

Holistic Ageing

A white paper by Singapore Management University (SMU) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Tata Consultancy Services written in 2016, explores a concept of Holistic Ageing, which can be used for helping seniors age in place.

“Longevity is the defining challenge of our age. We need to make sure it’s a blessing, not a curse.” Laurence Fink, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, BlackRock, USA

Technology has a role to play to help us as we age, The following chart shows the focus and the impact technology can have on us as we age. Our friends have just bought Alexa for their home and they love it. Alexa is a tool that can be used by seniors in many ways, one way I have not thought about but is one that is worth pursuing is around falls.

One of the biggest issues for many seniors is the risk of falling and not being able to get up. There are many sensors on the market that people can wear and when the individual falls, the sensor sends out a signal. Problem is that many people refuse to wear these devices. There are many reasons for this but if the device is not worn it is on little or no use. If a person had Alexa in the house, and they fall, they could signal the device and ask it to call 911 or a friend.

Alexa or similar devices can and are used by seniors to stay socially connected, to increase their cognitive abilities and to help when they fall and also help them develop a physical activity regime.

Holistic aging is a concept that builds on the above technology focus areas and adds new dimensions. In holistic aging, there are six key wellness dimensions, that constitute holistic aging takes into consideration: physical, social, intellectual, spiritual, emotional and vocational.

The physical aspect is related to the body, and in particular, the ailments of aging: decreased strength, feeble health, increased vulnerability to falls, physical disabilities, chronic illnesses, and the inability to cope with the physical stresses and strains of daily life and activities of daily living.

We are social beings, and new research shows that loneliness can be very harmful to your health. We exist in a community, with others, and for others. We have a need to belong to a community, to have deep, close, intimate relationships — the social aspect — is crucial to the development of our social health, not only when we are young but as we age.

The intellectual aspect of the person directly affects our capability for cognitive reasoning, and the actions of our will, which impacts our ability to perform the activities of daily living. Many seniors are afraid of Dementia and holistic aging take into account, the idea that we need to be intellectually stimulated

As we age, many seniors want to “hedge their bets”, those who were not religious may take a greater interest in this side of living as they age. The spiritual aspect has an effect on our wellbeing and health. No holistic approach towards caring for the elderly can possibly ignore the profound impact of spirituality on the elderly.

If society and caregivers were to always have in mind the wellbeing of the elderly, it would be essential to explore (or to have us explore) our interior life. As we explore our emotions, we want those who we are in touch with to empathize with even our most concealed inner emotions when we express them.

As we age, many of us find fulfillment in making a sincere, disinterested gift of themselves to others. Hence the importance of the vocational aspect of holistic aging. When we accomplish our vocation and mission in life, we feel a serene, peaceful joy that can permeate our whole being.

The concept of holistic aging combined with technology makes the future seem very uplifting and bright.

Walking as a creative exercise

Walking for exercise is something I try to do on a now semi-regular basis. I enjoy the solitude that walking allows and the opportunity to think, but I never considered walking as a creative enterprise. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings (is “her one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012”) did and a post talks about the creativity of walking. I can do no better than to quote her writing about walking.

“Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau wrote in his manifesto for the spirit of sauntering. And who hasn’t walked — in the silence of a winter forest, amid the orchestra of birds and insects in a summer field, across the urban jungle of a bustling city — to conquer some territory of their interior world?

Artist Maira Kalman sees walking as indispensable inspiration: “I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see for a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.” For Rebecca Solnit, walking “wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.”

Five years after publishing The Wind in the Willows, Grahame penned a beautiful short essay for a commemorative issue of his old boarding school magazine. Titled “The Fellow that Goes Alone” and only ever published in Peter Green’s 1959 biography Kenneth Grahame (public library), it serenades “the country of the mind” we visit whenever we take long solitary walks in nature.

With an eye to “all those who of set purpose choose to walk alone, who know the special grace attaching to it,” Grahame writes:

Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.

In a sentiment which, today, radiates a gentle admonition against the self-defeating impulse to evacuate the moment in order to capture it — in a status update, in an Instagram photo — Grahame observes: Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday

I highly recommend Maria Popova at Brain Pickings her writing is always fun to read and challenging for the mind and the soul.