The path less chosen

Memories are made of this, is a refrain from an old song and it talks about how we make our memories. As we get older, time flies and it could be because of how we see time and how we make memories. In a new book, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments by Meik Wiking. Published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2019 by Meik Wiking the idea of how to make memories is explored. According to the author, there is something called the reminiscence effect, or reminiscence bump. This bump is caused by the fact that we remember better new and novel things, and since those new and novel things decrease for us as we age, our memories are stronger of times when we were younger.

As teenagers, we experience our first breakup, our first love, our first kiss, our first time driving and these stay in our memories. In our twenties, we also experience many new events that also stay with us over time. In another post, I talked about how time flies and how we can change our perception to slow it down or speed time up. The way to slow down time is to experience more firsts and break out of our daily routine. When we were teenagers and 20 somethings, we had many firsts but as we hit our 60’s these firsts are harder to find. We may have become jaded and this causes live to speed up. Experiencing firsts and changes of the scene play an important role in organizing the way we remember our lives.

If we want life to slow down, to make moments memorable and your life unforgettable, try to harness the power of firsts. In your daily routine, it’s also an idea to consider how you can turn the ordinary into something more extraordinary to help you remember the event. It may be little things. If you always walk down the path well-trodden, it might make the day feel a little more extraordinary if you walk down the path less chosen. If you are always walking the path less chosen then perhaps it would be nice to travel the path well-trodden.

Leap year

 Some fun facts to start the day

1. On a leap day, a man can't refuse a woman's plea to get married. Queen Margaret of Scotland was apparently five years old when she came up with the notorious February 29 proposal trap.

2. If a man did refuse the proposal, he would be fined a kiss, a silk dress or twelve pairs of gloves.

3. Women either have to wear breeches or a scarlet petticoat to pop the question, according to tradition.

4. One in five engaged couples in Greece will plan to avoid getting married in a leap year. They believe it is bad luck.

5. People born on February 29 are called "leaplings" or "leapers".

6. The poet Lord Byron was born on a Leap Day.

7. So was the rapper Ja Rule.

8. The plot of Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance revolved around Frederic's discovery that, because he is a leapling, he must remain apprenticed to pirates and serve another 63 years before he can join Mabel, his one true love.

9. Anthony, Texas is the self-proclaimed "Leap Year Capital of the World". It holds a festival which includes a guided trip to Aztec Cave, "fun at the horse farm" and square dancing.

10 Parties are sometimes thrown to celebrate leap days. There is no special leap day food but if there was, it would probably be frog’s legs.

11 Matthew Goode, the British film star who acted in the film Leap Year, said he knew the movie would be remembered as the "worst film of 2011" but wanted to be "close to home and able to visit his girlfriend and his newborn daughter."

12 February 29 also marks Rare Disease Day.

13 Today you are working for free if you're on a fixed annual wage.

14 Astrologers believe people born on February 29 have unusual talents, such as the ability to burp the alphabet or paint like Picasso.

15 Mitsukuni "honey" Haninozuka, the manga and anime character born on a leap day, likes sweets, cake and stuffed toys. 

16 Hugh Hefner opened his first Playboy Club on February 29, 1960.

17 The character Leap Day William who appeared in an episode of 30 Rock wears blue and yellow.

18 The French call leapfrog "saute-mouton", which translates literally as "leap sheep".

19 The frog is a symbol associated with February 
20 The Australian rocket frog can leap over two metres.

21 Being born on February 29 is extremely unlucky. While this myth is prevalent in India too, the Scottish believed that if you're born on the Leap Day, your life will have an everlasting stream of suffering. Well, the only bad luck we can think of right now is not having one's birthdays recognized by computer systems!

Pedestrian safety.

One difference between my Aussie family and me is our understanding of the role of pedestrians and drivers. In BC when a pedestrian approaches a highway at a crosswalk they first look to the left, then the right and then to the left again before crossing the street. The assumption we make as pedestrians is that we have the right of way and that traffic will stop. 

We teach our children to stop and look both ways, we also teach them to cross at marked crosswalks or at lights whenever possible. The law is on our side as well, if we attempt to cross a road and a car does not stop the driver could be in serious trouble even if we are not hit.

In Australia at least in the state of Victoria, the driver has the right of way and a pedestrian has no expectation that a driver will stop if the pedestrian tries to cross the road. I found that hard to get used to, first I had to learn to look to the right, then to the left and back to the right before stepping out. I also had to make sure that there were no cars close unless I was at a light. 

Pedestrian right of way appears to be a foreign idea to my Aussie friends. When we were in Rye, which is on the Mornington Peninsula we were staying at a house that was across the road from the beach. The road was heavily used and the speed limit was 70K along the stretch we had to cross. There were no crosswalks and no lights within at least two kilometres, so we had to dodge traffic to get to the beach. 

At least twice during our stay, the owner of the house, stopped traffic after we had been waiting along with about 10 other people to cross the road. He went out in a break in the traffic and held up his hand and the traffic stopped or at least slowed down so we could get across the road. Each time he was surprised they had stopped.

I am sure that in many parts of the world, the idea that the driver is king and pedestrians have no rights is also in place, but I love what we do here and found that I like the idea of a pedestrian having some rights as important. My Aussie friends thought it was a strange idea, and have grown to live with and accept their own unique way of looking at the role of the driver and the pedestrian.

Bush Fires in Australia

There has been a lot of news lately about the weather in Australia and the devastation caused by the fires, in some states in the country. The danger of wildfires cannot be understated, but the resilience of the Australian people is amazing.

We spent most of our holiday in the high country in the Alpine region north of Melbourne, which as the crow flies is close to the New South Wales Border. When we were there was a fire in New South Wales and a fire near the northern border of Victoria and the fear was that the two fires would merge and create a mega-fire. That did happen and the fire was still burning when we left, but at the time no homes were in danger.

The fire danger and the number of fires were so bad that the government of the state of Victoria declared a state of disaster for the whole state. This was meant to give the government more power and to help reassure people, which I am sure it did. However, it did cause some unintended consequences, one of the edicts under the state of disaster was that all childcare centers would be closed. The idea was that if there was a fire danger parents should be with their children. A good idea, except that many people could not go to work because they had no childcare, so this created economic uncertainty and hardship in areas that were not affected by the fires, but were still under the state of emergency.

Fire Warnings were a part of life where we were staying. In the last week of our visit, it was very smokey, hot, and humid. My daughter and her mate received a number of warnings saying that they should leave now. They joked about the warnings telling us that there were several levels of warnings which started with Act and Watch, which meant do nothing,  then the next level was, “You should leave now” then the warning after that was, “Leave now or you will die”, and the last warning was “You can’t leave, take shelter and hope for the best”. The Australians in the area I was staying had a certain distrust for the government and government overreaction and said they would only leave when they received the third warning. They also said that they believed the government was overreacting to the fire dangers. They explained that in the fires a few years ago, the government did not act quickly enough and a lot of people died. They understood what the government was doing, but they likened the warnings they were receiving to the story of the "boy who cried wolf." They said that many of their friends did not trust the warnings and they were afraid that they might not leave when the needed to leave.

There were two fires close to us, one was, as the crow flies about 50K to the north and one was about 45K to the east. The fire that was to the north, had to climb up the mountain, go through a multi-million-dollar ski resort and then down the mountain to get to us. The area coming up the mountain had also been burned out a few years ago so the fire could not move quickly. My Australian friends and family were very confident that the state would not let the ski resort and the million-dollar homes are destroyed.

The other fire also had to go over a small mountain through two towns and cross a river through the grass to get near us. It was very slow-burning. It was under control within three days of starting.

The biggest cause of the fires appeared to be dry lightning, although watching the press it appeared that arson was the cause of some of the fires. Of the thousands of fires that started when we were there, only about 178 were attributed to people. The police had arrested and charged about 89 people with arson while we were there.

All of Australia was not burning, but because there were fires near Sydney in New South Wales and around Melbourne, which also has a large population, the smoke was a problem for many, including us.

We were affected by the smoke during our stay as it closed down the visibility so we could not see the stunning scenery of the Alpine region we were in, and when we left, we were delayed for three hours at the airport because the smoke made it difficult to fly.

The people of Australia have another month to go before the fire season is over, the wild weather and rain hitting parts of the affected areas are helping, but the danger is still there and will be for a time. I would recommend that if you want to help give to the Australian Red Cross.