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.

Have you ever noticed that some people just like to complain?

I noticed that this summer when we had a heat wave in Vancouver, with the temperature reaching 38°C (100.4°F) with the humidex. So naturally, lots of were complaining about the heat. In addition to the heat, the province had a record breaking year for forest fires and the lower mainland was covered in smoke for about two weeks, so people complained about the smoke. The rains came and for the first day or so people talked about how wonderful it was and how needed the rain was for the area. After a week of rain (normal for the west coast of BC) people started to complain about the rain.

Which is why I really appreciated the fact that someone in my neighborhood,  for some odd reason, decided to turn on the Christmas/ holiday lights on the evergreen tree on their front lawn near the end of the first week of rain.

I saw it as a reminder that winter is coming and that soon we will be having more days of cold rain, then warm rain, but the joy of the season should raise our spirits.

I've dubbed the tree "the complaints department" and I use it as a visual reminder that if I wanted to, I can always find something to complain about - but who wants to go through life like that?

On the road of life, sometimes we make a wrong turn. Lessons from our GPS

Over the years we have had many adventures and traveled many roads. I love the idea of serendipity, which is the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. Most of my adventures and I hope your adventures as well, over the years have been for the most part happy ones.

My first adventure with GPS was interesting and gave my friends and I a wonderful story.  Think about life, here you are driving down the road of life. Things are going well.  You know where you're heading. Your GPS device is guiding you along the way and everything is going smoothly.  The GPS speaks up and says: "In 300 meters, turn right." But you know the area, and decide that you will turn left, as the GPS is taking a route that you know and at this point don’t want to travel. So you turn left.

Others driving on the road of life with you may think, why did you do that, you may have screwed up! You didn't stick to the plan.  You sabotaged the entire trip! You couldn't even follow simple instructions.

Is any of that what the GPS unit says?  No, of course not.  It simply says something like:  "Recalculating" or "Rerouting".

On the road of life, we all make turns that don’t give us the results we need or want. Sometimes because we're not paying attention, sometimes it's because the path looks too difficult, sometimes we just fall back into old patterns.

If you have made a wrong turn on the path of life, it is never too late, just take a lesson from the GPS.  Re-examine where you are now, reconfirm where you want to go and recalculate your route. No judgments - just get back on track!

Remember we are all doing the best we can. One wrong turn now and then isn't the end of the world - you can always recalculate.