The glum faces of Team USA impressed me as they were receiving their silver medals.  Each of them looked like they would never play hockey again.  Later, during the closing ceremonies, they seemed in better mood, but the initial letdown of losing after trying so hard showed on their faces. 

Looking on without the emotional involvement of the practices and playing six intense games in 13 days, I could idealistically ask why they were so glum when they had proven they were the second best hockey team in the world. 

And I get stuck on the words, “second best.”

Team USA did not want second best, they wanted “best.”  In preliminary play, they actually beat Team Canada, and so they thought they could actually do it.  And they did come within an inch of achieving that goal. 

Team Canada had them down by two goals, when Team USA scored their first goal twelve minutes into the second period, and the tying goal with 25 seconds left in regulation play. 

Needless to say, that’s when emotions peaked. 

Going into overtime with four skaters and a goaltender playing “sudden death” their nerves must have been like violin strings – can’t make a mistake …

But fortune went to Team Canada, when their player found the puck almost unexpectedly near his stick, and in his own words, I just hit it in the direction of the net.  And it went in. 

Make no mistake; the win could have gone either way.  

Neither team was second best.  They were each at their personal best.  Team USA played as well as Team Canada, but opportunity came first to the Canadian team. 

And therein lies the lesson for us.  Life is like that.

We prepare to the best of our ability for an event, a job or career.  We perform our personal best, but someone else is a razor-thin line better or seizes an opportunity and they win the job, the place first in line, and we are “second best.”  We feel the disappointment intensely. 

But winners pick themselves up, improve their skills and move on to the next opportunity. 

Winners are never “second best” except in a particular circumstance or event.  They will never be “second best” in their own minds.

They are “best” somewhere, and often in many places, and they continue to practice and play the game until the world sees that they are the “best” as well. 

Let’s make it personal for ourselves.  Let’s never settle for “second best. 

Live a vital life.

It is easy to get our schedules bunched up as well as our blood pressure; and very easy to be late.  Habitually late

If we were meeting a potential romantic partner or employer, I would bet we would move everything out of our way to arrive on time, especially if it is the first time. 

Whether it is a date or meeting, over time we get comfortable and it becomes part of our routine.  We push the schedule and insert small tasks before we have to leave and they take longer than we thought.  We get more done, but are habitually late. 

Our blood pressure rises and we feel the stress squeezing us. 

So, how can we defend ourselves?  Don’t be late.  How can we do that? 

Make each time like the first time. 

This presupposes our schedule is not like an emergency room disaster.  If it is, we can do two things; try to lighten our schedule or become experts at time management or a combination of both. 

We can try to say no to some meetings and events if they make our lives too stressful.  We can try to limit activities with our young ones or involve other family members to help out. 

But at work, we might have a boss who doesn’t understand anything except his own needs, and drives us relentlessly.  We can probably discuss it with him, but he wouldn’t understand our hectic schedule.  We can ask him to prioritize the meetings he wants us to attend on time and without stress.  And he may be deaf to our suggestions. 

In that case, a decision should be made.  Do we want to die of stress on our present job, or live with another, better job? 

And if we manage to lower our activity, appointment and meeting schedule, we can then work to lower our stress by allowing ourselves a pace to get there on time or, even a little early.  How?  Apply a little project schedule planning.

Planning

Everything we do that involves interdependent activities is a project.  There are things we can control and things we cannot.  The secret is to recognize the difference, and plan each leg.  

First we need to do some calculations to know our personal numbers—adjust them for each particular case:

• Know how much sleep we need if we have a super-important appointment like a job interview the next day.  Let’s enter 8 hours.
• We are not robots, so it takes some time to fall asleep – more if we are apprehensive or nervous about the next day’s events.  Let’s enter 30 minutes. 
• We are not firemen, so leaping out of bed fully dressed and ready for action will not happen.  Most people need about 90 minutes to rise, shower, clear our morning fog, and dress.  It wouldn’t hurt to add 30 minutes for miscellaneous items like de-icing the car in winter, walking the family pet, herding our young ones and making breakfast.  Let’s enter 120 minutes to get out the door from the sound of the alarm. 
• How long will it take to get to our destination?  If we are driving, is there gas in the car?  If we take public transportation, do we know the bus or train schedule?  Would it hurt us to take an earlier bus or train in case there were delays?  Do we drop our young ones off on our way? 

This is a personal estimate of travel time, and keeping abreast of weather conditions and construction sites will help make the number more accurate.  We all like to estimate our travel time as if it was Sunday midnight, but most commuters commute at about the same time.  Vary the time with experience.  Pad on some extra minutes, just in case. 

Preparation

Next, prepare the night before.  Put gas in the car.  Organize what we will need and place it by the front door to avoid forgetting it.  Lay out clothes for our young ones and ourselves.  Prepare lunches and store them in the refrigerator. 

Check directions to our destination if it is unfamiliar.  If we are driving, it wouldn’t hurt to plan an alternate route in case of jammed traffic. 

I used to take a route to work through a large metropolitan center.  It was the most direct route, but every day, there were accidents and construction and my stress levels soared.  Then I planned an alternate route around the metropolis.  It was slightly longer, but less traveled, and the time was constant every day.  I actually enjoyed the drive. 

Distractions

The last thing I like to do before retiring is to check my e-mail for any change in plans.  I can do it in the morning, but 5 minutes usually turns into 25 and I fall behind schedule. 

This falls into the category of distractions that can put us behind schedule.  Other distractions may be an unexpected phone call.  Some of us cannot resist the sound of a ringing phone.  This is a discipline issue.  Let it go to voice mail unless it is someone with critical news.  We can call them back while enroute or when we arrive early at our meeting. 

Other distractions may include young ones out of sorts; they don’t like what they have to wear; they don’t like breakfast; they didn’t do their homework and a big report is due today.  Sorry, I can’t help you there.

If this is a regular occurrence perhaps we need to build it into the schedule.

Scheduling

Finally, we should time ourselves to be at the right point at the right time in the schedule, so we’re ready to leave on time. 

If getting up is our problem, we can set the bedside alarm ahead to compensate for hitting the snooze button too often, or we can set the alarm out of reach or out of the room to force us up to shut off the annoyance.  Most cell phones have a multiple alarm capability that can be set a few minutes later than the bedside alarm with a second alarm going off when we should be leaving the house. 

Practice

In truth, this approach requires discipline to keep to the schedule, but with practice it gets easier. 

In a recent CareerBuilder survey, 20 percent of workers admitted to getting to work late at least once per week.  12 percent confessed to at least twice per week.  Constantly arriving 15 minutes late cost our employers a week’s pay in lost productivity over the course of a year. 

And this is no economy to make our employer feel we are cheating them. 

Payoff

Arriving early gives us time; time to de-stress, to read an article, write a letter, make a phone call or work on something personal while waiting for the meeting or our work shift to start.

Arriving early gets noticed.  Over the years of my business career, the promotions and raises always went to those who arrived early, even if they did not stay one minute past quitting time.  Executives are in their jobs partially because of their timeliness, and they notice those who are like them. 

And finally, routinely arriving late for our date or meetings shows everyone we have little respect for them or ourselves. 

Live a vital life.

Many of us follow conventional wisdom and gather together with friends and others on the eve of the New Year to review all the ways in which we are deficient as successful people.  We are unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, and perhaps after a few drinks loosened our tongues, we admitted our shortcomings and resolved to bring our scores up to par. 

Whether we vocalized them to friends or simply admitted them to ourselves, we made a lot of really ambitious promises.  As the first month of the New Year played out, we realized we either have no intention or are incapable of keeping those promises. 

So why can’t we keep those promises to ourselves? 

For one, the guardian of the promises is us, an easy taskmaster; quick to inject reasons for delay and quick to forgive compliance. 

For another, the resolutions are poorly thought out and for a third reason they generally require us to be someone we are not. 

Sooner or later we will realize that we don’t do well with major changes in direction, even if it is resolved with the deepest intention. 

Habits, as someone once described, are developed in the manner of a silken thread being woven into a cord.  The thread becomes thicker and thicker with each occurrence acting as a reinforcement, until it thickens into a Gordian knot. 

Now this is a good thing for good habits, but bad for those habits not so good.

The Gordian knot of legend was made so complex, that no one could undo it.  Alexander the Great tried and could not, so he cut it in two with a single blow from his sword. 

Now cutting a Gordian knot of habit or lifestyle with a single blow is romantic but not practical for most of us unless it involves having surgery. 

In reality we need to change things on a much smaller scale.

We won’t do well and shouldn’t try to change our life in a single day or single week or single month.  What we need is a series of fresh starts and modest changes.  Small things we can change are very important. 

Instead of seeing how far away the end is on our huge projects, we need to break them into smaller projects.  These smaller projects can be constantly restarted if necessary, moving forward in small increments and needing less and less work to complete. 

Constant moving forward in small increments means constant accomplishment. 

Two examples we may resolve are quitting smoking and weight loss.  Many of us want to quit smoking for a number of reasons, but the process of leaving the addiction is doomed to failure without a plan, and maybe some help.

What if we counted our number of smokes in a day, and reduced it by one every week, and smoked only half?  It’s just an idea.  And if we slipped back to a higher level, it probably would be fewer than when we started.   

Don’t focus on failure, just restart from the new level. 

In the area of weight loss, many of us feel we must lose tons of weight.  It is overwhelming just to think about it.  But what if the number was only down to the next five-pound mark on the scale?  That wouldn’t be too bad.  The most we have to lose will be five pounds.  Once we are solid at that level we can restart and focus on the next level. 

A word of caution here.  We all know that diet and exercise in combination will bring us to our goal, but starvation denies us the fuel to burn calories.  We have no energy, we lose muscle mass, and our adaptable body becomes scrawny and learns to live on virtually nothing. 

In my early college days, I could have earned a PhD in cramming techniques.  I really believed I could learn a foreign language in three days.  But life is a great teacher, and eventually I got the “plan ahead” concept right.   

By embracing the “plan ahead” concept and focusing on small changes and adjustments to our lifestyles every day, we can conquer huge goals. 

And our “small goal” achievements will tell us when we should adjust goals up or down.

This method is great news for the next New Years party.  We will not have to make resolutions we have no plan for and no intention of keeping.  We will know that we have been resolving and accomplishing every day during the year, and we can really enjoy that party. 

It is time for us to effect solutions.  Make the list.  Make the plan.  Today. 

Live a Vital life.

Inspiration for this article comes from Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders

We are not robots, although sometimes the dullness of life can make us feel that way.  At various stages of our lives, we are overwhelmed by the boredom of daily living.  I guess that is what winter vacations are for. 

There are many diversions built into our lives to relieve boredom.  There is the latest movie or album to entertain us for a brief period, there are events and activities of all kinds to break up our days, too many to mention.  Each one offers an invitation to participate. 

Back to the scribbled note, it names a major reason for living is to have a little joy.  What dismal persons are those who have no joy. 

Joy might be discussed as internal happiness.  We all know people who run the range from being nonstop happy (sometimes very annoying) to nonstop unhappy.  We should focus on the middle ground. 

Let’s look at it from the backside. We know a lot of things that will make us unhappy (supply your own list here) and by eliminating them from our lives (where possible) our happiness index will naturally rise. 

If our lives are weighed down by responsibilities, see them through and don’t renew. 

Once we have a written list of what makes us unhappy, we can also make a list of what would make us happy, and try them out, one at a time.  Then we know if it stays or goes from the list.  We should be creative and not hold back.  We may not ever have the opportunity to “run away with the circus,” but on that list will be a lot of dreams that could become reality if we follow that path.  

Now that’s a reason for living.

We should be careful what we wish for.  Winning the lottery, as an example, should make us happy, but many people who have won wind up unhappy, plagued by relentless appeals for money. 

A major item that makes people unhappy is lack of control over their life activities.  The punishment of imprisonment is more than the lack of freedom; it is the lack of control over the person’s life.  They can make almost no choices of their own. 

Many of us are caught in a web of our own making.  As we mature, obligations seem magically to accumulate and we are driven by them.  We feel we are losing control over large portions of our lives.  We are not happy, and can’t pin the reason why. 

Feeling helpless and loss of control makes us unhappy. 

We must be careful to combat those feelings early.  Left to themselves they will get worse and may cause depression.  People give up living when they lose all control. 

We should go back to that list or make a new list of things that obligate us and things that draw us to them.  Rate them on some scale, positive for the things we want to do and would make us happy, negative for the things that make us unhappy. 

Keep in mind that an obligation like college tuition for a child will result in the happiness of seeing that person graduate with a career.   

If there are relationship issues, there are thousands of articles and mentors that can help us deal with and improve them.

Make it a hobby to work on the list, taking steps forward to raise the negative ratings and gain free time to pursue the positive items that will bring us joy. 

Now that’s another reason for living. 

Finally, feeling useless makes us unhappy. 

We are social animals, and it is built into our genes to help others.  We can volunteer for something that helps another person.  It is one thing to send money, but physically working to help others face to face makes us feel useful and gives us deeper satisfaction. 

Can we make someone’s life better by helping them in some way that would only get done with our efforts?  Try it.  You’ll feel great.  

And that’s another reason for living. 

Don’t give up living and don’t “run away with the circus.” 

Be useful; be happy. 

Live a vital life.

People make appointments and are late all the time – look at the cable guy.  Society today has a problem with promptness.  Trains and airline schedules are delayed all the time.  My coworkers are late all the time.  Why should I be on time?  If I am an hour or two late for dinner at Mom’s she won’t mind. 

Why bother getting to work on time?  I can get there any time and stay late, as long as I accomplish what I need to do.

Who cares if we are on time? 

A lot of people care.  15 minutes late is not late, is it?  The answer may surprise you. 

Think of a bus, train or plane leaving at a scheduled time.  We get there 15 minutes late.  They are gone.  Why didn’t they wait?  It was only a few minutes.  Now I have a great inconvenience. 

Our employer cares

Two-thirds of the expenses companies spend are on the workforce.  That cost is reflected in the products the company sells.  Putting in less than the time we are paid for lowers our productivity and is basically shoplifting from the company, ultimately raising the cost of the product.   

Arrival lateness cheats coworkers of their time, especially if they depend on our presence or have to spend time filling us in on what we missed.  Organizations lose millions in lost productivity due to lateness.  A 15-minute daily lateness costs the company more than our weekly salary over the course of a year. 

Our family and friends care

Perhaps Mom doesn’t say anything about our lateness, but she worked hard to prepare that dinner on time, and keeping it warm because of our lateness will dry it out.  It minimizes her gift prepared with her labor and shows her our lack of respect. 

When we promise to meet our friends at a certain time and we are late, we are showing them they are not important to us.

We should care

When we are consistently late, we project an image of self-indulgence, disrespect, and lack of time organization, telling everyone that we are more important than their insignificant event.  Like Mom, they may never say it, but they are thinking it. 

We should imagine ourselves on the other side at work, watching us consistently come in late.  Would we give that person a responsible project with a deadline?   

We should visualize each workday or meeting like a job interview appointment.  Would we be late then? 

Arriving early with small tasks we can work on will show off our characteristics of time management and respect. 

Punctuality is the most obvious form of loyalty we can display.  Time is never refunded once spent.

“I could never think well of a man’s … character, if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments.”  Nathaniel Emmons

Bingham interweaves challenges to his audience with advice to the people he fires.  In his motivational talks, he sets up an empty backpack as a focus point.

He associates the backpack with the burdens we carry through our lives and challenges his listeners to consider what is in their backpacks, and how as we travel through life we become bogged down by our ‘stuff’ and by our commitments to people. 

Bingham preaches to his audience, How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks; then you start adding larger stuff; clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack.

Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets; your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack. Feel the weight of that bag.

Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life; all those negotiations and arguments and secrets; the compromises.

As we watch this scene, we start to think about what we are carrying around, our burdens and our connections to different parts of our life.  A friend of mine described each burden as a golden thread, securing us more firmly in the cage of our life. 

Bingham points out that it is with our backpacks that we journey through life.  For most of us, our backpacks are pretty heavy.  Can we enjoy our journey with all that weight on our backs?

What’s in your backpack? 

The weight 

Can you feel how heavy the backpack is?  We weigh ourselves down to the point where we can’t move.  Bingham says, “Your relationships are the heaviest components of your life.” 

Bingham preaches we can choose not to be weighed down with objects.  In truth, we all accumulate lots of currently useless items over time.  They are the items that once had value to us but no longer.  

He also advocates the letting go of pesky personal relationships, praising the avoidance of commitments and connections. 

We must remember that this advice comes from a man whose entire wardrobe is contained in his airline carry-on bag, has no friends or intimate relationships, and whose lifestyle has made him a stranger to his family. 

His backpack is as empty as his life. 

The Moving Journey: 

Bingham also advocates continuous moving through life.  He considers he is at home in airports and on flights.  Experiences are more important than objects. Moving is living.   

The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake; moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks. 

He thinks of himself as a shark, but not in the competitive sense.  Sharks never stop or sleep.  Sharks have no relationships; they die if they stop swimming. 

In Bingham’s mind, relationships slow you down or hold you back.  He has none in his backpack.  He has even become a stranger to his family, being always on the move, no longer a part of his family.  As his older sister suggests when she asks him for a favor, I know you have a problem with doing things for people. 

His journey involves a quest to achieve ten million frequent flyer miles on the airline he uses exclusively for his travel.  He will be only the seventh passenger to achieve this, and the youngest.  For flying coast to coast more than 3,000 times, he will have his name written on the side of an airplane.  [This guy has issues]

Connections

Bingham is a man who spends his life making connections – between planes.  He also spends his work time severing connections – for others.  He fires people in corporate downsizing.  In his words, we set them adrift when they are most vulnerable. 

His cost is to avoid making any people connections for himself.  He doesn’t know how to connect with people or even if he wants to.

His older sister observes, You’re awfully isolated, the way you live.  Walking through a crowd, Bingham returns with, Isolated?  I’m surrounded.  She further points out that he lives in a cocoon of self-banishment with no human connection. 

But connections find him.  At his younger sister’s wedding, her groom, Jim gets cold feet and Bingham is pushed forward to handle it. 

Jim tells Bingham that the night before, he couldn’t sleep.  He started to think about his future – wedding, buying a house, mortgage, having kids, paying college tuition, having grandkids, and eventually, death.  Jim is mentally packing his backpack and reeling from the perceived weight of the staggering baggage. 

“What’s the point?” he asks. 

Bingham is caught in a connection where he must preach the exact opposite of what his base philosophy is. 

He admits that what Jim say is all true.  There is no point.  But if you think about your favorite moments, your most important moments in life, you were never alone.  Life’s better with company.  Everybody needs a co-pilot. 

Wakeup call

The wedding and his intervention wake up feelings in Bingham that perhaps he would enjoy his moving journey more with his own co-pilot.  After years of carrying his own empty backpack, he thinks maybe he wants to put something back in.  He seeks out his casual intimate fellow traveler and finds she has a family of her own. 

Where he considered her only a distraction, she considered him the same.  He finds it’s tough looking in a mirror, having yourself look back, and disliking what you see. 

After years of telling the people he terminates that the firing is a wakeup call for them, Bingham receives his own wakeup call.  

Do we need a wakeup call?

Repack

From his book, What’s In Your Backpack? John Bytheway recalls the pack one of his fellow Scouts that he lugged up a steep trail. “He had things in his pack that were too heavy, that he didn’t need, that weighed him down, and that made the hike a lot harder than it needed to be.”

What does this all teach us? 

We don’t have to be like Bingham, with only three shirts and no connections in his backpack.  However, periodic examination of our backpacks and our lives will certainly reveal unnecessary former treasures we can put aside and relationships that are holding us back from what will make us truly happy. 

Perhaps we are carrying bad habits, procrastination, a poor self-image, guilt, unresolved feelings and hindering relationships.  We could replace them with a capacity to love, energy, courage to follow our own path and supporting relationships that inspire us to move ahead with purpose.  Perhaps it is as simple as emptying a garage stuffed with former treasures.

After we purge those heavy burdens and change some of those relationships, we can pick up our backpack and it will feel just right.

What’s in your backpack?
 

If we attended a lot of holiday parties, we feel sluggish from too much food, we have no energy, and it is a challenge to get out of that easy chair at home.  We just feel old.

We know this is a temporary condition.  It has happened before.  After the holidays we will just get out, walk it off and renew our gym membership. 

But this is the wrong time of year.  In many areas, it is cold – certainly too cold to go out and walk or go to the gym.

We’ll just stay in until spring, and then we’ll walk it off.  We’ll save our energy. 

We are as young as we feel or as old as we feel. 

When we are in our twenties, our energy seems boundless, and we can do anything.  In our thirties we start to slow down, but it is hidden by the nonstop activities of work and family.  We notice that we can’t eat endlessly any more and perhaps it shows in our growing clothing sizes.

When we pass forty and our lives aren’t really over, we are starting to get the message that maybe we should start taking care of ourselves.  We might join a gym or start running or take up a vigorous sport.  We’re going to have a body like those people on the magazine covers. 

But it hurts to exercise at first.  We used to be able to run like the wind, but now we are more like a wind gust – run, stop, and gasp. 

Now we see our lives as really over.  We see ourselves marching slowly toward the grave, practicing getting old by moving slower, taking our time, being careful about everything. 

We learn to think old thoughts and live in the past since our future is so limited.  After all, doesn’t society expect and encourage us to age gracefully and limit our activity?  Aren’t our same-age friends feeling the same way?  And if everyone thinks that way, isn’t it true? 

No. 

At any time on our life path, there are alternative ways less traveled. 

The main road we travel with others our age leads to weakening and decline in our bodies.  Hardly noticeable at first, we gradually find it harder to stand or walk for an hour, or get out of a low chair or up off the floor.    This is especially true if our work is sedentary and we are the same in the rest of our lives. 

Our far-flung ancestors developed a perfectly functioning and efficient body, which is why their descendents survived.  We only use roughly 100 calories to walk a mile, but few of us walk that far in a day. 

And so our neglected muscles fall into disuse and lose their full function.  We fulfill our own prophecy and slow down because our muscle power has deteriorated.  Ailments come and we associate it with ageing.

But new research shows exercise slows ageing by keeping the body functioning at its top level.  One of the best paths to long life is feeling good about ourselves, and looking good with lots of energy will do it. 

Olympic 14 gold-medal winner Michael Phelps consumes a staggering 12,000 calories per day and trains six hours a day six days per week, without fail.  When asked in an interview how he keeps so fit, he replied, “It’s the exercise.”

What type of exercise is best?  That’s up to the individual.  Although the majority of people don’t exercise enough or at all, it still remains a personal decision. 

If we pick activities we enjoy, we will stick with it longer. 

Make a list — anything we like that involves the components of fitness: motion, endurance, strength, balance and flexibility. 

Aerobic endurance will build heart and lungs and let us keep moving.  Muscular strength, flexibility and balance will help us get out of that chair gracefully.   

And we should keep our muscles guessing by changing activities every month or two. 

We all have a preference for sedentary activities and many of us feel out of place where everyone else seems fitter than we are. 

Aerobic exercise means getting our blood pumping and breathing hard.  It doesn’t mean killing ourselves.  It also doesn’t mean ‘doing it tomorrow.’

Warming up and cooling down are key components to avoiding aches that make us quit and postpone.  Starting at and stopping from full speed is never a good idea. 

Stretching our joints instead of our jeans keeps our muscles loose and improves our balance and flexibility. Mobility and freedom from pain gained from regular stretching is a reward that we feel every day.

What’s a good fitness level?  Forget the magazine covers. It is the level at which we feel good and can get around easily.  We don’t have to be muscle-bound as long as the core area around our trunk is strong. 

The Internet and bookstores are full of suggestions on stretching and exercises that can be performed privately. 

Set some achievable goals to keep, then keep them.

The best exercise is the activity we will enjoy regularly.

Live long and limber!

With winter upon us, many of us are feeling cranky and cold in more than temperature.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a pattern of symptoms or syndrome characterized by depression during winter months when there are shorter days and too little sunlight, causing our body’s circadian rhythms (time clock) to lose synchronization with our body’s operational routine. 

The symptoms of SAD besides the fatigue and depression mentioned previously are loss of appetite or increased cravings for sweets, candies and carbohydrates,  as well as decreased activity promoting increase in weight. 

Studies concentrating on daily weather rather than seasonal climate have drawn conclusions that length of daylight, amount of sunlight and temperature have little effect on our moods. 

But we are more sensitive to climate than to weather.

One conclusion for climate-caused depression is that the small effect daily weather has on our moods is cumulative, building until it becomes a prime emotional state.  Dark gray days promote the secretion of melatonin (root: black tonic) that establishes sleep cycles; sunlight makes Vitamin D in the body which promotes wakefulness and lifts mood by boosting levels of serotonin (root: serum tonic). 

Other studies have shown a connection between pleasant spring weather and a more positive mood.  They conclude that the lengthening days bring our body’s operational routine back to our ‘normal’ settings.

So, what is a good way to lift that gray-sky melancholy?   Simple.  Get some sun.

Whenever the sun actually breaks through the winter clouds and shines brightly, get outside and let the sun hit your skin for a while.  It doesn’t have to be long if it is cold, but you will be surprised at how your mood lifts.

An alternative to natural sunlight, if the sun doesn’t break through, is an artificial sunlight lamp.  And for those of us wealthy enough, a midwinter vacation in a sunny location will boost your outlook.  If you can’t escape to a sunny isle, do activities that make you feel good. 

We often consider ourselves ‘evolved’ beings, no longer connected to our cave-dwelling ancestors.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Our ancestors developed a highly tuned body that survived all the disasters that befell them.  They owned the perfected body, which is why they survived to have descendants.

Our ancestors did not venture out into the cold to freeze, but depression evolved to create a strong craving for getting out into the sunlight of spring.  They stockpiled food and firewood and spent their days protected from the elements, and sleeping to pass the time.  Those evolved urgings live in us today.

Don’t be a cold crank.  Change your outlook.  Warm up in the sunlight. 

All of the 193 countries were out for themselves.

They won’t admit to the big picture.

Now that’s a pretty big statement, but here’s a bigger one.  The generation of greenhouse gasses spells probable doom for the future inhabitants of this planet, which are your and my grandchildren and their grandchildren.

Yet the attending individuals focused on their immediate needs rather than look ahead. 

Many delegates refused to sign the Copenhagen Accord because it didn’t do enough as far as they were concerned.  Everyone wanted a perfect agreement for themselves, even if it means others will suffer.

I didn’t get everything I wanted.  The future will take care of itself.  I need to take care of me now.  There is always next year.

Other examples are the shoppers of Black Friday last year, who crushed an employee, a young father, as they jammed into the store looking for bargains, and Republicans doing anything they can to destroy the Democrats, regardless of the people they hurt.

These are examples of our survival instinct.  Survival now is all that matters.  It has been like this since creatures of any kind inhabited our earth.  It is called competition.

At the lowest level, trees grow higher or angle upwards to get the most sunlight.  Bugs and vermin will kill anything in the way of food.  Predators eat the weaker and slower. 

At a higher level, animals defend their territory from other animals, even of their own kind. 

At the human level, competition has been refined with ego and greed.  Having some is good, having more is better, having it all is just right. 

Greed is what drives us into competition, and winning feeds our ego. 

Before we look down on competition and greed, be aware that competition and greed are the reason you are alive today.  If your ancestors had not carved out their ‘piece of the pie’ for themselves and their families, they would have been eliminated by the competition.

We all share the greed for the better things of life for our families and ourselves.  That greed drives us into competition for a better paying job to gain the better things.  Winning the competition for a better paying job feeds our egos and increases our greed for tougher competition and higher pay. 

When rewards for competition are removed, so is the incentive to compete.  Would we be so interested in sports if there was no competition and no prize?  Would we work harder than others if every job paid the same regardless of effort?  The Soviet Union tried ‘collective’ farming where there were no rewards for extra effort, and their people nearly starved.  

How does that relate to the delegates at COP 15, Black Friday shoppers and Republicans? 

Delegates at COP 15 are in competition with each other, putting the good of our earth aside.  They are more of poor nation against rich nation, and their agreement is all they have to sell here.  If they don’t get paid off, they will not cooperate.  They hold the earth for ransom. 

Black Friday shoppers were in frantic competition with each other.  Greed for the bargain shut out all other reality, including the fallen body of that young father whose children will grow up without him. 

Republicans are denying their votes because the agenda of their party is to defeat the Democrats at any cost, holding the welfare of the people of this country for ransom, while they attempt to make voters believe it is for their own good. 

Survival is a good instinct, but it needs temperance.  Sometimes it is the survival of our neighbors, our group, our people and our world that is more important. 

We are not yet at a stage where we can put the greater good before our egos.

It is a sorry state.
Change starts with just one person that says “I won’t join that sorry state.”
Maybe it’s you. 

I guess I had heard some passing references to December 12. 2012 as the day the world will come to an end. 

I like movies like that, where I can suspend reality for a short time and enter the world of fantasy, and the movie did not disappoint.

For one thing, the movie is long, nearly three hours, which makes you feel like you got your money’s worth.  For another, the computer graphics are great, showing disaster on a grand scale.  And finally, we all had a good time.

When I got home, I decided to do a little research on the events that are supposed to take place on that date.  I had heard that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on that date, but I found it difficult to believe that people that started a calendar more than 5,000 years ago could predict an event on a specific day (move over Nostradamus).

The date is the end day on the Mayan Long Count calendar.  The Olmec people who preceded the Mayans invented the calendar and the Mayans adopted it.  The Long Count set its zero date in 3114 B.C. at a point alleging the end of the previous world and the beginning of the current one.  A logic leap would indicate that the end of the Long Count would then indicate the end of our current world.  

Research indicates that the Olmecs set the end date first, then counted backward.

A New Age interpretation of this end is that it may mark the start of a new era when the people of the earth may undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation.  Some believe it omens an apocalypse, although the Mayans made no predictions of this happening.  However, this is the interpretation the movie story focuses on. 

The movie covers it all except being hit by an asteroid (which has been done too many times in previous films).  There are giant solar flares, magnetic pole shifts, catastrophic earthquakes, volcanoes, continental shifts and mega-tsunamis to name a few, all connected to disrupt the entire surface and under-surface of the earth. 

They missed galactic alignment, black holes and the Dark Rift.

The rescue crafts in the movie were all built in China and indicated cooperation between all nations to save some human and animal populace.  And who was saved? – the very wealthy, and those who were at the construction site.  Which means the world population would then be the very rich the Chinese, and astronauts on the space station. 

I guess after the disaster the mega-rich would be on the same economic level as the Chinese workers, an interesting premise for a follow-up. 

The end result is that the movie and the concept are entertaining and worth seeing, as long as we realize that earth-wrecking events take thousands of years to develop and complete rather than hours.  Hopefully, we will have advance warning when those events approach.  

Even if the predicted apocalypse is cyclical and has happened before, it means that enough people survived to repopulate our earth and build again. 

I prefer to believe the New Age interpretation, that December 2012 will mark the beginning of a new age, one in which nations cooperate; people care for each other as much as for themselves; we undergo a positive spiritual transformation; that we enjoy our lives and do our best to help others enjoy theirs. 

As of this writing there are 1124 days left to the end of our era and maybe our lives.  Some may focus on the potential horrors as they comes closer.  I intend to focus every day on what is joyful in my life, like friends and family and sunny days.  I will enjoy my days more than them. 

We never know when our last day will be. Before and after that date, people will be born and people will die.  I will focus on life.   

As I said to my grandson, yes, Russell, you should still plan on going to college. 

Live a vital life. 
 

If you want be scared by apocalyptic video clips, watch these YouTubes:

Excerpts from every disaster movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdNbtuHHoyU&feature=related

Dark Rift explanation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC7PWuRpUlU&NR=1&feature=fvwp