May 13 2021 - Restful

 

A 18,000 participate survey on rest.  Rest and restful seem elusive to me to some extent.  The definition is: having a quiet and soothing quality.  Repose is another word used in the definition.  A position of contentment and security.  It was a world-wide study that has great interest now that we are isolating and have lots of time alone. What is rest?  Claudia Hammond's book The Art of Rest:  How to Find Respite in the Modern Age is on this topic and covers the research.  She is an authority on rest, having worked on the research study - it had responses from 18,000 people in 135 different countries.  Her website is HERE. I point to it because I hadn't found the research website - it seems to have disappeared, being part of a grant from the Wellcome Collection. The study found that two-thirds of people said they wanted more rest - regardless of income.  And then the top activities that were found to be restful in the study?  I consider them predictable: Number 1:  reading, 2: being in a natural environment, 3: being along, 4: listening to music, 5: doing nothing in particular.  The top ten items turn out to be mostly alone activities.  I've included the chart. Claudia Hammond is worth looking into. She investigates such interesting areas.  What about The Touch Test - the topic of interpersonal touch in which 40,000 people participated in 2020, the the BBC Loneliness Experiment in which 55,000 people participated in 2018, and the earliest is the Rest Test, conducted in 2016.   So many things to investigate in our times. Here's the chart of the top ten restful interests.   Here's our Honsberger and 15th Street tree overlooking the orchard - I took this on Tuesday so there are still orchards in bloom.  Such a Niagara spring sky - those brooding clouds delivering a little rain to the scene, while off in the distance blue shines through.  Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Santa's Nice Scale

I've questioned Santa's moral "north pole".  He is interested in either naughty or nice.  Santa lives at the Canadian North Pole with the postal code address of HOH 0H0.  Is there any relationship between his values and where he lives? CTV news today has the story of a study published Wednesday in the journal of POS ONE.  It says that Canadians on Twitter are 'nicer' than Americans.  We use cheerful words like thanks, amazing and please, along with 'an unusual number of smiley emoticons'.  Researches had the resulting findings: "In Canada, those words included great, new, well, good, coffee, shawn, drinking and winter. Several sports-related words made the list, including game, habs, jays, leafs, hockey, playoffs, flames. Tweets from the U.S. leaned heavily on online slang (lol, lmao, smh), swear words, and words used to express negative feelings (hate, damn, mad, ugly). Researchers pointed out the obvious pattern: based on word choice, Canadians appear happier. Happiness may be apparent in the words we use. But researchers are less convinced that the tweets confirm broader stereotypes – namely, that Canadians are nicer. To date, there is simply not enough evidence to prove this belief. Self-reports of personality profiles of Canadians and Americans have yet to prove that that there is any measurable difference between the two groups." The article goes on to caution against using aggregates to describe personality. My own conclusion is that we can lay claim to being 'nice.'  And as a result, Santa can reward Canadians greatly with showers of presents. We had our celebration evening for the Fantasy of Trees yesterday.  The hard work is completed.  Of course there are many things to finish.  I will have to go under the table and behind the table cloths this morning to retrieve various things for our opening at Noon. Here's the link to the video: https://www.yourtv.tv/node/223486 Here are a few screen captures from the video that show the display

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com

Which is Cheaper?

Which is the cheaper ring?  You can decide here - a quiz on Cosmopolitan's website. Or decide on  shoes at Seventeen's site.  Go to stuff.co.nz and choose between various products at different price points. Have you wondered if there is anything that isn't for sale?  Atlantic Magazine in April 2012 addressed this question: "What Isn't for Sale?" "THERE ARE SOME THINGS money can’t buy—but these days, not many. Almost everything is up for sale. For example: • A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them. • Access to the carpool lane while driving solo: $8. Minneapolis, San Diego, Houston, Seattle, and other cities have sought to ease traffic congestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in carpool lanes, at rates that vary according to traffic. • The services of an Indian surrogate mother: $8,000. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly outsource the job to India, and the price is less than one-third the going rate in the United States." The article discusses the 'moral' meaning of goods and that some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. "This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society." "Even if you agree that we need to grapple with big questions about the morality of markets, you might doubt that our public discourse is up to the task. It’s a legitimate worry. At a time when political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable television, partisan vitriol on talk radio, and ideological food fights on the floor of Congress, it’s hard to imagine a reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship, and other goods. I believe such a debate is possible, but only if we are willing to broaden the terms of our public discourse and grapple more explicitly with competing notions of the good life." Today's images are banners for the Rotary's Grimsby Fantasy of Trees festival.  Forty trees are decorated and raffled off along with donated items with the proceeds going to support local charities. Check out the Facebook page and like it here.