Outside there’s a colourful riot of flowers cherry and pink blossoms and the joyful Springtime chorus of our birds. Out there drunk and disorderly, cheeky Tuis dangle from Kowhais sucking the nectar from the trees’ golden flowers.
I do love this long awaited time of the year especially this year when dreary winter lingered too long.
Things don’t always go according to plan.
No wonder John Lennon, and some wise people before him have said, “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”
And yet when the unexpected happens, it invariably throws us and we react.
Good news for Enzed: we came eighth in World Happiness, one ahead of Australia and Sweden, according to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the UN.
Happiest country of all was Norway, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland in a tightly packed bunch. All of the top four countries rank highly on all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance. Norway has insulated itself from the boom and bust cycle of many other resource-rich economies.
My mother once told me in a hushed voice that one of our neighbours might have TB. My mother-in-law spoke behind her hand about epilepsy (“E-P”). Then, it was considered poor practise to tell people they had cancer (they gave up hope) and of course we never mentioned people with that “condition”, homosexuality! Things have changed. So what makes it so hard in the twenty-first century to talk about dementia?
Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart, sang the late great Frank Sinatra. But sometimes being young at heart isn’t always the fairy tale you want, or need. At a certain age you forget the boomer body you’ve inherited over the years. You flip back multiple decades to those never-ending summers of youth, when anything was possible. It’s then that the less cautious resort to daredevilry, attempt things the boomer body would never allow except that… the teen brain has briefly taken charge.
Have you de-railed in your tracks recently? You were going along just fine and then WHAMMO!
Despite all your good intentions, rigorous short and long term planning and solid commitment, you found yourself back in a place you really didn’t want to be. A goal-less, soul-less zone?
I am embarrassed to admit that I am hooked on jigsaws. I have always thought them ridiculous. A picture is cut into small pieces that are then laboriously put together, briefly admired then broken up and returned to the box. (No wonder, after all that effort, that people sometimes frame them). This seems to be the occupation of lonely, bored, unimaginative, and rather odd people.
Alcohol is a neurotoxin which means it kills nerve cells. Some of these cells are in our brain, and so alcohol kills these too. This is not good news once we already have dementia – we want to preserve as many brain cells as possible. Even without a dementia diagnosis, excessive alcohol has a range of effects on cognition, from mild to severe.
These days, we see more and more emphasis on mental health—particularly where topics such as depression, stress, and anxiety are concerned. People are more aware of the psychological aspects that affect and sometimes govern our lives. You see it on campuses and hospitals. You see it in the digital space, such as in social media.
Despite this, it seems many doctors still prefer to treat these mental conditions with drugs.