Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.John F. Kennedy

Inner Life Directions

Expanding Reality

Better Relations

  • Street Art on Asphalt

    Imagine art work on the pavement’s asphalt!  That’s what the Asphalt Art Initiative is doing, it is part of Bloomberg  Philanthropies and is giving 19 European cities grants to create eye catching murals at crosswalks and near sidewalks. The idea is also to slow down traffic and accommodate pedestrians’ safety. Recent such initiatives have shown that when combined with other things called calming traffic devices, like bollards and modified curbs, that something like art on the pavement can enhance pedestrian safety. Speed at a crash prone crossroads in Kansas City was reduced by 45%. In Baltimore, the colored curbs initiated by the project, 41% of cars at a crossroads were encouraged to give pedestrians the right of way.  Cities in Kosovo, Italy and Belgium which all have better pedestrian spaces will receive one of the grants and in Istanbul and Varna, Bulgaria, murals will be painted at crosswalks and crossroads.

    Janette Sadik-Kahn  a commissioner with the New York City Department of Transportation and  the current principal for transportation at Bloomberg Associates says that “Projects like this not only connect people, but make streets safer, and we encourage cities everywhere to paint their own transportation masterpieces.”  I’m for that. I hope you are too.

  • Upside to Aging

    Aging for anyone who is experiencing it does have its downside. There’s an altered appearance which can be distressing and there’s a loss of energy which can be limiting. Cognition can be impaired too. But there’s an upside, a handling of emotions that makes life much easier. Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the university of California, Irvine has been focusing on how older people regulate their emotions  and what she found is that when it comes to emotions it’s the reverse of what happens physically, older people have greater ability to handle and regulate their emotions. It’s due to experience,  and it’s also perhaps the fact that being closer to the end of their lives, older people tend to have a perspective which eliminates smaller issues. They know how to pick their battles, and as a result can eliminate certain amount of stress. Of course it may not  be universal, because many of the people studied had a certain level of financial well being, but not surprisingly it does apply to people with certain level of cognitive impairment. Apparently the impairment does not necessarily  interfere with a certain level of happiness.   The hope is that by better understanding what makes older people better adjusted becomes something that can be applied  to those who are younger. The research as far as I can gather is still in a new field, but it does make a too often overlooked point that aging has positive aspects, that the experience we gather as we live, does matter and if we allow it we can benefit from what we learned or lived through.

  • Friendships and Wellbeing

    There’s been a lot written about friendship recently, mainly because of a study showing how poor children having friends who are wealthier than they are makes a huge difference in their future. They are exposed to ideas, to ways of life, to contacts, to opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise. They are therefore more likely to pursue an education and be more successful. It makes so much sense and  in retrospect we have all experienced, witnessed or observed,  what the researchers discovered. Still it was both surprising and reassuring. Perhaps it’s related to a developing trend  which is just as surprising and which didn’t receive as much coverage,  it is one finding that friendships are fundamentally more important to our overall wellbeing,  that what we call relationships, those that are more romantic and lead to a more traditional form of intimacy. When I was in my 20’s we used to say relationships come and go but friendships remain. It was a thought trying to console ourselves after a breakup with someone we thought would be our significant other. It turns out that more and more people are not only discovering but using the notion that friendships are more important than other relationships. Whether  people are in a committed relationship   or not, their friends nurture them and give them something unique.  That is because friendships give us something no other relationship can give us including inner strength and a sense of fulfillment. This is becoming increasingly evident as blogs, organizations, and websites emphasize the enduring benefits of friendship–Including it seems longevity.

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