Balance

   The snow came and went almost as quickly as the celebrations of the holidays and one could almost hear that fabled sigh of relief.  For us, getting back to our ritual of dropping off turkeys and hams and other items to the homeless (we go weekly to a year-round outdoor facility that serves an average of about 500 homeless people each Sunday) was delayed a bit as we struggled just to dig out from the snow, even the snow blower struggling to send all the powdery fluff to another spot away from all the walkways.  By the time noon arrived, we were able to navigate the icy roadways and make our way down, the crowds now mostly gone and the remaining packaged meals all waiting for delivery (another 300 or so meals were headed out to those unable to make it to the cold outdoor lineup located under a viaduct).  Despite tired arms and sore backs we were happy to just make it out and be able to marvel at the massive snow plows on the roads shooting fountains of snow as they drove through the streets, moving like bulls gone wild with little to stop them and us driving in their tracks, grateful for the less-slippery driving conditions that they had created.

   It somehow all came together then, the foot-plus snow on the sidewalks and the even larger amounts being brushed aside by the plows.  There was a balance there, a beauty among the cursing and the putt-putting of my blower.  I had written earlier to my wife about her being blessed with balance, of being able to juggle her life in such a way that for her it seemed that joy and frustration arrived like waves, sometimes turbulent and sometimes calm but appearing to always arrive back to a point of balance.  Yin and yang, isn't that we all seek?  And then we were out to dinner, all with a family whose children we had watched grow throughout the years.  Back then they were six, eight and ten and now the "kids" were in their twenties and thirties and gracious enough to want us over with them to celebrate their holiday dinner.  As one grows older, such moments matter to eyes which tend to look at things differently.  You recognize aging but you also recognize things such as friendship and history and closeness.  We have good friends, my wife said as we returned.  And good memories I thought, for I couldn't help but feel fortunate myself for there were two things I'd just read that pinged along those lines, a talk about just being remembered and another on the results of a study about our brain trying to make sense of it all.

   Dyslexia is common for many (one in ten worldwide), and is considered by many to be associated as a learning and/or reading disorder.  Imagine trying to read or speak and the letters and numbers seemingly shifted into a jumble that barely makes sense.  gnidaeR neht semoceb yrev tluciffid.  Said a piece in Smithsonian: Outside of the lab, it's known that people with dyslexia don't struggle as much to recognize faces or objects or spoken language as they do to read.  Gabrieli (neuroscientist John Gabrieli at MIT, and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research) suspects that their lack of neural plasticity may manifest most when it comes to reading because of the amount of thinking and learning it requires.  "Learning to read is one of the hardest things that people ever do," he says.  "Maybe that just stresses the system so much that if you don't have this capacity available, it becomes really burdensome."...Because reading difficulties are one of the main symptoms of dyslexia, researchers have long focused on studying and treating this phenomenon as a language processing disorder.  That has meant focusing on the language processing part of the brain, rather than overall neural flexibility.  The new study gives a new perspective: Seeing dyslexia more as the brain struggling to adapt could help explain the other learning difficulties it can cause, and why symptoms can vary so much from person to person, says Guinevere Eden, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University who directs the school's Center for the Study of Learning.

   Then came an introduction from Pico Iyer on a TED Talk* by CEO Ricardo Semler who advocates "...how to transform a company...about making a life as much as making a living.  And there's something invigorating about seeing this wisdom brought to us not by monk or formal philosopher or saint, but by elegant company director in black jacket."  Perhaps what was most striking about Ricardo Semler's talk however was his asking not "what do I want to be remembered for," but rather "why do I want to be remembered at all?"  Here's a peek at the talk:  On Mondays and Thursdays, I learn how to die.  I call them my terminal days.  My wife Fernanda doesn't like the term, but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer and my parents and grandparents had it.  And I kept thinking, one day I could be sitting in front of a doctor who looks at my exams and says, "Ricardo, things don't look very good. You have six months or a year to live."   And you start thinking about what you would do with this time.  And you say, "I'm going to spend more time with the kids.  I'm going to visit these places, I'm going to go up and down mountains and places and I'm going to do all the things I didn't do when I had the time."  But of course, we all know these are very bittersweet memories we're going to have.  It's very difficult to do.  You spend a good part of the time crying, probably.  So I said, I'm going to do something else.  Every Monday and Thursday, I'm going use my terminal days.  And I will do, during those days, whatever it is I was going to do if I had received that piece of news...When you think about the opposite of work, we, many times, think it's leisure.  And you say, ah, I need some leisure time, and so forth.  But the fact is that, leisure is a very busy thing.  You go play golf and tennis, and you meet people, and you're going for lunch, and you're late for the movies.  It's a very crowded thing that we do.  The opposite of work is idleness.  But very few of us know what to do with idleness.  When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time.  And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health.

   So there I was (still with me?), tired from moving so much of the snow from this place to that and yet energized by being so welcomed at our friends.'  Perhaps the real gift of life is not only creating and having such memories but being able to place them in the right order, to not have them return as jumbled random events and scattered happenings but to feel that amongst it all was balance and order, something that would give you pleasure in summing up your life, to tell you not only the life you had lived but the one you were now living.  Things are not always so ordered and often our own balance --emotionally, physically, financially-- can appear way out of whack, chaos we scream as if justifying our place in the universe.  But to be remembered for loving and friendship and family and blue skies and birds chirping and a million other things that a child would spit out without hesitating if asked what was there to be thankful for...and to make sense of it all.  Now that would make --DOES make-- life special.   Mondays and Thursdays.

Said Laura Emmons, Associate Photo Editor at National Geographic:

I got chills when I first saw this frame: a grandmother looking at and seeing her grandson, perhaps for the first time as a young man, after regaining her sight. I'm drawn in by the warmth of the moment, the gazes they share of both loving recognition and pure awe.  You can almost hear their laughter, feel their giddiness.  The image gives a glimpse into a victory that should be easy but is out of reach for most.  Cataracts are simple to treat but cause blindness in most of the developing world, where surgery is inaccessible.  The photographer, Brent Stirton, captured a beautiful experience that can often be taken for granted: seeing the face of someone we love.

*For the month of December TED has been interviewing various people to ask them what their favorite TED Talk was over the years and presented the results daily in a segment called TED's 31 Days of Ideas...