Olio: a miscellaneous collection of things
Happy Groundhog Day! The fat, disinterested rodent didn’t see his shadow, so spring is supposedly coming early. Although with the warm temps this past weekend, we don’t need a rodent to forecast this for us.
While we wait for spring, here are items of interest from my online browsing.
From The Coffeelicious on Medium – “The Discontent Optimist” – In my middle age I have become wary of too much Rah-Rah, Let’s Be Happy All the Time and Never Say a Negative Word Optimism. It is too easy to allow optimism to steer us away from changing things that need changing in life. This short article tackles this issue.
“Pursuing Ordinary” is a blog post by my cousin John. In it he reflects on learning how to appreciate the ordinary moments in life, a topic that has crossed my mind recently.
Here’s an article from the New York Times about a book I want to read. The article is called, “German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too.” The forest ranger is Peter Wohlleben and his book is “The Hidden Life of Trees.” Naturally he wrote the book in German, a language I can’t even begin to comprehend, so I will have to wait until an English language version is released.
If you’re a creative person who can’t keep your space clean, there’s good news for you in this article from PuckerMob: “The Psychology Behind Your Mess: Why Creative Geniuses Often Flourish in Clutter.” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other articles describing the same findings but this bears repeating for creative geniuses who are hounded to clean up their messes.
I’ll round out this version of Olio with another animal story, this from The Christian Science Monitor: “Can ravens read each other’s minds?” I have been fascinated by ravens since reading Poe’s “The Raven.” Does it surprise me that ravens can read each other’s minds? Nope. It’s cool that science is figuring out ways to test these things.