Cosy up to COVI-rtual activities during isolation
What are you doing to fight the cabin fever of isolation? Some stimulating suggestions and more to come
Looking to find your personal happiness, your personal history or your personality type, and in the process, find yourself? Or do you simply want to take your sudoku skills up a notch?
But how can you, when you’re housebound and tethered to the computer all day?
Here’s your guide — the first of several as the days pile up — to some helpful, fun, stimulating, enlightening, maybe even selfenlightening online places you can go to and virtual activities you can do, all at your fingertips.
1) Have you heard of the Yale “happiness” course? It’s the most popular course the famous university has ever offered in its 300-year history.
Originated several years ago by Yale psychology professor Laura Santos, the course was designed to address what Santos noted were almost viral levels of stress and mental health issues among students on campus.
The course begins with insights from psychology and neuroscience about well-being, the good life, satisfaction and happiness; then students were challenged to undertake behaviour change exercises.
Almost one in four students on campus ended up taking the course. What? You’re saying you don’t want to travel to New Haven, Connecticut, even if you could? Don’t have to. Now, in response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s being offered free online, through Coursera, to those who simply want to audit it or for a small fee for those who want a happiness certificate at the end. Link to https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-ofwell-being?
2) It’s true, distance means almost nothing online, but isn’t it nice to know that you’re supporting a local virtual initiative? The Hamilton Public Library, in response to the coronavirus crisis (oh, it again), has been offering access to Ancestry Library, the popular genealogical search engine containing Canadian, American, and British records. The HPL has subscribed to it for years and it is making it available free from people’s homes to keep customers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
HPL customers are also doing things like learning a new language through the library’s Mango Language courses. HPL.ca has seen a 175 per cent increase among customers using this free resource over the past month. (Comparing March 1-15 to April 1-15.)
Lynda.com, the library’s portal to hundreds of online learning videos, has also seen spikes in visits.
Over the same period, there has been a 700 per cent increase in customer traffic, as users access the site’s business, software, technology and creative courses. Free with an HPL card.
3) How well do you know yourself? Have you ever heard someone say, “You must be an ENTJ,” and you didn’t know what they were talking about? Welcome to the world of Myers-Briggs and other such personality tests.
If you don’t take them too seriously (some critics consider them bogus, and those critics are probably at least somewhat right), or even if you do, they can be quite fun. Compare yourself against your own expectations of what kind of person you are, and against other people’s perceptions, if you’re brave enough to ask them.
Myers-Briggs (Google to find online) is Jungian in its roots but there other tests that stem from different approaches.
One that is popular now is the so-called enneagram, which essentially breaks us down into nine types and is steeped, if not in Carl Jung, then in a pastiche of Buddhism, yoga-ism and, well, take your pick. Yes, the philosophies behind them might be woo-woo for some, but if nothing else, in practice they are a fun parlour game kind of a thing. Do the enneagram test free online at www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test/
4) One of the best guides to
Sudoku strategy that I have found is the engaging, easy-tofollow puzzlemaster Simon Anthony.
You can find a sample of his videos searching by name and Sudoku on YouTube. He has a pleasant manner and a soothing, relaxed speaking voice (the accent doesn’t hurt), and even if nothing else appeals to you about it, enjoy the transcendently satisfying sound of the numbers getting clicked into the squares. It’s absolutely hypnotic, almost ASMR.
5) “The Night Watch” is one of the most interesting and beloved art works of all time. Painted by Rembrandt in the 1640s, the masterpiece is enormous, almost 12 feet by 15 feet, and you can see it at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam or you could until the viral crisis.
The museum is closed like everything else. But you can see it at home, in the museum in our computer, by visiting ‘Operation Night Watch’.
This is a live stream of one of the most ambitious and largescale art restorations ever undertaken, being presented by the museum and Dutch broadcaster NTR.
There has probably never been a more restored painting. Why? It seems the more powerful an art work, the more it attracts vandalism, and The Night Watch has been deliberately gashed in 40 places, splashed with acid and defaced in various other ways over the centuries, two of the most violent occurrences having happened since the 1970s.
It is a testament to the art and science of restoration that one can hardly tell, but the complete restoration (not just spot fixes) that began last year, 2019, is one of the most exhaustive You can also view The Night Watch and other highlights of the museum on ‘Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close’