Petrol price extremes, water dangers
NORMALLY I don’t admit I get things wrong, except to my long-suffering wife, but I guess no-one’s perfect.
In last week’s column I mentioned Tradies In Sight and I got everything correct except the date of their catch-up at South Dubbo Veterans and Community Shed.
These two great organisations are partnering up and collaborating for better health outcomes for men, especially in the mental health space.
Anyway, if you’re a tradie or a bloke who wants to get involved, the first brekky at the South Shed wasn’t last weekend as I stated in the last edition but rather this Saturday, December 8, starting from 7am.
It’s a great initiative so get along and support what all these good local blokes are trying to achieve for our community. PLEASE take a moment to consider this question... Are we safer now than at any other time in history? Or not?
Studies show that more than 70 per cent of people will answer “No” to this question. Which is understandable given the trouble, strife and disaster presented every day in the media.
Yet for most of us, most of the NED JOHNSON (above) is pretty stoked about an early visit from Santa Claus, the one-year-old local Blues’ fan seeing a Santa made from a couple of round hay bales by his dad Myles.
A few months ago that hay would’ve been far too valuable to put anywhere near the roadside. Hopefully this rain will continue and there’ll be plenty of fodder around over the summer and well into next year.
time, it’s absolutely true. As a species, we have never enjoyed better health, higher standards of living or more diverse opportunity. One simple statistic – longer life spans – proves the point.
So why do we feel so worried? Remember we are designed to focus on the negative. When we evolved in the jungles and on the savannahs, it was important that we took serious notice of the grass that moved a little differently, or the leaves that rustled when others didn’t. It may have been a tiger, python or neighbour planning to have us for lunch. Or it may have been potential lunch for us. Either way it was important we took notice. A matter of survival.
To illustrate, there is this I did a yarn a few weeks back about Ty Hawkins and his ongoing Movember crusade. I’m happy to reveal he hit his personal fundraising target – and well beyond in reality since he inspired a host of other Dubbo Junior Rugby cricket coaches to join him this year.
Well done mate, spreading that awareness and inspiring others to do the same is in essence even more important than raising the cash itself.
quote from Margaret Attwood’s best seller Blind Assassin – “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.”
To achieve anything, we have to ‘have a go’ – and having a go involves failure. Achieving ongoing success involves learning the skill of “failing forward”. That means learning from our mistakes and moving on – applying the lessons learned and not making those same mistakes again.
So here is the summary. We are built to focus on the negative. That’s a survival trait. To achieve we have to strive and when we strive we will sometimes fail. This can add up to defeat if we don’t cultivate the habit of remembering that ‘failure’ is one of the most important HERE’S the state government’s PR spin doctoring headline: “Return and Earn: a billion reasons to celebrate.”
That’s such a long way from the real story, but read on, because this is the sort of guff that consumes most reportage these days.
NSW Environment Minister Gabrielle Upton said Return and Earn has been an outstanding success and changed the way people dispose of empty drink containers.
“Before Return and Earn, many drink bottles and cans became litter and only a third were being recycled through yellow lidded bins.
“Now the trend is reversed: far more are recycled than are littered and the state is a cleaner place,” Ms Upton said.
This is one of the most poorly designed schemes I’ve ever heard of.
Taxpayers and consumers have to pay extra and then do a whole lot of work just to regain that extra capital outlay, and they have to do all this work for free. They have to store the recyclable bottles and cans, buy bags or have containers to put them in, find time to put them in their vehicle and then, in their own unpaid time, drive their own vehicle and using their own fuel down to the unreliable Return and Earn machines
ingredients of a ‘successful’ life. The key skill is to find the good in the mistakes – the silver lining in the cloud and consciously focusing on it. The silver lining – rather than the cloud.
American neurobiologist Dr Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness, says “taking in the good” each day trains the brain to turn transient positive moments into something more long-lasting, and gradually sensitises the brain to positive experiences. He offers this formula:
H.E.A.L.
H– Have a positive experience and notice it, whether it is a physical pleasure, feeling or sense of determination.
E– Enrich it. Consciously stay with the positive experience for 5 to 10 seconds and let it fill and waste a lot of time there, even if they’re working or not full, just to get their own cash back. IF the market economy works so well, how is it that unleaded petrol was selling at less than $1.20 a litre in Melbourne when in Dubbo
your mind.
A – Absorb it. Let the experience sink in so it soothes you. Nourish it. Savour it. Enjoy it. Celebrate the satisfaction.
L – Link positive and negative material. Be aware of a negative experience while feeling the positive one. If a dark thought hijacks your attention, focus on the positive and try to let go of the negative. Or laugh at it.
Or, in the words of Monty Python, “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble, give a whistle, and this’ll help things turn out for the best.”
z In this series of articles, Dubbobased ikifit founder Kim Macrae writes about ideas and activities that can help brighten our own lives and the lives of those around us.