Integrate!

I really enjoy sitting down with a flight of beverages and doing a tasting. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m tasting wine or beer or scotch. I love the activity of responding and balancing choices and noticing how what comes before or after changes my perception of a particular sip. But knowing what I know from both research and personal experience, I am cautious about generalizing my evaluation based on just a small sample. Once we needed to buy new chairs for the boardroom at our office. We put a line of about ten different chairs out and people sat in each one in turn and voted on their favourites. We bought the favourites and discovered that sitting in a chair for just a few minutes is very different than sitting in the same chair for several hours. We tested, but we didn’t get a reliable result. When I was in grade 1, I took some tests as a demo for teachers who had to learn to administer them. They asked me what I would like to do while the rest of the class took the t...

I wonder if what frustrates people so much about elections like the one we are having in Ontario now is that they are reminded of how often they have to make choices between alternatives that just aren't good enough. https://www.elections.on.ca/en.html We often want a change because what we have isn't working for us, only to decide that none of the options available are good enough either. And then we say something like, "Why bother?" Here are three reasons to bother. It is worth making a choice, even when - especially when - you don't like any of the options: Shift happens.  Very small changes add up to larger impacts.  It does matter even if one choice is only slightly better than another. You don't have to vote. But there will be many times when you have to make a choice in your own life when you don't like your options. Practice will make the process easier.  Life will often take choices away from you. In those moments, you will want to fi...