February is the month of love.  Valentines and red hearts, chocolate hearts, sweethearts, and lonely hearts.  Heart smart food, heart health, heart-to-heart talks, and hearty laughter.  There are ads galore featuring the heart this month and you don’t have to look far to find something related to it.  Love is in the air!

For those who are in the lonely hearts club and looking for a partner, the options are truly bewildering.  Even if you are happily coupled, it is an interesting phenomenon to consider.  Dating these days has evolved to a science and big business where people put their hearts on the table for prospectors and anything goes!

Our beloved little Cupid, whose arrow is always poised for action, has been replaced by plenty of fish and the likes.  Specialized dating sites have become the norm today with a myriad of options for finding someone compatible based on preferences.  You can search for environmentalists, vegetarians, pet lovers, right-winged, left-winged and no-winged people!  You can search for seniors, single parents, bookworms, outdoor enthusiasts, cougars, geeks and redheads.  There are dating clubs and services offering outdoor adventures and indoor adventures.  You can speed date or text date, on a chairlift or in a pub.   You can lunch together or have drinks together!  The choice is yours!  It is the grand smorgasbord for adventure and anything goes!

The options are simply astounding.  Pay if you wish but it’s free to fish!  (Plenty of Fish is a free on-line dating website).   You can meet a potential mate in cyberspace, outer space, a coffee place, outdoor race or indoor race.  Speed date, put out your bait, hook a mate, see how they rate, test your fate, but don’t wait – otherwise you’ll be, just another sitting duck, waiting for good luck!

Sometimes things seem worse than they really are.  This is often the case when we jump to conclusions without adequate information or research.  We might hit the panic button prematurely and bring unnecessary worry to ourselves.  That is exactly what happened when others experienced the ‘holy scale’ I wrote about in my last post.

The ‘holy scale’ is a device used by fitness studios to measure the ratio of muscle, fat, bone and water in your body.  I humorously dubbed it the ‘holy scale’ for two reasons.  One, because of its ability to reveal what is not visible to the naked eye; and two, the fact that you are required to bare your sole(s) before using it.  The resulting figures are used as benchmarks for creating personalized fitness plans to improve health and fitness levels.  I was intrigued by the machine’s capabilities and how it worked.  Fortunately, there were no concerns for me but obviously that is not the case for everyone.

I considered the potential array of outcomes including worse case scenarios.  Putting myself in that position helped me to quickly understand how easy it is to hit the panic button.  I figured that in order to maintain my senses and ease my fears, I would need to ask a lot of questions and put the situation into perspective.

If you find yourself in a similar predicament, tap into as many trustworthy sources as possible.  Put on your detective hat and seize your high-powered magnifying glass to uncover enough facts and details to satisfy your curiosity.  Talk to professionals and read unbiased articles from trusted sources.  Once you have sufficient information, you can then decide if you need to take any further action.  By following this process, you will cope better with the initial shock and be wiser for it.  In short, you will save yourself a lot of sleepless nights and have more time and energy for things you really enjoy!  Now, doesn’t that sound appealing?

Life itself provides enough stress without creating more.  Maintain a lighthearted approach to life, take everything in stride and laugh whenever you can.   Above all, keep smiling and the world will smile back at you!

I sometimes ponder the random sequence of events in life.  It seems that when you are in the flow and open to opportunities, chance events occur with one thing leading to another.  This is exactly what happened when I signed up for financial planning workshops a few months ago.  I had no idea that I would be participating in a physical fitness assessment as a result of this.  Staying open to the flow makes life very interesting and brings an air of adventure as well.  This reminds me of one of my favourite storybook characters from childhood – Curious George, the ever inquisitive little monkey who mastered the art of adventure!

As I stood waiting for my fitness assessment to begin, I surveyed the many different types of apparatus surrounding me.  One in particular intrigued me, as I am sure it would have intrigued Curious George.  It looked like an elaborate bathroom scale with metal plates and retractable handles.  This machine was going to be my very first test.  I was asked to remove my shoes and socks and step onto the metal plates while taking hold of the handles.  I envisioned a surge of electrical energy channelling through my body as the machine was turned on and braced myself for it, but thankfully there was no sensation, not even the slightest buzz.  The only shock I felt was from stepping onto the cold metal plates with my bare soles.  The machine flashed a series of numbers revealing not only my weight, but also the percentages of my body fat and water, muscle and bone mass.  I took a deep breath as I stepped off of the scale, feeling like I had just completed my first test for the next mission in space.  T-minus 10 and counting.  I mentally prepared myself for the results.

You will be glad to know that I almost qualify for a launch into the stratosphere!  The scale alone did not reveal this but further tests involving my flexibility and endurance levels led to this conclusion.  As it turns out, I am in a healthy range for most everything except for my torso strength and arm flexibility.  This means I have to work on my abdominal and back muscles and that I cannot juggle bananas behind my back!  “Lucky George”, I think to myself.  Not only does he have limber limbs to juggle bananas and swing between trees, he also has a firm and fit torso.  There is no tree that I wish to train from at this time in my life but I think the inventors of monkey bars and jungle gyms had a brilliant idea when they created them for children.  Could it be that monkeys are the foremost scientist of our world?  I wonder what advice Curious George would give me for managing my finances.  Perhaps he would suggest that I make paper boats out of all of my bank statements and watch them float down a river!

Humour is serious business.  No pun intended but I am sincere when I say this.  As I transition writing styles from serious to humorous, I am making a correlation between my writing and life.  Switching abruptly to comedic stories brings up one question for me:  At what point does humour enter a serious situation in life?  The answer came to me quickly as I recalled an article I came across while researching an essay for college a few years ago.  It was a story about nurses who worked in an operating room and assisted doctors with life-saving procedures.  The article revealed that the nurses had posted a sign outside their operating room door for anxiously awaiting family members.  It stated that if laughter was heard from behind the doors, it was not their loved one that they were laughing about but rather it was just their way of coping with their work-related stress.  I love the story as it clearly illustrates how humour has an important role in life and that it can be a very powerful coping tool.

Life is filled with challenges.  My 9o year old friend, who is as sharp as a tack, summed it all up perfectly for me one day.  She said, “you need to be insane to stay sane.”  This is so very true at times.  When the pressure is on, sometimes all we can do is laugh to maintain our sanity.  A little bit of humour goes a long way in helping to keep the stress under control, not unlike the regulator of a pressure cooker.  Humour is a form of emotional release that helps to maintain the pressure within at manageable levels.  Without this, we might explode or implode, depending on our habits and style of coping.  Exploding is downright messy and imploding is no better.  If we do the latter, we might very well end up on the operating room table with nurses laughing over top of us, so we might as well laugh while we can!

Healthy humour is inviting and never hurtful.  Numerous studies reveal the physical benefits of hearty laughter which include reduced stress, lower blood pressure, and a stronger immune system.  We all know that hearty laughter exercises the abdominal muscles and relaxes the body.  That means that a hearty bout of laughter is just about as good as going to the gym for a workout!  When was the last time you had a really good belly laugh?

“Humour is reason gone mad” – Groucho Marx