Crevasses in glacier ice often remain invisible until you fall into them. To stay safe you need to be roped to your friends. The world currently feels like unexpected gulfs are opening up between people, like about vaccination. How do we prevent these differences from dividing us?
I find it hard to accept women choosing to wear clothing that limits their physical freedom, whether that is a chador or high heels. Similarly, it seems a pity that women will choose not to go swimming because of how their hair will look post-swim. Are there any men out there who feel the same way?
Whanau – a Māori word now in common general usage. To me it has connotations of a broad concept of family, beyond the sense of a traditional western nuclear approach.
Little things can have huge impacts, as in our toilet cistern, where manufacturing flaws result in serious water wastage. Or the Hubble Telescope where a 1.3mm error resulted in blurred images from a multi-billion dollar installation.
Christmas and primary school folk dancing are intertwined in my head as occasions where it is required to have fun. Being required to have fun is no fun at all. Why can’t I just relax and enjoy the season?
Humans are capable of such amazing feats, both of creation and destruction. Gold miners built water faces across mountain faces in pursuit of the precious metal in the Wakatipu and vaccines are being developed apace in the face of the COVID pandemic.
Rising house prices and unaffordable housing – a decadal problem in New Zealand (and much of the world) that appears intractable to the economic policy approaches governments use to solve it.
Problem solving can require a different view, like on a recent mountain bike ride. I’d tackled the same rock the same wrong way, year after year. It took someone else with a new method to show me what was possible.
Hope is sold in many forms – at container stores, through politicians promises and by vaccine companies. Let’s hope Pfizer’s promises are more robust than Trump’s.
Why does the voting in the US election differ substantially from the poll results? Could be the polls were wrong. Or it could be the polls influenced people to act differently.
