I had been trying for a couple of days to remember the first name of someone I knew but had not met for a while and it had slipped my mind. I find it frustrating when something is on the periphery of my brain but I cannot quite haul it in. The name I was seeking was Shira, which is not a common one. Then I got an email from one of the many advocacy mailing lists that send me stuff and the first name of the sender was Shira. If I were one of those people who think that there is some grand cosmic plan at work and that there are messages revealing its secret workings that could be decoded, I might have thought that this coincidence had some secret meaning, though the only one I could come with was that the universe felt it was important for me to recall the name.

Of course, I dismissed this as just a coincidence but some people tend to be impressed when, for example, they dream about someone they had not been in contact with for a long time and then they hear from them or learned that they had died. There is a tendency to give enormous weightage to events of this sort, seeing them as premonitions.
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While I am generally aware of the negatives of a sedentary lifestyle and the benefits of exercise, my own physical limitations rule out all strenuous forms of exercise. Hence I was interested in a new study that says that just walking, which I can do at least in limited amounts, can provide significant benefits.

The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, suggested that walking at least 3,967 steps a day started to reduce the risk of dying from any cause, while 2,337 steps a day reduced the risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases.

Above these cutoffs, each increase of 1,000 steps a day was associated with a 15% reduction in the risk of dying from any cause, while an increase of 500 steps a day was associated with a 7% reduction in dying from cardiovascular disease.

“Our study confirms that the more you walk, the better. We found that this applied to both men and women, irrespective of age, and irrespective of whether you live in a temperate, subtropical or subpolar region of the world, or a region with a mixture of climates,’ Banach said.

“In addition, our analysis indicates that as little as 4,000 steps a day are needed to significantly reduce deaths from any cause, and even fewer to reduce deaths from cardiovascular disease.”

For younger age groups, the sharpest improvement in health was seen in individuals taking between 7,000 and 13,000 daily steps, while for those aged 60 years and over, it was between 6,000 and 10,000 steps.

For some time now I have been experimenting with how many steps a day I am capable of realistically doing. Too high a goal can become onerous and result in getting discouraged and giving up, while too low a goal may not help much. I finally arrived at an average 6,000 steps a day as my optimal level so I was glad to see that it seems worthwhile.

I do not do the steps all at once, though. I do it in four or five stages a day and try to mix up indoor and outdoor walking. I also used to, when driving somewhere, try and park my car closest to the destination but now I actually park far away just so that I have to walk a bit. Little things like that can increase the step count without becoming a burden.

It struck me that this is something that technology has helped a great deal. We now have pedometers that can count steps automatically, either built into one’s phone or as a cheap separate unit, making the targeting of goals easy. Before we had them, one would have to specify goals either in terms of the distances walked per day, which are very hard to estimate, or one would have to specify the total time that one walks, which is hard to keep track of.

There seems to be an insatiable appetite for advice on how to improve one’s health and longevity, so it is not surprising that news items that claim to purport scientific research on the benefits of this or that diet or exercise or lifestyle choices appear regularly. The advice can sometimes be contradictory and thus can be confusing and lead people to tune out altogether, which is unfortunate. Since my personal motto is to act in moderation in all things, I tend to ignore recommendations that require taking extreme steps,

This article suggests eight lifestyle choices that can prolong life by as much as 20 years. Many of the recommendations seem like common sense, which appealed to me.
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I have never seen the so-called ‘green flash’, the brief appearance of green light just as the sun sets over the horizon. It requires special conditions for it it occur and although those conditions are not that rare, your chance of being in the right place for those few seconds is low. Fortunately with cameras, you can now capture the green (and even more occasionally blue and red) flashes as can be seen in this video compilation by Dutch filmmaker, photographer and artist Michiel de Boer.