There were dozens of curious facts and scientific phenomena that I simply could not comprehend as a young kid. I had lots of questions:

• If you jump in a moving airplane travelling at 600 km/h, why aren’t you slammed into the back of the plane?
• How is it possible that “days get longer”?
• How can your voice travel so quickly when you talk to someone on the phone; particularly, when the person you are talking to lives halfway across the world?
• Why don’t massive, heavy ships and boats sink?
• If the human eye can only see so far, then how can we see the sun and the stars?
• If we live on a circular globe of a planet, and we live on the top half, how can people in the southern hemisphere live upside down?

Clearly, science was not going to play a part in my future employment prospects. And, it didn’t.

Typically, most New Year's resolutions focus on four "Fs”: food, fitness, finances, fun. The emphasis is on self and better managing consumption, working out more, making or saving more money, and planning for the next vacation. Understandable, laudable, predictable. And, for the year 2021, for the most part, likely unrealistic.

How about switching things up this year?

One of my favourite responses, when asking friends to share their New Year's Eve resolution, was from a friend several years ago. Her resolution was "to not be angry anymore.” When I asked her how she intended to accomplish this, she confidently said, “I just decided. I am tired of being angry and I am in control of my emotions.” I recently checked in with her; she remained true to her conviction that she declared many years ago. Now, that’s impressive.

I try to limit my television news consumption to about 30 minutes a day. And, I try to read the newspaper for about 30 minutes a day. It appears that a global pandemic has provided a further opportunity for writers, politicians, commentators, interviewers, interviewees, and many of us, to start pointing at who is to blame and who is making things worse. From what I have observed, finger-pointing is at an all-time high.

Fingers aimed and assigning responsibility for the spread of the pandemic, delayed access to a vaccine and the perceived lack of a plan to distribute a vaccine, are pointed up at provincial and national leaders; fingers point right and left at neighbours and “other families” who are seemingly not respecting physical distancing protocols.

Most recently, some adults seem to be pointing down at young people as the primary source of our current and future pandemic “waves.”

A school’s academic year has a clear start and finish: an opening day and a closing day. Generally speaking, when your child was born, you planned for the stretch of their school career, from the day when they would start kindergarten through to their graduation at the end of Grade 12. As parents, this aided in preparing for all sorts of things that range from accumulating savings for university to anticipating the various stages of your child’s development needs.

Thank goodness, however, some things are not predictable.

From my perspective, sometimes knowing when something starts and finishes is a good thing, and sometimes it's better to not know. Or, in some cases I would like to be a giraffe seeing what is approaching from afar; at other times, I am content being an ostrich with my head in the sand. It depends on the situation.