Shivering outside the hockey arena in the nighttime cold, the girls stamp their feet on the hard packed, icy snow, smoking Number 7s. They wear short bomber jackets that do little to cut the cold, and huddle together after the Junior B hockey game. Most of the players don’t smoke but you can immediately tell, on those breakaways, which ones do.

High school.

My father, whom I have written about previously, had a catastrophic motor vehicle accident three weeks ago and remains in an uncertain state in hospital.

This piece is not about that sad story. It’s a strangely happy story that is related.

You might remember when Adele first burst onto the music scene and how people were wowed. She was painfully young, a fabulous singer and lyricist, and she was chubby. When she lost weight and revealed her svelte self, the world went even more crazy.

It’s baffling when a person you consider a close friend ghosts you or becomes an enemy overnight and never explains. You expect it would hurt but the confusion and anger get you over that quickly when you realize that anyone who doesn’t have the courage to explain is likely not someone you can trust anyway. Good to know, right?

Recently, two young men whose lives are within the circle of my adult children, took their own lives within a couple weeks of each other. In both cases the same description applies: they had everything to live for, careers, friends, family, children.

I caught an interesting piece from CBC news recently, which described a new-ish trend amongst young women (and men) who have chosen to remain celibate and, in many cases, forgo dating and that whole hot mess of online match-ups. It’s called “boysober” which I thought was pretty darned clever so I’ve adapted it to suit what I hear from my own demographic.

For the better part of a decade, I taught an executive development course in Persuasion, with the inimitable David McPhillips. We searched the world for the latest research into the art and science that makes up the body of knowledge of how people make decisions, and what triggers us to say yes.

And yet….

When I was a kid, growing up in a small mountain town in the West Kootenays of BC, summer Sundays meant gardening and washing the concrete sidewalks.

Peter Drucker noted that what gets measured, gets managed. Other iterations evolved to suggest what gets measured gets done.

My take is that what gets measured becomes addictive and compulsive.

Inside my head there is a ball of Velcro. Every time I encounter someone, have a conversation, teach a course or facilitate a workshop, some of what I encounter sticks to the ball. There’s no rational criteria to what sticks: sometimes it’s something I know will come in handy for the next session, sometimes it’s just freaky and fun and sometimes it has depth and potential that bears examination.