Maybe this is universal but I always find candid lectures or speeches easier to digest. I suspect the conversational tone of this week’s presenters stem from speaking in a language they’re not fluent in but it was this that made the talks easier to remember. The thing that stuck with me second most (the first being how incredibly Scandinavian they both looked) was Olof Stjernstrom’s remark about how we naturally problematize our world. Later that night Dr Mark Groulx and I went to Fort St John for the weekend to conduct facilitations with seniors to get their opinion on what makes a seniors complex good or bad and unsurprisingly they had quite the list of complaints; some were serious (“if there’s a fire I can’t escape because the elevator goes out and I cant walk the stairs”) and some less so (“the salads are too small here and I like big salads”). Near the end of the talks a woman stood up in the back and said that she has visited many other senior’s homes and commented on how their current facility and its amenities are much better than some of the others she’s visited ending with “I think it’s important to not take what we’ve got for granted, I know this place isn’t the Ritz but it’s certainly not the pits” which was not only a hilarious and positive note to end the discussions on but was also really refreshing to hear.

Since I got to Prince George a little over a month ago I’ve had to continually convince people that I genuinely like it here. “Really?” they say

“Really really. I can drive 30 minutes in any direction and find mountains and trails and awesome wildlife” I say.

“Yeah but it’s kind of sketchy” they’ll counter, to which I remind them that I drove to Prince George from Toronto, a small little town in Ontario which believe it or not has some sketchy areas of its own but that fact alone doesn’t extinguish every light of positivity the city has to offer (the traffic does though). So, while Olof’s work doesn’t seem relevant to mine in an academic sense, I think its relevant in a way to a lot of graduate projects because most of us are here studying a problem and while it’s important to address these problems and issues scientifically, it’s easy to get swept up in the doom and gloom mentality. It’s important to recognize when we have slipped into a state of despair so that we can take a step back out of our bubble or risk a life reliant on Cipralex.