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Title: Alone for the Holidays? Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2003 by Margaret Paul Web Address: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 667 Category: Personal Growth

ALONE FOR THE HOLIDAYS? By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Being alone is a challenge for many people. This challenge may loom especially large during the holidays if you are single or newly divorced and without family around you. Holidays are a time to share love, and many people end up feeling depressed when they do not have people around with whom to share love. If you are in this situation, what can you do to make the holidays joyous rather than depressing?

The key phrase here is SHARE LOVE. Too often people think in terms of getting love rather than giving and sharing their love. They don’t realize that it is the act of giving their love that is so very fulfilling.

Gail had grown up very lonely in an emotionally distant family, with parents who did not freely give their love and relatives who were also cold and distant. She had married an emotionally distant man, and after 7 years of more loneliness, had decided to leave him. This was her first holiday season alone.

Gail decided that she was not going to be alone and lonely again this holiday season. She did some research on service agencies that needed volunteers and discovered a women’s shelter in her area for women and their children who were hiding from physically abusive husbands. The shelter was badly in need of funds for food, which Gail didn’t have. What she did have was the time to help gather food. Each day, after her job as a secretary, Gail went around to the markets in her area until she found some willing to donate Thanksgiving dinners for the mothers and their children. Then, on Thanksgiving Day, she spent her time at the shelter cooking, decorating, serving, and having Thanksgiving dinner with these brave women who had left their abusive husbands to save themselves and their children. It was the best Thanksgiving she ever had! By choosing to share her love with people who needed her, she felt filled with love.

Gail had such a fulfilling experience that she found a small part-time job in addition to her regular job so that she could afford to buy presents for the children at the shelter for Christmas. She had such fun buying presents for the children and watching their joyous little faces as they opened them on Christmas day! Gail felt anything but alone and lonely.

Gary was in a similar situation to Gail. He was single, had been an only child to parents who were no longer alive, and had no close relatives. His janitorial business did not give him much opportunity to make friends. Gary had spent many lonely holidays feeling isolated and depressed, and decided a few years ago to do something about it.

Gary loved animals. As a child, his dog had been his main connection with love. After some research, Gary discovered that there was a wonderful animal shelter within a half-hour of his home – a shelter that loved and cared for animals and didn’t euthanize them. Gary started to volunteer one day a week on the weekends – cleaning, feeding, playing with puppies and kittens, helping to interview people who wanted to adopt a pet, and getting to know the other volunteers. He found that he really connected with the people who volunteered there. Many of them were loving people who were deeply devoted to caring for animals. As his friendships developed, he found he had a new sense of family centered around the shelter. Thanksgiving and Christmas were now sometimes spent with the other volunteers who did not have families, and sometimes with the families of some of the volunteers. Gary’s life had become full and fulfilling. The last I heard, he was dating a woman who also volunteered at the animal shelter.

No matter what your life situation is, you can always share your love with others. Instead of feeling alone and lonely this holiday season, open your heart to giving. There are many people and animals out there who would welcome your love.

Hailed as the Rubik’s Cube of the 21st century, Sudoku is the current rage among number puzzles. It may sound surreal but at an age where bubblegum pop music has successfully reinvented itself as punk rock through the likes of Avril Lavigne and Simple Plan, a puzzle and a number puzzle at that is able to establish itself as a global phenomenon. Sudoku, which is sometimes spelled as Su Doku, is pronounced as soo-doe-koo. It is an abbreviation of the Japanese phrase suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru which means the digits must remain single. Most people are under the wrong impression that sudoku is of Japanese origin when the only thing Japanese about sudoku is the word sudoku.

Nikoli Publishing House Nikoli is the publisher of the leading Japanese puzzle publication Monthly Nikolist. The think tanks of Nikoli noticed an interesting number puzzle called The Number Place published by their American counterparts, Dell Puzzle Magazines. Sudoku made its debut on the pages of Monthly Nikolist in April of the year 1984. It was initially christened Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru by Kaji Maki, Nikoli’s incumbent president at that time. The maiden issue of Sudoku enjoyed modest success. Its success is due in large part to the fact that the Japanese people are inherently puzzle-crazy.

It was not until two significant developments occurred that the puzzle began to really catch fire. First, the name suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru was shortened to sudoku which was easier to remember and to market. Second, Nikoli modified the game by introducing two new rules in 1986: the digits of are to be arranged symmetrically; and the given numbers are not to exceed 30 digits. As of today, there are at least five publishing companies that print monthly magazines solely devoted to the game in Japan. Sudoku is, for all intents and purposes, a brand name; it is not the generic name of the game. It is a lawfully registered mark of the Nikoli Company in Japan. This means that the other publishers of the game in Japan are legally obligated to provide their own brand names for their versions of the popular number puzzle.

Made in Manhattan According to urban legends, sudoku was created by a team of puzzle creators from New York. Another version of the story credits a certain Howard Gerns, a retired architect and puzzle enthusiast, as the true father of the modern sudoku. Although the legends conflict and give credit to different inventors, they coincide on two important details:
Sudoku was first published in 1979 by Dell Puzzle Magazines under the title The Number Place; and Gerns and the team of puzzle creators were both inspired by the Latin Square of Leonhard Euler. Sudoku: The Old Testament Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, presented a paper entitled De Quadratis Magicis before the St. Petersburg Academy in 1776. Euler demonstrated that a magic square can be created through the use of 9, 16, 25 or 36 cells. He imposed conditions on the value of his number variables to bring about the creation of his magic square. His magic square evolved into the Latin square in his later papers.

The versions of Gerns and the team of puzzlers differ from Euler in two ways: First, Euler’s Latin square does not have a regional restriction; and Second, Euler neither created nor did he intend to create a puzzle. On the other hand, Gerns and the team saw the potential of a hit puzzle in Euler’s works and proceeded to create the grandfather of modern day sudoki with this specific frame of mind. No Fool’s Gould Wayne Gould, a retired judge based in Hong Kong, chanced upon a sudoku puzzle in a Tokyo bookstore in 1997; Gould could not help but gravitate towards the blank squares of the puzzle. He felt compelled to create a digital version of the puzzle and worked on the sudoku computer program from 1997 to 2003.

In 2004, he found himself pitching an unknown puzzle called Su Doku to The Times of Britain. The results were overwhelming; within a few days, other newspapers began printing their own versions of the game. The popularity of the game snowballed and spilled over to Australia and New Zealand. By 2005, it had earned the moniker the fastest growing puzzle in the world. What Goes Around, Comes Around American newspapers caught wind of the sensation created by sudoku in Britain and the rest of the world, and found themselves jumping on the sudoku bandwagon. The New York Post published its own version of sudoku in April of 2005; this marked the homecoming and belated public acceptance of a New York native who went unnoticed in its own backyard since its birth for more than 20 years.

Within a few days sudoku made its presence felt throughout the country when major dailies such as USA Today and The Daily News began replacing their usual crosswords with the number game. The appeal of modern sudoku appears to be infinite and without boundaries. As a number puzzle, it does not make use of letters from any particular language; thus easily dispensing with the language barrier factor. Publications numbering in hundreds of thousands, from magazines to newspapers and digests, solely devoted to the game are testaments to the puzzle’s popularity and profitability. The numerous websites that offer digital versions of the game, for free or for fee, guarantees the game’s continuous development and improvement; it also provides a platform most accessible to the younger population.

Sudoku has even gone mobile as companies race to create sudoku games specifically for mobile phone users. Sudoku is a game of logic that challenges the young and old alike. In fact, studies on the mental benefits of regularly playing sudoku have been conducted; and the results have been positive so far. From the fastest growing puzzle in the world, sudoku has evolved into the most contagious puzzle virus the world has seen in years. Go and play sudoku.

This article was written by Andy Hope of SudokuPuzz.com that offers online sudoku puzzles, printable sudoku and a sudoku script.

It’s one thing to get mad when you miss a shot, but the hardest part of golf to overcome is when you decide on the wrong shot and hit it perfectly only to find that you’ve put yourself in jail.

So why do we do this? Sometimes it’s a special shot we know we can hit and we get keyed up about it and forget to think of the result.

Just like chess and pool, golf is a game of strategy. If you plan all of the shots for a hole, including possible changes for missed shots, there is a good chance you’ll play the hole well and score well.

With a good plan of attack for a hole, you are not blind-sided by the result of a missed shot because you’ve taken into consideration every possibility and chose the shot that had the best outcome for perfect and less than perfect contact with the ball.

When you stand on the tee box for each hole you should make a strategy for each shot on the hole.

In that strategy you should consider all possibilities and decide what the miss-hits leave you with. If you have chosen a shot that leaves you in jail with a miss-hit, you should try to find a shot that doesn’t.

When you don’t give yourself room for error, you always miss…it’s Murphy’s Law.

In golf it’s not your perfect shots that make your round, it’s how you play your miss-hits.

Much of the “luck” you see in golf comes from good planning.

How should you plan the hole? Glad you asked.

The hole should be planned from the green back to the tee.

If you know the course, and you know where the pin is, you should try to plan to leave yourself a straight, uphill putt. There are good and bad places to land on a green. A downhill putt has less room for error to make than an uphill putt.

This one variable can be the difference between a birdie and a bogey.

Based on where you wish to putt from, you should decide on the best place to approach the green from and the type of shot that would best put you where you wish to end up on the green. If the green is protected by bunkers, you’ll probably need a high approach to the green. What is your favorite approach club? Can you set up that shot? If so, what will it take to get the ball to that point?

If your worst shot is a 70 yard wedge, why would you leave yourself 70 yards from the green?

If you can’t make it to the green on the previous shot, and you have to take another shot anyway, why not set up your favorite approach or the shot that you feel gives you the best putt on the green?

Sounds simple, but it takes a lot of effort to back down from a three wood to a five iron as the second shot on a par5.

Many times you will find during the planning stage that you only need to hit a three iron off of the tee box on a hole. What do you do if everyone else pulls out driver? Stick to the plan.

If you start to wonder what your playing partners are thinking, you will ruin your plan.

Your thoughts about what everyone else is thinking are still your thoughts. If you give in to the worries and doubts about others might think, you are giving in to your own thoughts…not their opinions.

You are not playing against your partners.

No matter what bet is on, the only obstacles you face are Mother Nature and your own mind.

The first one requires practice and skill. The second one requires awareness and control of your own inner conversations.

The only limitations you have during the planning phase for each hole are the shots you know you can’t make. If the hole calls for a draw and you can’t hit one, you have to decide on another shot and set that shot up so that the consequences won’t kill the hole if you miss the shot.

The best way to cure shot limitations is to practice them on the driving range. Instead of working on your swing, practice the shots, that you know you will need on the course but don’t yet feel comfortable with.

Make a game out of it. Use your imagination. The range is the place to try the stuff you read in the magazines. If it works and you’re comfortable with it on the range, Try it on the course. If it fails you on the course, shelve it until you can learn more about it.

Be careful. Trying some of the tips from the magazines can ruin a good swing if you don’t have all of the information about them or don’t quite understand them.

Sometimes the magazine tips leave out necessary details that allow you to better understand what they are trying to explain. It’s not intentional, they just don’t have a lot of room for details on tips.

If you see something that looks good but don’t quite understand it, email me and I’ll try to elaborate on it.

The next time your out on the course, try to plan out each hole and allow for your mistakes. When you allow for mistakes and they happen, you don’t get mad because you are ready for them. This makes the round more enjoyable.

The fact is, even the pros only hit a handful of perfect shots per round. There is no reason we should expect to do any better.

Don’t forget to enjoy golf. It’s supposed to be relaxing.

Tracy Reed is a Golf Biomechanic, International Golf Coach, and Author of “Golf Swing Control” now sold in 28 countries. Learn to Gain the Unfair Advantage on the Golf Course. Go to http://www.golfswingcontrol.com