New Year, Perth Australia and New Delhi India

I believe that this is my 16th time in Perth, (and Alison's 26th) which perhaps explains why I have not yet been motivated to blog about the experience, even though I could describe in excruciating detail the 26 hours of actual flying time and the nearly 48 hours it took to get here, by way of New Delhi. But having done it so many times, its no longer memorable and even the experience leaving Toronto at minus 20 degrees and arriving in plus 40 degrees Celsius, seemed hardly worth a mention. Then there are the endless bicycle paths along the river, lakes and ocean, the exotic cockatoos, pelicans and the famous black swans, and did I mention the white beaches of the Indian Ocean, and yet I have stayed away from the blog as if this is all so "ordinary".

Perhaps its spending time with family, ranging from Issy the patriarch in his ninth decade and his great grandson,Daniel in his nine month, and the familiar family patterns of eating, sleeping, nightly movies etc. which has been so much the focus of our stay; the fact that in about two weeks we logged about 450kms on the bikes and the odometer on my bike passed 71,000 kms also seems to have gone by without much fanfare.

Then I came across an article by Matt Ridley that described how the brain is more active when it is surprised. It cited an experiment wherein volunteers followed a moving pattern of dots while having their brains scanned. Occasionally, a dot would appear out of step, which caused the brain to be more active.

Ridley then goes on to suggest that based on related research, that the human mind's main preoccupations is prediction, which is based largely on past experiences, and that the longer the memory of past events, the better ones ability to predict future possibilities.

In my case, as my short term memory is fading, I look forward to those random dots and recharging the memory bank with memories and experience, of which which I am sure there will be many, as we enter the New Year, in New Delhi, India and travel on to Kathmandu on two wheels.

Wishing you many new dots and experiences in the New Year,

Namaste,

andrew