1 . I have always been creative since I was a little girl. My childhood was filled with arts, crafts and music, and every day was an exciting adventure of creation.

Somewhere along the way, however, I lost touch with my creative self. At 21, I landed a job at a big insurance firm out of my business degree. I would go to the office, sit at my desk and repeat the same work five days a week, 9 to 5. The days were long and tedious. Working this way for one year was painful enough, let alone a lifetime. Before long I decided to make a change.

One thing I had developed an interest in was sewing, so I took a sewing course at a community college. It was only a five-week course but it awakened my interest and got my confidence up.

As I dreamed bigger, I began looking into college courses for Fashion Design and three months later I signed up for a part-time design course. I attended classes two nights a week. Although exhausting, it gave me energy, enthusiasm and happiness.

As it became more evident that fashion was what I wanted to do full time, the reality of my day-to-day work at the insurance firm became harder. I felt bored. No energy, no motivation and zero fulfillment.

I knew I needed to make a big change. After struggling for quite a while, I made a tough decision— leaving my job and studying my design course full time. Two years later I got my diploma.

The last few years have been exciting because I have been following my heart to do what I love. Today I'm living a creative life as the designer of my own fashion brand.

3 . Last Sunday I made a visit to some new neighbors down the block. No specific in mind, just an opportunity to sit at the kitchen table, have some tea and chat. As I did so, it occurred to me how rare the Sunday visit has become.

When I was a kid in New Jersey of the 1960s, Sunday visits were routine (惯例). Most stores were closed, almost nobody worked, and the highways, as a result, were not so crowded as they have become today. My family normally traveled eight city blocks to the home of my grandmother, where adults would sit on the front porch and chat while we children played hide-and-seek.

The Sunday visit was something to desire strongly, because everyone seemed to be on the same schedule, which means that there was one day when everyone seemed to have time for everybody else.

Sunday as a day of rest is, or was, so deeply rooted in the culture that it’s surprising to find that, in a short span of time, it has almost entirely lost this association. In my childhood, it was assumed that everyone would either be home or visiting someone else’s home on Sunday. But now the question is, “What do you plan to do this Sunday?” The answer can range from going to the mall, to participating in a road race, to Montreal for lunch. If one were to respond, “I’m making a Sunday visit to family,” such an answer would feel strange, which seems like something from ages ago.

7 . We’ve known that sitting for long periods of time every day has countless health consequences, like a higher risk of heart disease. But now a new study has found that sitting is also bad for your brain.

A study published last week, conducted by Dr. Prabha Siddarth at the University of California, showed that sedentary(久坐的) behavior is associated with reduced thickness of the medial temporal lobe(中颞叶), a brain area that is critical to learning and memory.

The researchers asked a group of 35 healthy people, ages 45 to 70, about their activity levels and the average number of hours each day spent sitting and then scanned their brains. They found that the subjects who reported sitting for longer periods had the thinnest medial temporal lobes. It means that the more time you spend in a chair the worse it is for your brain health, resulting in possible damage to learning and memory.

What is also interesting is that this study did not find a significant association between the level of physical activity and thickness of this brain area, suggesting that exercise, even severe exercise, may not be enough to protect you from the harmful effects of sitting.

It then surprisingly turned out that you don’t even have to move much to enhance cognition(认知); just standing will do the trick. For example, two groups of subjects were asked to complete a test while either sitting or standing. Participants are presented with conflicting stimuli(刺激) , like the word “green” in blue ink, and asked to name the color. Subjects thinking on their feet beat those who sat by a 32-milicond(毫秒) margin.

The cognitive effects of severe physical exercise are well known. But the possibility that standing more and sitting less improves brain health could lower the bar for everyone.

I know, this all runs counter to received ideas about deep thought, from our grade school teachers, who told us to sit down and focus, to Rodin’s famous “Thinker,” seated with chin on hand.

They were wrong. You can now all stand up.

8 . I go to a gym in west London, always unwillingly. Exercise is too exhausting and boring. Always was. At school I made believe that I had headaches and parental notes too, to get out of PE classes and compulsory games. Now, twice a week, I dutifully get on cycling machines and other equipment and make myself work out for an hour. To get through the difficult hour, I people-watched: young and old, fit and unfit and Clayton Rose, one of the instructors.

Clayton is a personal trainer not only to body perfectionists, but to people who are mentally and physically disabled, the obese and hopeless. He treats them all the same. I have witnessed him listening keenly to a middle-aged working-class woman who goes on and on about her life, holidays, everything. Slim and attractive now, she was once so heavy that she was in a wheelchair. I have seen him calm down a young man with Tourette's syndrome(抽动症)and get him on a treadmill. I have also watched him pushing and coaching strong, cool men.

Clayton was shocked when I said I wanted to write about him. “Why? You know I'm not educated? I'm not clued up about politics and all that. Just an ordinary guy.”

He grew up in Twickenham, where his dad worked in a timber yard, his mum in an office. After college, the young man got into personal training and found his work. One of his best friends got seriously ill and was given months to live. Clayton put him on a program that kept him alive for almost five years: “I don't earn much, but I love my work; training and talking really helps people who don't have confidence, who are lonely, afraid, sick. Lots of people can't step into a gym. They need someone they can trust, someone who will be on their side.

The gym recently updated its equipment. The flashy new stuff confuses and upsets disabled customers. Me too. The private firm running these centers made decisions without considering these needs. Clayton is managing the chaos with grace and strength. Last week, when a young woman in a wheelchair started sobbing loudly, he calmed her down, restored her dignity, superhumanly contained his anger.

One of his colleagues thinks Clayton's “a legend”. He is, and doesn't know it—a rare thing in this age of extreme narcissism(自恋)and monetized(货币化) everything.

I expect you may be slightly surprised to receive a letter from someone living as near as your next-door neighbor, but I have to raise a subject that it will be easier for me to discuss in writing.

You may have noticed that I have a line of apple trees running alongside the fence that separates our two gardens. You may also have taken pleasure in the frequent sight of your two children sitting on your lawn directly by the fence. And you may also have noticed that my apple trees, so to speak, bend over the fence and seem to look down at your children with interest.

It is only natural that your children should sometimes seem to return that interest. And it is not only natural, but, I acknowledge, quite legal, for them occasionally to show that interest by picking all the apples that hang over on your side of the fence.

But to be plain with you, Mr. Jones, I am tired of seeing your children, day after day, tear the branches off the side of every one of my apple trees, and leave my trees looking as though a battle had been fought on one side of them. I am, if anything, even more tired of waking up these fine autumn mornings, to find even the apples on my side of the fence much less in number. I know this is the work of your children, since last night I was woken up midnight by the noise they were making climbing one of my trees, and (as they may have told you) chased them home.

While I am on the subject, I am at least grateful to you for keeping your bonfire on the far side of your garden this year. Last year neither I nor your children had any apples, because the smoke from your bonfire destroyed all the flowers before the apples had time to form. I very much hope that next year—for the first time since I came to this village—I shall have my apples, and your children will have theirs and that the sight of the line of apple trees will be a pride to us both.

Otherwise, I shall not express my displeasure simply in writing to you, but shall have to refer the matter to those capable of taking stronger action.

Yours sincerely,

J. Smith