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Welcome to the 96th volume of WizeWorld: a collection of stories and sounds to round out your week, pique your curiosity, and widen your wizdom.
This week’s theme is connection.
Whether it’s connecting people on their daily commute to strangers hundreds of miles away, or connecting people to the everyday items that they need to manage and maintain their lives without excess waste or cluttered space… connection is more powerful and more necessary than ever.
We’ll be looking at:
- Why we struggle to exercise even when we know it’s good for us
- An interview with mountain biker Madeleine Pollock
- Street art installations featuring sci-fi inspired portals
- Kaleidoscope from Madeleine Pollock
- The library of things
Learn
Yahoo!News poses a key question: if we know that exercise is good for our mental and physical health, why do so few Canadians put that knowledge into action? A recent study polled just over 1500 Canadians. 87% or participants said that they understood exercise to be one of the best ways to prevent dementia, yet only 61% said that that spurred them to engage in physical activity to avoid mental decline. To help bridge that gap, the Baycrest Foundation is hosting their very first Mattamy Homes Bike for Brain Health event in 2022, which encourages cyclists to challenge themselves with distances ranging from 25 to 75km. It’s one small way to help us boost our physical activity. If you find exercising by yourself difficult, look to join a run club, rowing club, or some other group activity to get you started.
Connect
Enjoy this interview with North Vancouver mountain biker Madeleine Pollock. Madeleine started mountain biking at age six with her dad, but said she hated it at first. It wasn’t until she turned 13 that she decided to give it another shot… and fell in love with the sport. In five to 10 years, she’d love to be on stage at the Olympics and championing equality for all in sports. As a performance athlete with big goals, she’s careful about what she consumes—which is why you’ll find her drinking a hot cup of Chocolate Dream tea in the morning and a can of Zesty Lemon Wize iced tea in the afternoon to stay fresh.
See
From Colossal comes this interactive, sci-fi inspired street art installation that spans two cities in Poland. The initiative, called Portal, involves a pair of screens and cameras set 376 miles apart—one in Vilnius and the other in Lublin—that allow passersby to wave hello at each other from across the geographical divide. The project has been called a “visual bridge” that allows people to feel connected even when they’re miles apart. It was in development for five years, though its debut during the Covid pandemic seems almost prescient. The plan is for Portal to open a link between London and Reykjavík next, and hopefully it will expand from there.
Listen
This week’s playlist comes from mountain biker and Wize Collective member, Madeleine Pollock. Kaleidoscope is a summer-ready pop-punk-rock mix that will see you through everything from outdoor workouts to road trips. You’ll find tracks from Lorde, The Killers, Taylor Swift, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more. Hit play, grab a Ruby Red Grapefruit Wize iced tea and get your sweat on.
Get inspired
To wrap things up, Positive News brings the story of a lending library that lets over 5000 UK residents borrow everything from sewing machines to vacuums, weed wackers, and more. The initiative helps people save money and reduce waste by not having to buy items that will clutter apartments and townhomes with objects they may only use once a month (or year). The group says that they’ve already reduced almost 50 tons of waste from the landfill since they started up, and have raised £375,000 to expand the library so more people across the country can benefit from this amazing idea.
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