​Pain is one of the things healthy human beings do their best to avoid. None of us goes looking for it, in all likelihood because we know that it will eventually come our way. Pain is unavoidable in the course of this life.

Like for many of you, spring is my favorite season of the year. I especially love the way that everything around me buds and blooms in a cascade of colors that not even Picasso could come close to matching. A good part of it, no doubt, is that spring just happens to be the season that comes after winter, which as we all know is almost always a dreary and dismal time. Even though we live far enough south for it not to get too brutally cold down here in Birmingham, we get just enough of the chilly stuff that we soon weary of it, which makes the springtime something we anticipate most anxiously.

​In times like these we do well to open ourselves to new forms of learning. You’ve probably already stretched yourself in more ways than you ever thought you’d attempt. But the alternative, of course, is to stay mired in your rut, a fate that is far moreworse now than ever, and let the rest of the world pass you by.

Some years ago, I remember traveling from my hometown in West Alabama to get back to where I was living at the time. The route I took from York was US 80, which we chillingly referred to as “Blood Alley” because of the number of fatal accidents that had taken place on that stretch of road over the years.

It’s been years since I was stuck in a Statistics class in college, where I struggled to wrap my mind around modes and medians and standard deviations. I eventually got the hang of each of those statistical realities.But the one that made the most sense to me immediately was the concept of the “Bell Curve.” Simply put, a curve of that kind represents a normal distribution of variables that distinguishes between the best and worst, with the largest percentage of variables being occupied by the average.For those of you who remember begging your college professor to “grade on the curve” yet had no idea what you were talking about (other than not to grade you by the percentage of correct answers), if the professor was agreeable, that’s how she or he made those determinations.

As a “newbie” to smart technology, I continue to be amazed at the immense capabilities I have at my disposal with something as small as my smartphone. Not a week goes by that I don’t discover some new application that delivers on its promise to make my life go so much smoother and so much easier.

Wouldn’t you know that as we approach the infamous Ides of March that our planet is having to contend with a pandemic that has everyone on the edge of his seat, one that is about as far away from the next person as we can possibly get? The experts in the public health community refer to this tendency as “social distancing," and commend it as one that is in everyone’s best interest to practice.

There are certain stories that I always seem to fall for. Regardless of how busy I may be, when I’m reading a magazine or surfing the Internet, there are just some stories I can’t pass up. Probably the ones that rank at the top of my lists are the “Best Places” stories. You know the ones I’m talking about – “Best places to live…work…study…retire.” Evidently, I’m not by myself, given how many of them get written.