It was a cool November day and the rain was drizzling down out in the street, but the little upscale collectors shop was warm and inviting. Even so, Milo didn’t particularly want to be here, but his divorce was getting dicey, and he needed liquid assets if he was ever going to maintain the lifestyle he had become accustomed to.

When he was a kid his grandmother had always told him that his senile grandfather’s coin collection was worth a lot; he even remembered the word priceless being tossed around a few times. When she had handed them down to him, she had left very clear instructions that the coins were never to be sold or given away. She had made it clear that they must always stay in the family.

Milo cared nothing for sentimental baubles or the tall tales told about them though, and his silly old grandmother had probably embellished the value of the coins. Still, Milo thought what the hell, maybe he would get lucky, and at the very least it was one less thing his wife could take from him. And if he did get lucky, a large sum would keep him in designer suits and exclusive restaurants while his lawyers secured his assets from that harpy of a wife.

“Ya, I want to get rid of them, what are they worth?” Milo replied casually.

“Oh, a few thousand.”

The guy said it far too nonchalantly, but Milo was in no mood to shop around a silly little coin collection, he had better things to do, “Ok, fine, give me my money and let me get out of here.”

“Sure, no problem.”

Money in hand, Milo made for the door, but the obese guy with the eastern European accent running the counter stopped him, “just out of curiosity, do you know what this coin is?”

He held up an old coin. In fact it was barely even a coin, it looked like someone had taken a hammer to a round piece of metal. There was no value, no discernible markings except for a picture of an ugly little creature with a big grin on his face.

“No,” Milo said as he continued for the door, “should I?”

“It’s called the soul coin, or the devil’s coin. Supposedly it gets passed down through generations in families.”

Milo stopped, turned, and gave the guy a withering look, but he kept right on with his stupid story.

“I always thought maybe it was an urban myth, and I certainly never thought I’d come across one. If this coin is what I think it is, that means someone in your family tree made a deal with the devil. Whoever it was sold their soul, but managed to buy it back, which is not an easy thing to do, it being a deal with the devil and all. The story goes, when you get your soul back from the devil, he doesn’t put it back where it belongs, he puts it in a coin instead. I don’t really know why, maybe as a reminder. The twist though is that whenever someone new inherits the coin, the soul in the coin is allowed to go free, and the soul of the person inheriting the coin gets put in to the coin.”

The fat guy looked up at Milo and grinned. He wrapped the coin up in his big sweaty hand and turned to the safe behind the counter.

Milo wasn’t sure he believed the story, but his grandmother’s warnings were dancing around in his head, and he was becoming a little worried. “So what does me selling the coin to you mean?”

The guy spoke over his shoulder, “it means I own your soul now, I can do what I want with it, I can even use it to make a new bargain with the devil.”

“Hey,” Milo said, a little worried now, “sell me the coin back buddy, it’s a family heirloom, I shouldn’t have sold it to you.”

“No I would never sell this coin,” the guy turned and the grin was gone, his face was all sadness and pity now, “it’s the reason I became a coin collector. You see my dad inherited one of these, and he sold it. He sure regretted it though, once he found out what it was, and he died terrified of an afterlife with no soul. His dying wish was that I find another coin and make a bargain to get his soul back from the devil. Now I have the coin, and I can make a deal for my Dad’s soul and my father will be able to rest in peace.”

The coin dealer turned around and slammed the safe door, “anyway it’s only a story, don’t take it seriously, just forget about this whole thing. I’m sure your soul is fine.”

Milo was shocked, too shocked to say anything, and he stumbled out in to the rain. Suddenly, he left a little lightheaded, a little sick. Suddenly, he felt a little hollow inside, like something important had been ripped out, like there was a hole now where something had been before.

He went back the next day with this lawyer, but the coin collector was gone, and no one could tell Milo where he had gone.

After that he became obsessed, and spent his whole life looking for another coin, another unsuspecting stranger who would be glad to get a little spending money for an old and useless coin. He searched everywhere, but he never found another coin.

And lying in the hospital, surrounded by machines which were only barely keeping death at bay, he confessed everything to his son, and crying pitiably, he begged his son to find another coin, to save his soul.

But his son became an engineer, and lived his own life. He forgot all about his dad’s drug induced death bed ravings, and the story of the soul coin passed out of the family and was gone forever.

For almost five thousand years green tea has been a key part of many Asian cultures. Many of these cultures believed that green tea had healing power and important health benefits. More recently, science has been hard at work putting these traditional beliefs under the microscope, and it has been discovered that green tea has a variety of health benefits that make it an ideal choice for anyone looking for a healthy beverage.

In one recent study, a research team from Kyushu University in Japan found that drinking just a few cups of green tea dramatically reduced the rate at which lung cancer grows. Green tea has also been shown to reduce the growth of prostate cancer and breast cancer. Prostate cancer is the most likely form of cancer for a man to get, and breast cancer is the most likely form of cancer for a woman to get, which makes green tea an ideal cancer prevention treatment.

Some of green tea’s most impressive qualities, however, are not in what it prevents but in how it augments the human body.

New research has discovered that green tea increases neural activity in the brain. By consuming theanine, which is found in tea leaves but almost nowhere else in nature, a unique state of calm alertness is achieved.

Theanine has also been shown to be beneficial for the immune system. In one study, tea drinkers and coffee drinkers were compared and it was found that the tea drinker’s blood samples contained up to five times more anti-bacterial proteins than the coffee drinker’s blood did.

Green tea even helps kill off the bacteria that cause bad breath.

Clearly, the benefits of green tea are substantial enough that anyone who takes their health seriously would be wise to start drinking it. It’s also cheap, easy to make, and it tastes good too, which certainly doesn’t hurt.

It was the summer after high school, the summer before university. I had been a student and soon I would be a student again, but right now I was an adventurer, following the Mediterranean across southern Europe with no particular goal in mind.

I was walking south on the Eastern Italian coast when she pulled up beside me and offered me a ride. I could tell that she had been crying sometime recently, and looked like she might start again soon, but she spoke English, and, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, was quite beautiful, so I was easily convinced to hop in and hitch a ride.

We sat in comfortable silence for awhile. I watched the coast fly by and enjoyed the wind flying through my hair as I waited for her to tell me what was wrong.

After awhile, she began to tell me her story. She was a Canadian who had been going to university in Venice for the past year. Her high school sweetheart, who was still back in Vancouver, had come to see her and go with her to her Italian friend’s wedding where she was the maid of honour. She had loved him deeply and had been breathless with excitement when he walked off the plane, but he had had other plans and had broken up with her right after he got to Italy, and had taken a flight back the next day. She had been talking endlessly about her boyfriend to all of her Italian friends and had been too heart-broken, too embarrassed to tell them what had happened, but most of all, she was desperate to not ruin the wedding of her friend, whom she loved like a sister.

Finally, she showed me a picture of her boyfriend and I knew right there why she had pulled over to offer me a ride, I looked just like him. She begged me to stand in for him so that she wouldn’t have to ruin her friend’s wedding by being a tear stained maid of honor.

I agreed. It wasn’t the wedding that convinced me, or even the fact that this was a once in a lifetime adventure, it was her. I couldn’t believe that someone would treat such a sweet and innocent girl like that.

Since she hadn’t told her friends much of anything about her boyfriend, we decided it would be easiest for me to be me, rather than trying to play someone else. We talked all through the night as we raced down the idyllic Italian coast, taking turns driving and telling stories as we learned everything we could about each other. We exchanged intimate details and deeply personal stories, nothing was off limits. If I could help, even for just one day, I would.

The wedding went off without a hitch, and so did our little facade. But innocent kisses on the cheek to help sell our story turned in to real kisses and stolen moments away from bright lights and prying eyes. We were two people faking love who were quickly falling in love.

After that I abandoned my Mediterranean wandering and went back with her to Venice, where she was going to school. I signed up for fall classes, found a job, and learned Italian. We were married the day after I graduated from university.

I go back to the states sometimes, and we always swing through Vancouver, but our hearts and our home will always be in Italy.

‘How can I find Happiness?’ is everywhere.

And one of the big things happiness researchers thought they knew about happiness was that as long as people have enough money to live comfortably, money does not affect their level of happiness. But new research has proven that wrong.

It turns out, more money means more happiness

While the link between happiness and money seems to be quite conclusive, the really unfortunate thing about this research study is that the researchers did not look at what it is about money that makes people happier. Chances are good that having an abundance of green paper is not in itself making people happier, but something (probably more than one something) that people use that green paper for is making them happier.

It should also be noted that material possessions are probably not high on that list of things. Some of the more likely ways that money makes people happier could include:

• Having more free time and more vacations
• Having less stress in life as a result of not having to worry about money
• Having the means to achieve financially dependent goals, like owning a house for instance
• Having more money could merely be a symptom of having a job that is challenging and stimulating (how many minimum wage jobs are challenging and stimulating?)
• Having more money could be the result of setting and achieving goals in life, the achievement of which would also increase happiness

The important thing to keep in mind about the above list is that money is not an absolute requirement for any of those things. Even achieving financially dependent goals could be more easily achieved by simply improving the management of whatever money one does make.

In short, happiness is a means to an end, and as long as we can be creative there is always more than one means to any end.

How to use this research in your life

The take home lesson from this research is not to go get an office job and start climbing the corporate ladder. Doing that might increase wealth, which would in turn increase happiness, but it would probably increase unhappiness in so many other ways that the negative would far outweigh the positive.

Money should be an added bonus, rather than the end goal. Devoting oneself to an enjoyable and worthwhile career will bring its own rich rewards, of which money is only one small part.

Doing something for love of the doing is a really fantastic way to make a lot of money, because when doing something for love it is easy to believe in it and be devoted to it and that kind of determination inevitably leads to success, and money, and happiness.

Further Reading:
- Economic Growth and Subjective Well-being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox (pdf) by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Ellen Langer, the psychologist leading the experiment, believed that making these men live as if they were 20 years younger than they actually were might actually make them physically younger.

At first glance it seems like the kind of thing that belongs in a bad science fiction novel. The idea that we can make ourselves physically younger by fooling our brains seems almost laughable, but Langer and her colleagues weren’t convinced.

As the experiment wore on, it became apparent that Langer had been right. What had started out as a mental exercise had actually begun to change the elderly men in physical ways, and the changes weren’t subtle, they were quite remarkable. The men began to look younger, their posture improved, and their joints even became more flexible.

The most telling change of all, however, was finger length. As we age, our bodies shrink and succumb to the ravages of gravity, and fingers are no different in this respect. As we get older, our fingers get shorter. In Langer’s experiment, however, the fingers of the research participants actually reversed this trend and started getting longer.

These men weren’t popping a new pill or even trying out a new diet, they were simply thinking themselves younger. Our minds, it turns out, can do a lot more than we give them credit for.

Of course, not all of us can live in a time warp bubble, and doing away with cell phones, laptops, and all the other perks of modern living might make the medicine worse than the disease. There are, however, other ways that our minds can be harnessed for our betterment.

In 2007, Langer, along with fellow researcher Alia Crum, set out to reaffirm the findings from 1979 with a new experiment.

The two researchers took a group of hotel workers and tested them on a variety of health measures before splitting them in half. One group, the control group, was told nothing and went about their work normally. The other group was told that the work they did every day was good exercise, and that it satisfied the surgeon general’s requirements for an active lifestyle. The researchers also provided this group of hotel workers with specific examples of how their work was actually good exercise.

Langer and Crum waited four weeks and then went back to retest the two groups. They found that the group that had been told their work was actually good exercise had, when compared to the initial tests, experienced a decrease in body fat, blood pressure, weight, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. The control group had not experienced the same changes.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing more than a placebo effect, but who among us wouldn’t gladly take a placebo effect that caused us to lose weight and become physically younger.

We may not be able to wish in to existence vast sums of wealth like The Secret leads us to believe, but it’s clear that our minds can change our lives in significant and surprising ways.

Health, beauty, and even happiness could have a lot more to do with our internal state of mind than the externalities that affect us every day.