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Fear Bucket List

By Ruth Ostrow on 10 March 2012 in All Posts, Weekend Magazine Columns

We should be out there doing the things we most fear before we die: A Fear Bucket List

I’m out at sea in a small boat shivering as if I were cold. But the wind is warm. It’s just fear. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve feared deep water. The reason is sharks. I grew up with a father obsessed with sharks. The story he told was that he watched a man taken when he was a boy. We grew up with posters on the walls of gaping jaws and a constant diet of shark films like Blue Water White Death and later Jaws 1, 2 and 3; with me at the drive-in hiding under the seat.

But on my recent trip Africa I made a pledge. I would tackle as many of my fears as was possible in a month. A “Fear Bucket List”. I’ve always believed a person can be summed up by the risks they’re prepared to take. One of my greatest fears is heights. Ladders make me queasy from the second rung up. But out in the middle of the great Serengeti plains I was offered the chance to go up in a hot air balloon to look down on elephants, lions and giraffes roaming wild. And so up I went, terrified but proud of myself.

Today is sharks. My partner wants to swim with whale sharks off the coast of Mozambique. Originally choosing to stay on the boat, I’ve listened to the pleadings of the dive instructor who assures me that this is “the experience of a lifetime”. Yes, there are dangerous sharks in the water, but they never swim with whale sharks. Thus we are quite safe as long as we stay next to the huge, gentle giants. So I decide to follow my motto: “Feel the fear and do it anyway”.

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Compatibility

By Ruth Ostrow on 10 March 2012 in All Posts, Relationships, Weekend Magazine Columns

Are there really failed marriages and relationships or do we just change?

I met an interesting man while travelling in Africa. We stayed at his hotel on a remote island in Mozambique. It had been his dream to run a resort. His great passion is the sea. Before he built his hotel he did many jobs in different industries but would always retreat to the ocean in the evenings and on weekends, fishing for endless hours, scuba diving, and snorkelling.

One night over drinks he talked to me about his “failed” marriage. He said he was still grieving the loss of his wife and regular contact with the children. But he told me something that surprised me. “The problem was that she hated the sea. She wouldn’t even walk on a beach. She hated sand … We always fought about it.”

Strangely on the same trip I met a woman whose passion was surfing. Similarly, she had spent many years with a bookish intellectual who couldn’t understand her need to get up every morning and drive to the surf; accusing her of not loving him enough to stay in bed. Continue Reading →

Call Centre Blues

By Ruth Ostrow on 24 December 2011 in All Posts, Weekend Magazine Columns

Call Centres are driving us all crazy

I WAS dealing with a call centre recently, trying to get something I had organised to be cancelled. The process was exhausting. Every time I called I had to stay on the line for at least a half hour because of the pre-Christmas backup.

And each time I called for a progress report I had to tell the story all over again to operators who pretended they were from the institution I was dealing with but quickly revealed their ignorance about some of the simplest questions I was asking.

“I’ll just ask my supervisor,” they would say while I waited another 15 minutes. Most were from overseas call centres and had no idea about the local situation I kept referring to. This is so common nowadays that most of us are used to it.

No longer do we have a bank manager, or insurance broker, or favourite customer service person at major companies – we’re put through to impersonal voices far, far away and can’t even ask for the same person for a follow-up. Continue Reading →

Why and how we get scammed

By Ruth Ostrow on 17 December 2011 in All Posts, Weekend Magazine Columns

How and why do we get conned? According to Paul J. Zak neuro-economist, and columnist for Psychology Today it’s about brain chemicals

A COLLEAGUE of mine got caught in a Nigerian money scam before much was known about them. And he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was bright, head of a leading company, and savvy. None of his friends understood how he could have been roped in. Continue Reading →

Don’t sweat the small stuff

By Ruth Ostrow on 9 December 2011 in All Posts, Weekend Magazine Columns

We fret our daily pains without remembering how trivial much of it is

IT’S been a hell of a week for me. Many things have gone wrong, with one drama snowballing into another. The only thing that’s kept me above water was hanging out for an amazing trip we had planned for Christmas. Even though I’m a travelling gal, it was to be the trip of a lifetime, trekking across the Sahara to a festival called Festival in the Desert, in Timbuktu, Mali.

Being a great lover of African music, in particular music from Senegal and Mali, it was powerfully exciting to imagine being amid the indigenous peoples of the region who come each year for the festival — from north and south on camels and by foot in their traditional costumes, carrying instruments. And then to sleep under the stars surrounded by crackling fires and song.

Warnings on government websites of al-Qa’ida activity in the region did not deter us, so strong was our passion for the music, the dance. Then at the end of my nasty week, the news. Six foreigners were kidnapped from or near Timbuktu — one executed. Continue Reading →

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