My grandmother often said to me, “You can count the number of your true friends on the fingers of one hand.” For a long time I thought this was true. However, I've now discovered my grandmother was only half right. Maybe we do only make a few best friends in our lifetime, but those aren't the only people that we can call friends. There are many different types. Let me tell you about a few of them.

    One type of friends is the type I call the “football mom friend”. My neighbor Sally is a good example. We both have kids who play football in a football club, and someone has to take them to practice and pick them up. Sally and I and two other mothers take turns to do this. We meet sometimes and have tea and talk about what our kids are doing, but those are the only times that we meet each other. I enjoy being with these women, but we don't do anything else together.

    Another type is called the “hobby friend”. That's the person you share an interest or a hobby with. Michael and Cater, who are brothers, are a good example of this type. We're all in a bird watching club. Every few weekends the members of the club go on a trip to watch different kinds of birds. There's nothing romantic about my relationship with Michael and Cater, of course. We just share interest in birds.

    Then there's the “other half of the couple” type of friends. Jim is married to Rose, a friend that I've known since college. When Rose married Jim, I realized that I would have to be Jim's friend if I want to continue to be Rose's. Jim and I don't share so many interests, but we do have a friendly relationship.

    Ever walked to the shops only to find, once there, you've completely forgotten what you went for? Or struggled to remember the name of an old friend? For years we've accepted that a forgetful brain is as much a part of ageing as wrinkles and grey hair. But now a new book suggests that we've got it all wrong.

    According to The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, by science writer Barbara Strauch, when it comes to the important things, our brains actually get better with age. In fact, she argues that some studies have found that our brain hits its peak between our 40s and 60s— much later than previously thought.

    Furthermore, rather than losing many brain cells as we age, we retain （保留）them, and even produce new ones well into middle age. For years it's been assumed that brain, much like the body, declines with age. But the longest, largest study into what happens to people as they age suggests otherwise.

    This continuing research has followed 6,000 people since 1956, testing them every seven years. It has found that on average, participants performed better on cognitive （认知的）tests in their 40s and 50s than they had done in their 20s. Specifically, older people did better on tests of vocabulary, verbal memory (how many words you can remember) and problem solving.

    Where they performed less well was number ability and perceptual speed－how fast you can push a button when ordered. However, with more complex tasks such as problem-solving and language, we are at our best at middle age and beyond. In short, researchers are now coming up with scientific proof that we do get wiser with age.

    Neuroscientists are also finding that we are happier with ageing. A recent US study found older people were much better at controlling and balancing their emotions. It is thought that when we're younger we need to focus more on the negative aspects of life in order to learn about the possible dangers in the world, but as we get older we've learned our lessons and are sub-consciously aware that we have less time left in life: therefore, it becomes more important for us to be happy.

    Someone sent me an email urging me to acquire a lot more resources, suggesting could do so much more good if I had an 8 or 9 figure net income of 6 like I've been doing for years. He claimed to have acquired a great deal of wealth himself and found it highly beneficial to fueling his path with a heart.

    As I consider his suggestion, I find myself not having much clarity(清晰的思维)as to what I'd do with I million or 10 million more money flowing through my life. I put so much attention on creativity, fulfillment, exploration, relationships, etc. that I find it difficult to intelligently imagine how more financial resources could provide extra fuel for that, except in small ways or in ways that aren't particularly meaningful to me.

    Lately I've been considering what it would be like to deliberately reduce my income for a while and see if I could live on much less，just for the experience. What if I capped my net personal income at $10,000 per year, for instance? That isn't such a big deal to me, though, since I already went through a period of low income like that during the 1990s, and I learned that I could still do what I love regardless of income.

    I've never worked in a business environment-the only job I've ever had was working for $6/hour in a video game store while I was in college. So I've never seen how larger operations allocate resources. That's probably why I haven't pushed myself to acquire more. As I mentioned in my book. Money and Your Path With a Heart，my main financial goal in life was to make money irrelevant in my life.

    I'm not interested in building an empire. What interests me is exploring personal growth and sharing what I learn along the way. In some ways I feel that acquiring and acquiring and allocating more resources could become a big distraction. I'm already doing what I want to be doing, so why rick distracting myself to acquire more resources, especially when I lack the idea about how I should treat such resources? I like having freedom and flexibility，and I don't really see how more resources would meaningfully improve that.

    The evidence for harmony may not be obvious in some families. But it seems that four out of five young people now get on with their parents, which is the opposite of the popularly held image of unhappy teenagers locked in their room after endless family quarrels.

    An important new study into teenage attitudes surprisingly shows that their family life is more harmonious than it has ever been in the past.” We were surprised by just how positive today's young people seen to be about their families,” said one member of the research team. “They're expected to be rebellious(叛逆的) and selfish but actually they have other things on their minds; they want a car and material goods, and they worry about whether school is serving them well. There's more negotiation and discussion between parents and children, and children expect to take part in the family decision-making process. They don't want to rock the boat.”

    So it seems that this generation of parents is much more likely than parents of 30 years ago to treat their children as friends. “My parents are happy to discuss things with me and willing to listen to me,” says 17-years-old Daniel Lazall. “I always tell them when I'm going out clubbing. As long as they know what I'm doing, they're fine with it.” Susan Crome, who is now 21, agrees.”Looking back on the last 10 years, there was a lot of what you could call negotiation. For example, as long as I'd done all my homework, I could go out on a Saturday night. But I think my grandparents were a lot stricter with my parents than that.”

    Maybe this positive view of family life should not be unexpected. It is possible that the idea of teenagers' rebellion is not rooted in real facts. A researcher comments, “Our surprise that teenagers say they get along well with their parents comes because of a brief period in our social history when teenagers were regarded as different beings. But that idea of rebelling and breaking away from their parents really only happened during that one time in the 1960s when everyone rebelled. The normal situation throughout history has been a smooth change from helping out with the family business to taking it over.”

    Sam Allred suffers from a rare and incurable kidney (肾脏)disease. One day, when his sister was playing a song repeatedly, Sam sang along. His sister thought it was funny so she recorded it and posted the video online. The video—and Sam—became a hit. Only 8 years old at that time, he couldn't have expected the response.

    "(The television show) The Doctors called and wanted me on their show so they paid for me to go to California," says Sam, now 13,"and we got to stay in a hotel where all the movie stars stayed."

    During that visit to California, Angle Allred, Sam's mother, had an idea about Sam writing a children's book. Together, she and Sam wrote Opening Hearts, which tells Sam's experience of living with a chronic (慢性的) illness.

    "I wrote the book to teach people to be kinder to people," Sam says.

    Moreover, Sam wanted to send pillows to sick children staying in hospitals around the country to make their stay more comfortable, an idea that came from a time when he was in the hospital.

    "A few kind boys came in with pillows and they gave me one and it meant a lot to me that someone cared about kids in the hospital," says Sam.

    Angie thought of starting a nonprofit organization to provide a way for people to contribute money to realize Sam's ideas. She named the nonprofit organization Kindness for Kids.

    Since then, Sam has taken pillows to children staying at Providence Hospital in Anchorage.

    Sam's father, Scott Allred, owns a small business that contracts (承包) shipping services with FedEx Ground. He asked the company for help.

    "FedEx Ground learned about Sam's pillow project, "says Erin Truxal, manager of public relations for FedEx Ground. "We thought, 'What a perfect way for us to get involved.'"

    The company provided shipping services for Sam to ship about 5,000 pillows to hospitals.

    Sam wants to send more pillows to all of the children's hospitals in every state. His goal is simple: Kids in the hospital as happy as they were before they got sick.