Hello Sunshine
Summer. It’s my favourite time of year by far. I love the season’s sense of expansiveness, its long days, languid evenings, limitless horizons. Even the heat I love, aware that summer’s glory is brief as a candle. Blink, and it’s winter again, which to a Canadian signals the end of paradise as experienced in flower beds and bird song.
As summer hastens us outdoors, we can’t but help experience a heightened awareness of the external world.
We see life in full bloom, colour anew. Even gazing dreamily at passing clouds can conjure things not discerned before – a nag in a nimbostratus; a castle in a cumulus. You get the picture.
Summer’s large blue skies loosen and extend the imagination, encouraging fresh ways of perceiving and thinking about things.
That ability to see potential in a momentary flash of inspiration is what I call a summer mindset, and it’s shared by many of the people you are about to read about here, in the summer issue of the award-winning The York University Magazine.
From established scientists producing breakthrough research to young entrepreneurs helming their first startups, they are fresh thinkers with strong connections to York. They epitomize bright.
Among them are York grads Jay Klein, whose brilliant idea to sell sugar-free gum and mints to the world is giving a small local business a big presence in the multibillion-dollar global candy market, and Shereen Ladha, one of YouTube Canada’s NextUp Creators who is shaking up the internet with her Bollywood dance videos.
We also have stories on the Canadian origins of the IMAX big-screen phenom and on why hogwash has suddenly gone hog-wild, and why that’s worrisome.
Summer being a time of bounty, there’s more of course. The hope is that you find it all dazzling, much like the season itself. ■