Sometimes it doesn’t matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that it’s night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It’s not that time stops or that it hasn’t started. This is time. You are here. Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time Once uponContinue reading “On living in the moment”
Tag Archives: emotional issues
On knowing your place
Home’s where you go when you run out of homes. John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy In British usage, at least, telling someone they should know their place is (or used to be) a rebuke. It meant knowing their place in the class hierarchy – with the not very subtle subtext that their place wasContinue reading “On knowing your place”
On death and rebirth
Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death. Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, Book I. Regular readers of this blog will know that I tend to write a post at each of the four quarters of theContinue reading “On death and rebirth”
On the Day of the Dead
Life is wasted on the living. Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the \Galaxy This post appears on the first of November: All Saints’ Day, also known as All Hallows (hence Hallowe’en for the previous evening). In Celtic tradition it is Samhain, the mid-point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. In Latin countriesContinue reading “On the Day of the Dead”
On sanity
Mens sana in corpore sano.(A healthy mind in a healthy body.) Juvenal, Satires, X You need to be quite careful when quoting Roman satirists. My old school, for instance, had a motto taken from the poet Martial: “Quas dederis solas semper habebis opes” – “Only those riches you have given [to others] will be yoursContinue reading “On sanity”
On the end of a chapter
I know nothing stays the sameBut if you’re willing to play the gameIt’s coming around again Carly sIMON, cOMING aROUND aGAIN Unless you have been living under a rock, and goodness knows I do my best to do so, you will have heard of the recent demise of Queen Elizabeth II. Or, if you’re Scottish,Continue reading “On the end of a chapter”
On being disconnected from reality
Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World One of the things that makes human beings as adaptable as they are – and therefore so numerous and widespread – is our ability to ignore inconvenient facts. When IContinue reading “On being disconnected from reality”
On excess
Too much of a good thing is wonderful. Mae West Context is a wonderful thing. Mae West was speaking in the context of the Hays Code, Prohibition, and the general backlash against freedom of expression of all kinds, but especially those involving sex, alcohol and recreational drugs. It was in the same context that H.Continue reading “On excess”
On helplessness
I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do, and at such a moment one feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless. Vincent van Gogh Back in 1902, a pamphlet appeared with the arresting titleContinue reading “On helplessness”
On processed food
“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world – and what is to become ofContinue reading “On processed food”
The sound of falling leaves 