Resilience

If control is a delusion, and it’s pursuit is ultimately futile, what would be a better strategy? Given the complexity of human, social and global life, accurate predictions are not feasible. The grander the scale of the prediction, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong.
However, at a personal level, we need some [...]

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The End of Control

One of the most amazing capabilities of the human mind is the imagination. However, this great ability brings certain difficulties, not least of which is being able to imagine our own mortality. It’s this existential fear which underlies most, if not all, other specific fears. Whilst very few people actually believe it’s possible to escape [...]

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Myths which improve life

People often use the word myth as if it is the opposite of the word truth. It’s juxtaposed to reality. You hear that a lot. An explanation about something is dismissed as a myth, meaning that it’s not true, not a fact, that’s it’s unreal. It’s quite strange how we’ve developed this way of using [...]

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The stories that emerge from little observations

Let me tell you a story.
Last week, when visiting my parents, my mum said she was looking for her collection of Robert Burns poetry (it was Burns Day), and she came across her aunt Wilhelmina’s “Burns Birthday Record”. Here it is

I’ve never seen a book like this before. You can see it was owned by [...]

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theWarofArt

On the plane from Edinburgh to Tokyo I read theWarofArt by Steven Pressfield (ISBN 9 780446 691437). It’s subtitled “Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles” and has a brilliant little Foreword by Robert McKee which really captures the essence and the scope of the book. It’s one of those books about [...]

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Poets change the way we see the world

I think poets have not only the keenest powers of observation but their words illuminate. The world looks different after reading poetry. I’m not referring to particular passages which have changed my perception or understanding of particular places or experiences. I’m referring to, well, what would you call it? The poetic stance? The poetic viewpoint? [...]

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Visual thinking

Look at this

This is a little drawing to illustrate the fact that there have been only 200 generations (each of about 25 years) since the beginning of recorded history right up to the present time. Isn’t that amazing? This grabbed me for two reasons. First, it really captures just how little time has passed since [...]

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Station poem

My post about the blackbird spotted from the delayed train prompted my friend, the poet, Larry Butler, to send me a poem he had written some time back. You can see why it came to his mind on reading that post. I’ve asked him for his permission to publish it here and I’m delighted to [...]

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Heroes Not Zombies – the book of the blog

I’ve just taken delivery of my first attempt to use blurb.com to produce a book. It’s fabulous. It was so easy to do and the quality of the hardback book I’ve received is way beyond my expectations. And for any fellow bloggers, it’s a real treat to be able to page through a hard copy [...]

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Writing your self

Two of my best blog friends have posted interesting writing ideas yet. I’m going to point them out to you so you can go and check them out.
First of all, mrschili, across in her inner door blog, picked up an idea from a fellow blogger (wordlily), about writing a six word autobiography. The results are [...]

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