Whenever something dramatic happens there is a (very natural) tendency to treat it as “all bad” or “all good” – a mistake surely as it is extremely rare that any event hits either of those extremes, even more so when the event is far reaching either by dint of the number of people affected or due to the length of time involved. Rather there will be a mixture of good consequences and bad ones – all of which need to be taken account of to determine whether the event was beneficial or detrimental in the long term to the wider community.
George McConnell
Are You Happy With Your Profile Picture?
On social media, is your profile picture how you see yourself or how you want others to see you?
Entanglement
This blog is predicated on the foundation that I don’t know everything. That – I am sure everyone who knows me will agree – is a not unreasonable starting point. 😉 Sometimes it surprises me just how much is included in the not known bucket – then I think – what about all the rest that I haven’t yet realised I don’t know – and that makes me slightly more comfortable with having such a big list of things I don’t know – it is dwarved by the (likely) list of things I don’t know that I don’t know!!!
Opening Up
Going back through my blog posts I guess there are many different sorts of trigger – things which spark some sort of idea in my mind that leads to some sort of outpouring here. Often, I guess, the result is quite out of proportion to the cause – many times the trigger takes me off at quite a tangent.
We Are What We Are
I received an email the other day that widened my thinking on the subject of “we are what we are”. Previous blog entries have already delved a bit into my thoughts about there being no room for any consideration of going back and “changing history” by making different decisions the second time around. This email added a new “dimension” to this issue.
A Modicum Of Doubt
Many say it is of vital importance to hold true to your beliefs. Belief is a concept that is central to “being human”. I would like to suggest that it is more important to have doubts. That Doubt is not so much central to “being” as to “becoming”.
Time Marches On
In recent days I have had a couple of discussions about “getting old” – and more specifically about a slight feeling of disbelief about how old we actually are. Is “oldness” a state of mind – quite separate from “age” which is clearly a measure of time?
Hypocrisy Must Be Avoided
A tendency to see everything in terms of right/wrong – or black/white – or any similar binary distinction is a blight on many people’s view of the world. In some very rare cases it is true that you can make such clear cut distinctions, but mostly you come up with either a “shades of grey” type of situation or a boundary that has been set pretty much arbitrarily somewhere between the two options.
What Is Not Real?
Has there ever been a work of fiction that didn’t – in some way – draw on reality? This is, of course, sort of the reverse of my previous thoughts on whether our memory of reality is accurate or intermingled with its own fictions. In some cases the “fictional” world is created within a reasonably accurate representation of a specific environment. In others a “new world” is imagined in which the characters interact – often in a very similar way to what we are used to.
Why A Madeleine!
Having written A Different Sort Of Madeleine I realised that my readers (always assuming I have any….) will have been completely thrown by the fact that it was written on the assumption that I had earlier posted a piece about madeleines. It turns out that I must have dreamt it!!