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life Philosophy

The Mistakes we Make

What is our painful memory of life but the melted wax artefacts of so many errors and regrets, sometimes softly revisited and sculpted into little candles of light as lanterns by which we might then see the long road that ever lies before us? What is a hope of future happiness but that distant shore […]

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life

What the World Needs Now

There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]

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life

Stranger Traffic

Most of the people I ever encounter are hidden behind their windscreens – sitting behind steering wheels, dashing from lane to lane and engaging in that frustrating automotive ubiquity of second-guessing each other in case any of us loses focus for a moment and does something that proves to be catastrophically stupid. This is how […]

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life

On Paradoxical Love

What would you do if you discovered that the only reason you even existed was to bring compassion, love and happiness or even the possibility of hope and light or learning and wisdom into the life of a truly beautiful, fascinating, sensitive and brilliant human being that you were almost certain to never meet? We […]

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life

Purpose in Life

Purpose is really just actualised meaning and just like meaning there is no purpose in life other than that which we make. The reason that most people are looking for meaning or validation and something, anything at all to provide a goal or trajectory around and as which they might wrap their aspirations and goals […]

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life

Some days are dark…

…some days are dark; dreams grow distant like those long afternoon shadows that stretch off towards vanishing horizons like feathered violets in your eyes and there, intangible and coiled in the fading light, lurk invisible as poisoned serpents of self-doubt that eventually visit us all, in troubled sleep or as a metallic-taste of dreaming awake […]

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life

At times, a broken heart…

The sting in the tail (or tale?) of unhappy relationships is that we sometimes opt for unhappy companionship over loneliness, and even as we eagerly drink from a renewed cup of emotional freedom and sorrow or isolation and living solitude we rarely acknowledge that this certain subtle sense of hollow anticipation and insecurity is the […]

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life

Time and Memory

Just living is proving to be quite difficult, at times. I really miss being a child and not constantly feeling as though I have to second-guess everything both I and everyone else do or think and feel. There is a simple state of just existing, of simply being present in life that seems to leave […]

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life

Christmas Eve, 2020

Christmas Eve: a lonely walk around my neighbourhood where I captured these glorious sunflowers basking in the last rays of one of those long slow Summer’s afternoons that seem to sidestep evening and slide straight into night. It’s been a spectacularly difficult year for everyone and while I can’t see this changing at scale in […]

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life

Desolation

There is a deep and disconsolate desolation I feel at times, a profound and overwhelming sense of futility and pointlessness that is impermeable to light and is also and quite equally unassailable by any rationale of emotional transience, by appeals to the generally temporary nature of such a darkening and empty inundation. I doubt very […]

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life

A key without a lock…

That moment you realise that not only is your dream truly and forever unattainable, but that all your hopes and aspirations to nurture and protect that precious soul and eternal flame of joy and living beauty or unbounded freedom were only ever bundled hollow, haunted and melancholy intuitions of your own failure. To become a […]

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life

Letters to Eternity

I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]