A rare moment of clarity: I realise that I’m not going to be here forever, that my own transient, anxious and caffeine-fuelled path through life is, has been and will forever be completely meaningless if I do not in some small way make this world a better place and room for improvement quite clearly exists […]
Don’t let the unexpected arrival of a lifelong friendship blind you to its simplicity: no expectations, only compassion. If they expect anything from you which is in any way, shape or form beyond those things that will nurture your safety, well-being and happiness – then they are not your friends. Friendship is a kind of […]
Soulmates are two sides of one life. It is in the difference and distance between us that we might identify both our selves and each other as though two ends of some silvered, higher-dimensional thread but it is in the binding identity of entangled energy, information and experience that we discover the unity of which […]
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. […]
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 […]
Context: Experts Sign Open Letter Slamming Europe’s Proposal to Recognise Robots as Legal Persons Robots might be a bit of a stretch for asserting personhood although it does remain somewhat indistinct as to where and when awareness, experience or sentience arise in recognisably “living” things. We may (following, at a distance, something I once read […]
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
You can neither give nor take freedom from someone else in any profound, enduring or ultimate and Universal sense – they always and already possess it and no matter how much you rationalise or embellish it with words and reasons or project ethical, ideological and behavioural grammars upon it or as it, the underlying fact […]
Love fascinates me. We might as easily substitute any other concept of similar ambiguity as indicated by the word “peace” or “unity” and “happiness” because, beyond any contingent or arbitrary agreement upon the structural or material facts and experiences these referential entities represent, they all exist in something of a Twilight Zone of unprovable truth. […]
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 […]
We suffer for others and in so many ways but we always do so alone. There is nothing quite so distressing as to live in fear. It is a relentless slow burn of doubt that eats away at us inside and in its haunting persistence and metallic tang generates burdens, not necessarily of fact, but […]
The bitter-sweet cost and irreducible irony of sincere compassion is that in any act of selfless love we will almost always ourselves lose that which we seek to set free.
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