“Resignation” is a truly beautiful poem by Nicki Giovanni. I once saw someone perform a part of this poem with such tenderness, natural intelligence and compassionate insight that I can (and must) say with complete sincerity – even though I do not fully understand what these words mean beyond the haunting feelings and sweet melancholy […]
On yesterday’s visit to garner some domestic logistics I found myself drawn, as is quite natural for me, to a local bookstore. Rapidly yet calmly and with apposite politeness I navigated my way to the psychology and philosophy section, just next to popular science and astronomy. I tend to treat the pages of these books […]
It’s a general observation of human nature that those among us who most deeply need to trust or depend on others are often also those least able to do so. A further complication and irony of this is that it is commonly those whose trust has been broken who both incessantly seek and foundationally fear […]
Rejection is an empty room. Is the hollow hell of fear we feel the clear and present absence as much and in or of ourselves as that of any Other? We each and all in turn eventually reject that Other self and in dusty, mirrored isolation turn once more towards our own essential emptiness and […]
There is a unique and binding property of emotional life that is quite poorly captured by neuroscientific reductionism to organic chemistry, to pure blind mechanism. While it might be true that we can correlate emotional experience with chemical and electrical facts, it is also true that beyond quite limited chemical or behavioural influence, these facts […]
Dissimulated emotional authenticity… “Dissimulation” is a curious term for Nietzsche to use; something is lost in translation? It is all about concealment, obfuscation, to pretend not to have what one has and to pretend to have what one most certainly does not. Perhaps he was suggesting that there is an irreducible element of theatre in […]
It is a simple truth. Fear drives most of our irrational decisions and our inability to admit it is in fact the greatest fallacy of all. Violence, war, hatred, discrimination, cruelty – it is all at base and in essence just fear under another name. People fear the truth of their own essential vulnerability more […]
I wonder at times if all of our emotional lives are little more than random fluctuations and transient, effervescent flickering candle flames in the chaos of our minds and of this, our shared world. Somewhere between the volatile, if probabilistically determinate, entropy of physiological or cognitive reflex and those diverse rationales and causes we retrospectively […]
In an era of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there may be nowhere that is not unveiled by the light of information and data measurement.
Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?
That which frees us is also that which binds us.
Do we fall in love with a person or do we fall in love with the idea of a person? We can never ever really get inside someone else’s head, experience the world as they do and through their eyes, so we are surely only ever as much in love with who we think that […]
