I have always found starting a big writing project to be easier if I have given my house a thorough cleaning. Somehow, the idea of my house being dusty and cluttered makes my brain’s machinery turn more slowly or even creak to a halt. So whenever I embark on a new project, I literally clean …
Continue reading “Life-Love 84: A good spring cleaning is a good feeling”
Stories are at the heart of our experience as humans. We love to live vicariously through the tales told by the people we know: our friends, family and even strangers whom we meet at a friendly pub or our favourite café. There is something unique and special about hearing a story told by someone in …
We all worry about things an awful lot. We think about being single, being in difficult relationships, improving our conditions at work. We worry about our friends, and their relationships and worries. Sometimes we worry so much that we start to feel a weight upon our shoulders, a weight that pushes down upon us and …
Continue reading “Life-Love 82: Freeing yourself from worry”
We seems to feel tied up so much of the time. Tied up by obligations to our friends, to our places of work, to those we love – it is easy to start thinking about all of this as a burden, to lose perspective. In the past, it was easy to become submerged in the …
Continue reading “Life Love 81: How social media is a new town square”
We spend much of our lives wracked with doubt. We wonder if we are smart enough, tough enough, tall enough, good-looking enough, and so on. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see reflected back at us all of the things that worry us – our looks, our aging skin, our greying hair. …
Continue reading “Life-Love 80: Someone who believes in you”
We all have a relationship to the past. Oftentimes, that relationship is conflicted – we don’t feel as though we want to take ownership of it, or can’t make sense of parts of it. It can be challenging and confusing. So we do our best to make sense of the past, to try to piece …
One of the great challenges of our modern lives is that we spend so much of them alone. We fill the loneliness with noise – the television in the house, the radio in the car. When we go out at night, we experience the brutal sonic assault visited upon our senses by the pounding, dehumanizing …
So much of our life is spent driving from place to place, or taking the bus, or even just the elevator instead of the stairs. All of these ways of getting around are artificial, and transfer the art of getting around to machines. In fact they transfer a big part of perceiving the world to …
We all love to be liked. We try really hard to get the attention of others, which sometimes leads us to build up an image about who we are and what we can do in the minds of others. This can, however, be deadly for our reputations. When we set expectations in the minds of …
We spend an awful lot of time worrying about change. When we are little, we think an awful lot about changes to come: we look forward to some of them, like getting older and wiser thereby enjoying more respect and consideration from our parents and other elders; and we dread others – changing school or …
Continue reading “Life-Love 75: Realising that change is part of life”
