Post (1) of a four-post essay.
The full essay makes up Part 4 of a broader series about language. It stands alone if that’s what you want out of your reading life, but for best results read the previous installments in the series — this, this and this — first.
I saw an interesting thing recently. A tweet from someone I don’t follow came up in my timeline, arguing that logic wasn’t ‘helpful to the complexity of lived experience’.
I think that’s true often enough to make it a worthwhile observation. But the mysterious tweeter went further and claimed that…
There’s nothing to do. You have no goals. You have no plans. You have no targets. You don’t need to achieve anything. Actually, you shouldn’t achieve anything. Why should you? That sounds like a lot of effort. Stop trying to do things. Stop pretending there’s anything for you to do, even if you wanted to. There’s nothing out there to act upon. You can’t influence a thing.
No-one else exists. They don’t possess anything, not even existence. They have no status, not even the status of being alive. They haven’t done anything. They haven’t achieved anything. They haven’t acquired anything…
This is Part 1 of a series on anxiety and depression. I’m not a psychologist but I do spend a lot of time sorting through my own feelings, pulling them apart and seeing what gives them their juice. I hope these posts will be helpful to anyone who’s ever felt similarly to me for similar reasons.
This post is about some of the things that cause anxiety and depression. The next post will look more closely at what they’re made up of and what they feel like. And the posts after that will discuss some management techniques. …
‘If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire…’ (Matthew 6:30)
The implication being that God loves us more than He loves birds, flowers and grass. But a few months ago I was in the garden watching grass grow — yes, I went through a phase of that when it was last warm enough to sit outside — and it occurred to me that He loves us the same way He loves those things. And I find that weirdly comforting.
Here’s what I mean. God is a…
You have something to say.
It may be something that’s already been said, but all of us habitually forget the things we already know and need to be constantly reminded of them. Maybe what you say is exactly what someone needs to be reminded of, and you’ve said it at exactly the right moment.
Have you ever read something that was so well put and so relevant to the things you’d been thinking and worrying about that it made you cry? I have.
Even if what you say has already been said, you’re using slightly different words to say it…
Hey all. I’m working on a few looooong posts at the moment that I’m going to have to break up into series, but in the meantime I thought I’d try something different for my first Christmas post. I’ve put together a few stray thoughts, analogies, stories and quasi-poems that have come to me over the last few months, and made them up into a seasonal hamper for your delectation. Hope at least one of them strikes a chord.
Merry Christmas.
‘I think of self-improvement as spending your life painting a picture of the ideal you. Every day you add a…
PIANO TEACHERS AND GOOD SAMARITANS
A piano teacher shows a five-year-old how to play a scale. A thought flits into her mind: ‘I’m much better at piano than this five-year-old’. She automatically dismisses the thought, not because it’s untrue but because it’s uninteresting. She keeps teaching.
A woman encounters a homeless man and gives him some money. She doesn’t say ‘I’m better because I have more money’, ‘I feel guilty for having for money’ or ‘I can’t accept that I have more money — is there any chance he has some money I don’t know about?’ …
My previous post was about who I am, this post is about what I write. Read on if you’re curious about what this publication is for and where I hope it ends up going. Hint: you may be involved.
I realise that as writers go, I don’t give away an awful lot about myself. I write under a pseudonym, I don’t show my face, I don’t talk about my ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, class or age. The most I’ve said about myself is that I’m a Christian millennial — spirituality is pretty fundamental to my writing, and being a ’90s kid is so relevant to some of the generation-war stuff I write about that it can’t help but come up.
Why the secrecy? Partly because it’s freeing — I don’t write particularly inflammatory stuff but it’s nice to think…
This is Part 3 of a series on hippies, although it stands alone if you like your posts to stand alone. Part 1, which focuses more on politics, is here. Part 2, which focuses more on peace ‘n’ love ‘n’ morality, is here.
‘We were talking about hippy music.’
‘Ah, the music. Wild, ebullient, unashamedly melodic. You don’t hear the Sixties in the lyrics, you hear it in the notes — in the rhythms, the energy, the optimism and freedom. Black music has always had those things, but very little white music from Handel up to early rock ’n’ roll…
Writer, composer and filmmaker, into soul music and Chinese philosophy. Editor @ The Small Dark Light