Abraham Maslow, the humanist psychologist created a ‘hierarchy of needs’ (it is pictured below using the simply psychology websites’ icon – because it is so simple). According to it (but of course I oversimplify) needs at a higher level of the hierarchy cannot be met before those at the lower levels, and these needs are, … More If self-realisation through reading is a luxury designed for an élite, yet I still can’t live without it, isn’t it a necessity? Why I buy and read about the obscure and unurgent things in life. I read Charles Freeman’s (2023) ‘The Children of Athena’.

Most bloggers create a tagline, although they attach it as a tagline name or statement of intent only the blogsite. Mine was ‘Lifelong Learning’. I intended, I thought to indicate a response to retirement, to a belief that divorced the idea of learning from institutional education and from work. But terms deteriorate. Lifelong learning became … More Autonomic Learning For Life

A claim of being ‘passionate’ about something often comes with an apology these days. Passionate people don’t just talk to you. The ‘go off on one’ in the modern term. They seem forced to act or talk in ways that go beyond people’s expectations of them, or indeed anyone. Those people often include the person … More Passionate or not? Feeling forced to feel it or forced not to feel at all.

The answer to this prompt question (‘What are the most important things needed to live a good life?) has to be one based on how and who we love and value outside the circle of what we call me. But you cannot achieve such things easily and they are often obscured and misrepresented. We have … More Dirg Aab-Richards, a Black gay elder from Brixton, would say the important things are an integration of ‘love’ and ‘communities of diversity’. Yet he felt he had to reinvent them, rewritten from the ‘works of a white man’ in order to find ‘What wasn’t there but was’. This is a blog on Jason Okundaye’s 2024 book, ‘Revolutionary Acts’.

In Act 4 Scene 2 of Cymbeline, a late play of Shakespeare’s, is one of his most famous songs, possibly made so by Virginia Woolf’s obsession with it. It is, though, rarely reprinted as the dramatic lyric or part song, distributed between two roles that it is (Cymbeline, Act , Scene 2, lines 331 – … More The wisdom of the late Shakespeare plays tells us that to ‘fear no more’ is to be dead.

Olivia Laing tells us as her book The Garden Against Time closes that she loves a line  from the fourteenth-century Psalter by Richard Rolle: This boke is cald garden closed, wel enseled, paradyse full of appils’. In contrast she goes on to say that her ‘book is a garden opened and spilling over. The common … More Olivia Laing thinks the answer to this question is to ‘cultivate your garden’. But she shows us what a political act that is!

A ‘rolling description’ is where I post early on the day of an event and keep updating it as the experience I am trying to recount occurs. It is now 6.30 a.m on the 28th May and I am looking forward to friends Rob and Linda Goffee arriving(about 11 a.m. we think, to leave for … More It is joyful to visit mutual interests with friends. A rolling description of visiting The Laing Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to see ‘Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia’, on Tuesday, 28 May 2024.

Erich Fromm distinguishes a healthy culture of ‘being’ from the diseased cultures obsessed by ‘having it all’. However you define ‘all’ in that phrase, it is the acme of a diseased culture ruled by individual greed alone. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was an iconoclast of amd from many traditions in which he was nevertheless embedded, … More Erich Fromm distinguishes a healthy culture of ‘being’ from the diseased cultures created by capitalist ideology, obsessed by individuals dreaming of ‘having it all’. However you define ‘all’ in that phrase, it is the acme of a diseased culture ruled by individual greed alone.

“Strictly speaking,” said Mr. Strict DyasDust, who spent his life correcting others, “this question is nonsense because it uses the word ‘practice’ as a verb whereas it is only a noun. Ask me, if I practise religion, or do not ask at all”. In the UK there probably are people who still care about the … More An Atlantic of a difference in ‘How I Practise as a person following a religion’ or ‘Practicing religion’. And then my answer!