What’s your #1 priority tomorrow? Tomorrow, as it happens, is the second session of a seven week counselling session I have started to try and reconfigure a life gone awry and an emotional economy in crisis. Sometimes, you start these things with a sense of how an episode like this in your life has been … More Facing 😈demons and slaying 🐉 dragons: the power of being counselled.
In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled? Alasdair Gray quoted Canadian poet Dennis Leigh when he used the phrase in my title. On the outer wall of the Holyrood building of the Scottish parliament it appears as a monumental word art work and its authorship is attributed to him alone. He spent … More “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”: does hard work fulfill only when it were ‘as if’ it could make anew a world in which work has become to seem futile and counter-productive.
What’s the trait you value most about yourself? Trait theory derived from the work of the psychologist, Gordon Allport. It contends that human personality is characterised by traits that resemble states of being, feeling and thinking but which are stable and enduring.They emphasise a view of psychological development that is heavily influenced by innate oor … More I like to think I value the fact that critical thinking is an early response when I approach questions asked of me. But is critical thinking a trait? And why is it so unpopular? This blog is on whether trait theory helps in self-understanding.
During my working life which started in the late 1970s, work changed its nature, the largest symptom of which was the growth of public service managerialism. In the name of efficiency and resource economics, work changed to match business models. It followed that objectives like increased well-being and secure attachment in relationship-based work were turned … More Work from which you learned, grew as a person and gained personal fulfillment used once to exist. Here are 3 examples from my past career.
As soon as we seek to possess and venerate a ‘culture’ (even assume its its nature as thing with boundaries that has internal integrity or unity, wholeness and exclusive definition) we are already in deep water. Even ‘pride’ is problematic except as a claim for recognition for a culture that has been marginalised and is … More The assumptions in this question that concern me are those of ‘ownership’ and ‘pride’ in ‘one’ culture. Are those implicit claims compatible with an open attitude to the world we live in and the beings that inhabit it?
Wikipedia is, as always, helpful, wherein on the subject of ‘Human branding’ it says: Human branding or stigmatizing is the process by which a mark, usually a symbol or ornamental pattern, is burned into the skin of a living person, with the intention that the resulting scar makes it permanent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_branding A further extract on the use of … More There is a terrible truth in the origin of the term ‘brand’ for me, which stops me ever associating with it.
It horrified Bumble the Beadle when Oliver asked for ‘More’. The very word turned his face to burning coals; his heart, so hard for so long, crumbled as if for a moment it were becoming ash and falling away. But return it did to its ancient, petrified state: the kind of fear that is as … More More! But isn’t it true that less is more! Hardly! And here’s why. LOL.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? Perhaps the best advice about how to act next in any complicated human situation is to be wary of acting in the way you are told to act, however respectfully one listens to and hears out the advisor. Keep in mind too that the advice will … More The best advice is to, by all means, listen to advice but be wary of acting as it prescribes that you do.
What things give you energy? Philosophers tell us that Aristotle used the term ἐνέργεια (it transliterates as ‘energeia’ – the possible root of the work ‘energy’) in a very different way to the use of the word in modern science, whether that be in physics, chemistry or biology, where it names various kinds of measurable … More If we thought as much about what energy is for as about seeking selfishly for the ideal sources of it for our individual selves, a world that is going bad might get better.
Which topics would you like to be more informed about? The TV Series of Ragnarök (Netflix) On Norwegian TV it made sense to call a series Ragnarök that was based on a community on the fjords that learn the hard and irreversible way the effects of climate change, and environmental / ecological degradation on them … More Is Ragnarök on its way? It is but if we ‘knew’ that and were fully informed by that knowledge, we would be urging Governments to act – and now!
What would your life be like without music? The sound of the concord or discord of the world are only unheard in the cold of a tomb. There is no life where music does not happen, for the nervous system is attuned to the to a range of sounds that align with feelings of security … More “The man that hath no music in himself,/ … Let no such man be trusted”. We can’t escape the ambiguous personal politics of music.
How do you celebrate holidays? Given I am retired, I have to redefine the term ‘holiday’. But, why not start with the term holiday itself. The Word Press question-setter follows precise grammar (though that precision is rather dishonoured in everyday use I think) by using the plural ‘holidays’ in this question here to refer to … More A celebrant of the holy days of retirement. Some thoughts about the fate of ritual in a world defined by scheduled work.
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