What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself? To tell a story about giving up alcohol as a means of embracing life ought to be a humbling experience for the amount of self-congratulation for having made that choice needs the perspective of stories of people for whom this choice was both starker in … More Alcohol promises to enhance your life. In fact, it impairs the internal biochemical machinery with which to choose life as your primary goal. I decided to live clean of it. That machinery does repair.

Who are your favorite artists? Cooking is an art in which I do not excel. This picture irrelevant to the blog, although this was once my favourite artwork. The joke was devised by my room-mates in the 1970s at university. Art is a big part of my life and it is not as a maker … More If I love art, why do I find this an impossible question to answer?

What is your favorite hobby or pastime? In a neglected novel called The Fugitives by John Broderick, he writes: But just as people will live on in houses demolished by a bomb, going through the ritual movements of everyday life; so Lily adapted herself to the uncertainty of her existence’. This is probably a strong … More Passing time is no trivial thing: how to respond to the ‘uncertainty of one’s existence’.

Tell us about a time when you felt out of place. The rich man in his castle,The poor man at his gate,God made them, high or lowly,And ordered their estate. The third verse of the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful is rarely sung now unsurprisingly and perhaps we did not sing it thus during … More Make the whole of space and time that is available into your place: it’s okay to feel anxious as you replace yourself, of course.

Your life without a computer: what does it look like? The prompt today contains, of course, its own bias. First, it speaks to people who are first asked to imagine life without a computer as if that absence could occur to one individual, regardless of the rest of the globe. Second, it sort of presumes … More Life before the spread of  personal computer technology was once a fact but can it even be imagined now.

What skill would you like to learn? If you search the internet for the term ‘passive skills’, the likelihood is that the majority of returned sites will be on the use of the concept in computer gaming (they were on Bing anyway). These skills have a dark side: in their purest form we compare them, … More If all skills were active skills, learning would stop. Indeed, perhaps the fact is some active skills need unlearning. Relearning passive skills.

What details of your life could you pay more attention to? I think the idea of paying attention to your life down to each detail is problematic. Were it possible to attend consciously to each detail of my life, I would still not be in control of these details since so often they are details … More Attend not to the intention but to the accident of your presence having an effect.

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.