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Posted on August 30, 2021 Leave a Comment
We all tend to harbour outlandish and unreasonable expectations for just how good our life should be. In a phenomenon not resulting from but by no means helped by social media, our expectations for how life should be (and our misery at how it has so far turned out) turns on disregarding so much we […]
Posted on August 28, 2021 Leave a Comment
The hardest person to break up with is…ourselves. Each of us, in our own ways, becomes practices behaviours and espouses beliefs that while once upon a time served us, no longer do. Perhaps we had a difficult childhood and the only way we could have survived was to bottle up our emotions, put on a […]
Posted on August 19, 2021 Leave a Comment
The question – so often asked by friends, parents and prospective partners – is not a bad one. It is, however, often asked and understood far too narrowly. Do you want someone who likes to read, who watches the same television shows? Do you want someone who is intelligent, or funny, or poetic? When posed […]
Posted on August 18, 2021 Leave a Comment
Memory deceives with how it flattens experience. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than when we reminisce on a past relationship. When you were with your partner you were sometimes angry, often irritated, and while there were surely moments of ecstasy and fulfilment, there was, of course, a reason (or many) why you left them […]
Posted on August 7, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘To those human beings who are of any concern to me’ wrote Nietzsche in The Will to Power, ‘I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished’. Speaking not out of hate but of love, he continued, I […]
Posted on July 29, 2021 Leave a Comment
We think about life in terms of a subject who acts, and an object that is acted upon. So, if there is an artist in her studio, we think and speak with the artist as the active subject, and the paint, brushes and canvas as the still, inert objects being acted upon. We are inclined […]
Posted on July 22, 2021 Leave a Comment
Like laughter, tears (which often go together and are separated by the thinnest of membranes) are a testament to our humanity, of our capacity to feel. Contrary to popular belief, crying does not come from a position of weakness, but of strength. For it takes a particular sort of strength to allow yourself to be […]
Posted on July 19, 2021 Leave a Comment
When we speak of beautiful faces, a generic set of assumptions and descriptions arise: proportionate features, geometrical perfection, and symmetrical smiles. Perhaps a residue of Renaissance art and its use of the golden ratio, we tend to find people whose faces are the most balanced, proportionate, symmetrical, that is to say, mathematical, the most beautiful. […]
Posted on July 16, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘The expectation’ for ‘help and protection’, writes Carl Jung in The Structures and Dynamics of the Psyche, while ‘normal for a child is improper in an adult’. In Psychology and the Occult he makes a similar point, remarking not being able to psychologically mature is just as absurd as not being able to outgrow child-size […]
Posted on July 9, 2021 Leave a Comment
The sun is disappearing below the horizon. The sky is soaked in a whirl of pink and purple. It looks almost like a surrealist painter took his brush to the clouds. Arrows of light splinter through the leaves of the tree you are sitting under as a gentle breeze caresses your skin. It feels sublime, […]
Proper Candor 