15.08.2024 - Procrastination
Seneca wrote “The fool,[...]is always getting ready to live.” Sometimes we permit ourselves to be in a rut. A position that is exhausting and drains our energy bit by bit, but requires very little of us day to day. 

Growing, at times we have separated from those in our lives that may be well meaning, but overbearing, or those who wish to put us down for their own selfish reasons. The same force, that helped to shield from them helps the procrastinating mind dismiss their opinion.

A friend is one that will be at your side, and be with you in your petrification. A good friend will also remind you, that you should move on and will not let you rationalize yourself into inaction.

25.08.2024 - Small Hero
A participatory study published in the Journal of positive Psychology by Tribot et al. (2023) on 'What makes a teddy bear comforting' has found, that above all else, being cute and cuddly, feeling nice to the touch and smelling good, it was the personal emotional bond that made a stuffed bear a comfort. Ownership and emotional attachment, or rather - as I like to think of it - the bears true character. The story we tell about them in our hearts.

The monsters under our bed, summoned by ourself imagining them there, cannot touch us, for our bears are brave and strong against foes such as this. And sometimes their comfort shields us even against the woes of the waking world.

07.09.2024 - Alone
After air to breathe and water to drink, after we are fed and rested, we crave the company of others. To see ourselves reflected in them. To be perceived by them makes us certain that we actually exist at all. 

Though we may appear to walk through life a Monad - as Leibniz wrote - a self enclosed 'windowless being', drifting through the cosmos, in truth, non of us is ever so free. Within us is generations of social instinct, making us seek out one-another since long before we were human, long before we were mammals even.
But then, we are never as alone, as when we are among our kind and remain unseen, unrecognized, overlooked and unnoticed. 

At least in solitude we imagine, that another would know us for who we are, if they were with us. Anonymous in a crowd we may be faced with the existential dread that we are in fact perhaps truly alone.

02.01.2025 - Hope
Nothing can be as cruel as Hope. The elder of written western poetry, Hesiod, presents us hope as one of the evils Pandora had in the jar she was given by the gods. At the very bottom, not as a relief, but in fact as the greatest among them.

Hope makes us toil in vain, makes us endure the Shakespearian sea of troubles, instead of taking up arms against them. We hope things will turn out well enough in the end, if we persevere, if we hang in there just a little longer.

In short, it is that thing that makes us keep going beyond all reason and rationale. And by that it is a most human, most essential quality. But it can seem malicious sometimes. The purpose of hope is not to deliver us from peril, nor to grant us our wishes. The purpose of hope is to see, that there is someone that may struggle, someone to make wishes to begin with. 

06.01.2025 - We're all mad here

“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. 
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. 
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here..’” 
— Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The reasonable world of adult and serious people, with its strange rituals and all it's presupposed, preconditioned, assumed suppositions seems utterly bizarre to the uninitiated - the child, the divergent, the outsider. Yet at the same time they may look back in utter perplexity and cannot grasp what they see in terms other than the strange and mad. And so it is, that the ones touched by weirdness and those insisting on their reasonableness and all those in between look at one another without comprehension.