Schopenhauer

The art of not reading. Or, selective attention as a means for intellectual survival

Reading is a serious business. It takes precious, irrecoverable, finite time to devote yourself to a book. In doing so, you make an active decision to press pause on your ordinary life so as to step into another world, another place, another time.

Why then, would you choose to continue reading something that is not only uninspiring but frustratingly disappointing?

On memory & forgetting, via Cave, Kundera & Nietszche

When we’re young, we worry and wonder about how life will turn out.

Will it get easier, does it get better, will it become clear who we’re supposed to be and will we be able to find the right way there?

We know nothing of consequence. The future is all anticipation and expectation.

Words to live by when you're struggling to find your own

For days when you feel torn or dissatisfied, when you wake up and all the toughness of determination seems to be weakened for no apparent reason, the words of others can save you.

They can fill the spaces between moments of clarity or confusion with meaning.

Where you stumble to understand let alone express yourself, and where you understand but can’t do the feeling or the knowledge justice, it can be useful to delegate the task of communication.

When actions speak louder than words: Why I’m trailblazing for Oxfam

Newton’s third law of motion tells us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  The Buddhist principle of karma similarly teaches us that everything we do, every decision we make, has a consequence.  Philosophical determinism suggests that we cannot escape the inherent causality of human existence, and that our actions will inevitably give rise to the effects that reflect our essential morality.  Faced with the imbalances that subsequently blight much of our over-exploited, under-resourced, conflict-riddled world, the question is – how should we live?  

The restless whirlpool of life

What is it that we’re saying when we talk of highs and lows? Why do we linguistically frame our lives this way? How have we even come to collectively associate and articulate “forwards” and “up” as signs of progress, while assuming “backwards” and “down” to be regressive?