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What’s gone and what’s past help
How many of us actually try to clarify in words, what we think we’re feeling? Affect labelling it’s called; apparently, the very act of labelling a negative emotion, can blunt its harmful effects even without a conscious goal in mind. In fact, labelling positive emotions seems to have a similar salutary effect.[i] The mechanism is…
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A touch of Nature
Sometimes I feel a little bit like the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne, when I write. Not with his skill or wisdom, I hasten to add, but more in his ability to readdress the same topics without embarrassment. It’s just that some things impress me again and again, and each time cry out for comment.…
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Deliver me from evil…
We take a lot for granted nowadays, don’t we? Our individual life-spans are short, our collective memories only slightly longer; most of us cannot even imagine how things were before the advent of modern medicine, before the recognition of germs as a cause of infections, before Semmelweis, a 19th century Hungarian doctor, realized that deaths…
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Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear
I have to admit that I’m not a dedicated library book borrower; books seem far too important to simply surrender after becoming intimately acquainted with them. Just as I wouldn’t borrow a dog to bond with and then return it after a week or two to see if I could find something better, a book…
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A matter of belief
My father grew up a Baptist, my mother an Anglican; they compromised after they married: they joined the United Church of Canada. So for me, growing up in post war Winnipeg, there was no confusion, no need to meld different traditions into an edible stew -I had simply accepted the compromise that they had made;…
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To weep is to make less the depth of grief
To say that emotions are important for us, is a rather trite observation, I suppose -they all seem to have functions although usually so seamlessly woven into the cultural Zeitgeist they defy easy inspection. Happiness seems to serve a fairly obvious purpose, if only as a contrast to its absence; pain (at least when considered…
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What’s done is done
‘Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.’ -remember that poem? It kind of reminds me of my childhood fantasies of things that might be if I could just wish hard enough. Things that could have been, if only I could remember the details. The distant past has always been like that for…
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The outward shows be least themselves
I read somewhere that in less than a second of talking to someone you don’t know, you begin to determine their trustworthiness, and that after only a few seconds more, you have formed an opinion about them. It could be their appearance, their manner, or even their face that sways the decision; I suppose that…
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The temple in which we live
I realize I’ve been obsessing about this for quite a while now, but my progress has been slow, and the chances of resolution seem to recede further and further each time I make the attempt. It’s easier, of course, to analyze it, measure it, and categorize it in someone else, but for this… for this,…
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The liability of intelligence
As I age, what I once thought I knew about intelligence has evolved, partially because knowledge has itself changed over time, of course, but also because what we value, what we regard as appropriate, unfolds differently as society develops. It’s why we seem to espouse new ethical standards, find new ways of interpreting History, and…
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