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Sifting through the noise
Listening requires special skills which, like muscles, weaken with neglect; they might not always be needed in retirement. The need should be weaker there I imagined -retirement is more transactional, with each of us intent on regaling others with our own contrasts in exchange for hearing, but not necessarily listening, to those of our friends.…
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God-damned?
Sometimes there are no easy ways to cross a swamp and many of us have chosen to live in areas so removed we cannot even see the marsh; do not understand that it may be difficult for others to reach us; do not care that they may not want to. I have seldom privileged beliefs…
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Speak me fair in death
There is a question whose answer I think I should start preparing. It’s not one that would make a large difference to me at this time I suppose, but it still needs some serious thought, some proper wording. The problem of formulating it too far in advance is that its validity might be questioned. Some…
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Some must watch, while some must sleep
I’ve been retired from active medical practice for a few years now; I can’t say I miss the hours or the stress, but what I did enjoy, however, were the patients and the adventure of solving their problems. It was always a journey, and like visiting a city for the first time, there was a…
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Conscience does make cowards of us all
I don’t think I’ve thought of myself as being in a moral quandary for a while now -at least not since I retired, anyway- but I do remember the feeling of opposing forces pulling in different, if not opposite, directions; the feeling that by yielding to one rather than another, there is always a loser;…
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Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feelings as to sight?
I feel fine today; I feel fine most days, but what does that actually mean? Who, or more probably what, is it that feels fine? The words of Virginia Woolf, in her essay On Being Ill haunt me at times like this: ‘All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours,…
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Words, words, words!
I can’t remember when it first became evident to me that my mind was not alone in the universe I occupied; perhaps it wasn’t immediately clear to me that others, too, had thoughts and that they may well be different from my own. The Theory of Mind, as it’s now called, develops early in childhood…
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The web of our life is of a mingled yarn
I’m getting old now and although I don’t regret the slow accumulation of the lately-wilting years, I’ve noticed that a lot of people do -or at least say they do. I’m not sure how well they’ve thought it through, however; even if they somehow managed to continue their lives in a candy shop, they’d soon…
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We have seen better days
Things seem to change so quickly nowadays, don’t they? Of course we often grow impatient if they don’t; we expect a channel to change as soon as we press the button, the Google result to appear immediately; waiting for the red light to turn green at an intersection seems to take far too long. We…
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When valour preys on reason, it eats the sword it fights with.
Have you ever wondered what it means to be reasonable? Is it actually an injunction to be fair and sensible about something, or merely to change your mind? Is it to consider the merits of whatever is being discussed and arrive at a compromise that takes both sides of the argument into consideration, so that…
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