Tag: change
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Omne ignotum pro magnifico est
There are some bits of wisdom that are hard to forget -especially if they verge on the personal. Take, for example Virginia Woolf’s observation that ‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.’ I like that: it gives me permission to change my mind -or perhaps more to the point,…
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Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
Have you ever wondered why things like pleasure and happiness, are so evanescent? For some things, we accommodate to their presence and after a while cease to notice them even though they are still present; pleasure is fleeting as well, and yet it is not simply because we no longer notice it, but rather because…
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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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The Pleasure of Impermanence
Don’t you sometimes think things are changing too fast? Moving past you so rapidly it’s all a blur? Even mistakes are corrected with other mistakes so quickly it’s hard to know whether it’s all a game. It’s hard to know which is supposed to be the pentimento. And, perhaps more to the point, does it…
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The Feast of Fools
It’s hard to switch sides, isn’t it? Hard to cross the tracks. And even if you do, does welcome await, or merely sidelong glances and mistrust -or as Macbeth feared, curses not loud but deep, mouth honour, breath which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not…? It’s a brave person who crosses over…
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She wears her faith but as the fashion of her phone.
Everything is a matter of time, isn’t it? Everything changes. Like the apocryphal monkeys typing away infinitely, everything will be written. Everything will be transmogrified somewhere. Some time. Somehow. I suppose that should be a comfort, but I can’t escape the nagging feeling that there is something unrequited in all that: an imbalance between now…
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Medical Revisionism
Words -that’s all they are: sounds that by their very presence magically communicate meaning. They are more than mere noise or background. They are not the wind rustling through the leaves, nor the sounds of a frog in a pond; in a way, they are entities that resolve uncertainty, and in as much as they…
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A Medical Chinese Curse?
Change. We are condemned to live in interesting times, as the Chinese Curse purportedly observed -although there seems to be no evidence that there ever was such a curse, nor does anyone appear to have any idea what it means… But I have always assumed that it had to do with change, and our sometime antipathy to it.…