Tag: empathy
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Doubt thou the stars are fire
What am I doing, thinking about love at my age? And don’t get all shmaltzy about that; don’t remind me that without love, there is no hope, no future, no point in going on… It’s not that I’ve never considered those arguments, but I’ve lived through them all, and am at peace with myself and…
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But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end
Although I am old now, and should know better, I still have not figured out loneliness. It is not avoided, as I once assumed, by having a lot of friends, or things to occupy my time; it is not so easily definable. As St. Augustine was said to have observed when asked about Time: If…
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What is it like to be a…?
When I first read the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ essay, I was intrigued by his idea that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Empathy -the ability…
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Give me a staff of honour for mine age
It’s interesting how we can find ourselves immersed in Time, isn’t it? We ride in it as if we were on a bus, looking out of the windows at the world going by. We are all on a journey I suppose, but some of us at different speeds and from different locations. Well, at least…
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The gift of accompaniment
I remember it from my medical practice; I remember it from dealing with friends with incurable illness: the feeling of helplessness in commiseration. The recognition that my often naïve suggestions, intended to help, were not what was required, nor even wanted, for that matter. Sometimes there are no solutions; sometimes presence –listening- in itself is…
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Look the other way, please.
There really are inconvenient truths, aren’t there? There are some things that seem to slip quietly under the radar -things that go unremarked until they are brought our our attention. And even then, they are perhaps dismissed as unimportant -or worse, accepted and rationalized in an attempt to justify them as tools that enable the…
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The Trigger Warning
Call me naive, if you will, or maybe even uninformed, but not insensitive. Not indifferent; I am neither. Unaware, perhaps comes closest. And, until recently, the concept of trigger warning was not one that I thought would have arisen in the day to day world of office gynaecology. But I was wrong. A trigger warning,…
musingsonwomenshealth.com 