Tag: gifts
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The Roads Just Taken
I know we should be thankful for what we have, and not be upset about what we don’t, but sometimes these things arrive as gifts: wind rustling through the leaves on a hot summer day, or creeks babbling like children playing behind a thicket of bushes just off the trail. It’s things like this, for…
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Looking a gift horse in the mouth
I’ve never thought much about how deeply gifts are ingrained within our culture, within our interactions, within our expectations. I have always looked upon gifts as merely acts of caring and altruism on the part of the giver: offerings that expect no return but gratitude; a feeling that both sides benefitted from the exchange, albeit…
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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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Believe me
What is it about religions which endorse beliefs that often seem so… well, irrational? And for that matter, why do those beliefs seem so compelling? Is it merely the other-worldly components that capture our attention: the mysterious and inexplicable outshining the everyday unpolished world? Or is it more than just magic? Does it instill in…
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Every offence is not a hate at first
What do you do with a gift from someone you once respected, a gift that seemed freely given at the time, but which turned out to be a mere façade? What do you do with a love turned sour? A love turned selfish? All love is selfish, you say, but it is your experience speaking…
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An accident of birth
For years now, I have picked through the garden of my life -sometimes for pleasure, and sometimes for utility. I weed, of course -the privilege of growing in my aging plot is largely contingent on my having planted it in the first place. Contingent on the purpose for which it was intended. Things that arrive…
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Oh coward Conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
Every once in a while, buried in all the fake news and confirmation biases, I find something that rings true. Something that transcends the routine moral admonishments that usually find me wanting. It’s not that I don’t aspire to morality, or whatever, it’s just that I’m sometimes not very good at it: I forget things…
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Much Rain Wears the Marble
I had just missed the bus, I know that now –but so had she, the little woman sitting by herself in the tiny shelter. It was an almost-dark evening in April, and I had walked for a few blocks along a darkened, tree-lined street because there was no shelter at the previous bus stop. It…
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Zealandia?
Sometimes things are not as they seem and we see, as the biblical Paul wrote, ‘through a glass darkly’. Sometimes there is more than meets the eye; it is what makes the world so interesting. Maybe it’s why we wrap gifts –or give them, for that matter. They are such stuff as dreams are made…
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