Tag: identity
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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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The soul walks upon all paths
I suppose I’m coming to it rather late, but I’m beginning to realize I still have a lot to learn; there are some things that I should have figured out by now, others should have been evident from the start. Identity, I think, is one of the obvious ones. After all, who we are matters […]
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Does light, seeking light, the light of light beguile?
Is the sense of control of one’s life, of one’s surroundings, of oneself, merely an addendum tacked on to the accumulating years that follow maturity? A garb one wraps around oneself to adapt more successfully to the role assigned -a costume meant only for the play? Or is it really the emperor’s clothes, borrowed and […]
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I am undone
By now, you’d think we’d have a pretty good idea who we are. I mean, we’ve been assessing and predicting things about each other since… well, a long time. And because each of us feels a pretty unbroken identity from when they were a child, it probably makes sense to assume others do as well. […]
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To hold, as it were, a mirror up to Nature
Who am I? No, really -where do I stop and something else begins? That’s not really as silly a question as it may first appear. Consider, for example, my need to remember something -an address, say. One method is to internalize it -encode it somehow in my brain, I suppose- but another, no less effective, […]
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Is What’s Past Really Prologue?
War has so many faces and wears so many different clothes that you might be forgiven for misunderstanding its refugees. Confusing cause and effect in their behaviour, their appearance, and perhaps, most obviously, in their adaptations to the stress of upheaval and migration. There is no universal pattern that obtains, and few things to offer […]