Tag: Life
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To be, or not to be, is that the question…?
‘To be, or not to be…’ The timeless soliloquy by Shakespeare’s Hamlet still provokes a shiver. I don’t hear it as much now that I’m retired from my Obstetrical practice and contraception (or pregnancy termination) is so readily available; it occasionally surfaces from time to time in my social interactions, however. The problem is often…
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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees
I’ve always felt a part of Nature, but now that I’m in my autumn years, there seems to be a special urgency to it. Still, the continued rebirth of green each Spring gives me hope; the longevity of trees that will continue to stand long after I cannot, inspires me; or perhaps it is simply…
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Yet Death will seize the doctor too
Death seems a lot closer now than in my youth; but it was always just around a corner, peeking out from traffic lights, hiding in the limb of a tree I might have climbed. And it’s not as if it suddenly surfaced when I retired either -death is a fact of life; we come from…
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Masters of their fates?
Sentience is the present participle of the Latin verb sentire –‘to feel’- but what is it? What does it imply? Consciousness? Thought? Or merely some form of awareness of the surroundings, however indistinct and vague? Is avoidance of a noxious stimulus enough to establish sentience, or does it have to involve an understanding that it…
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It’s About Time
‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’ So wrote Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, more than fifteen hundred years ago. And we’re still confused… Okay, I’m confused. When considered philosophically, you’d…
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The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley
Two steps forward and one step back –isn’t that always the way with progress? Reward coupled with unintended consequences? The Industrial Revolution with worker exploitation? Nuclear power with the Bomb. Nothing, it seems, comes without a price. Even religion, the great leveller, once established brooks no rivals. Life itself, is a succession of survivors outcompeting…
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The Feminist Egg
Once upon a time, I suppose that one of the characteristics of Age was its hubris. After a certain age, it was easy to dismiss most new things as mere variations on time-tested themes –additions, clever perhaps, intriguing even, but still accretions. Ecclesiastes lived in old minds: The thing that hath been, it is that which shall…
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