Tag: Pain
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Does Pain pay the income of each precious thing?
Why is pain? Even after all these years, I am still confused. It is true that I have likely lived on the periphery of its delivery route; pain has not been a constant companion but, rather, an occasional acquaintance rattling the gate: an unexpected guest who seldom apologizes for their inconvenient arrival and usually prevents…
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To weep is to make less the depth of grief
To say that emotions are important for us, is a rather trite observation, I suppose -they all seem to have functions although usually so seamlessly woven into the cultural Zeitgeist they defy easy inspection. Happiness seems to serve a fairly obvious purpose, if only as a contrast to its absence; pain (at least when considered…
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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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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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Is there really nothing new under the sun?
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. The older I get, the more I understand the wisdom of that passage from Ecclesiastes. It’s not that I have experienced everything, seen everything, and I certainly haven’t thought of everything; I have no…
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For my Pains, a World of Sighs
What does pain look like? An intriguing question to be sure, but one I hadn’t even thought to ask until recently. Pain is one of those things that, like St. Augustine’s quandary over Time, presents a similar difficulty in defining. The International Association for the Study of Pain made a stab at it: ‘Pain is…
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The Unexpected
What I like about the unexpected is that you never expect it. It’s a surprise. A gift. And the world is filled with this stuff. Each day at work –I’m a gynaecologist- there are little treasures hidden within appointments, presents in names. Especially the unpronounceable Persian names that unravel when I try to work at…
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Reflections on the Bell Curve
We -many of us in the Western world at any rate- live our lives on a Bell Curve, thinking -hoping- we occupy a place near an out-lying position: the 5% area that presumes we are not just normal, but rather, exceptional… And given the population numbers, there is time spent worrying that we are inadvertently drifting towards the center…
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