Gender

There are two types of ‘gender’ – biological gender and social gender. We have a tendency to conflate the two, for largely historical reasons – history of society, that is. However, as our society becomes less and less ‘pressured’ by our environment, these two are diverging, resulting in a growing dysphoria within both individuals and society at large.

We Are Weak

When we are first born, our body is weak, but pretty much fully formed. Our mind is active but lacks experience. We have a ‘spark’ of consciousness, but without experience it is just a spark: a promise. At this point, we have not yet discovered the art of ‘doing’: we are merely ‘being’. But already our senses produce impressions. We notice repeated events and we begin to make associations. We learn to predict and we learn to ‘do’ – to try to exert control, so that our discomfort is eased, and later avoided. But our control is poor.

Corporate Wellness

A large part of human ‘life’, today, is centred around the operations of businesses: collective enterprises that see a need, serve that need and thereby make money. Some of that money pays the workers, some pays ‘operating costs’ (facilities, tools, energy and so on), some is siphoned off in taxes and some goes to reward investors, whose cash enabled the business to start and keeps it growing. Many executives of such enterprises just focus on this cash cycle, but I think they have another, equally important duty: the mental wellness of their whole enterprise.

Cries In The Dark

Last night, I watched a programme – a recording, actually – from a TV series called “Murder By The Sea”. This episode was about a spree killer, who went on a small but deadly rampage about 50 years ago, in the sleepy, seaside town of Bournemouth in the UK.

Sorrow Is A Broken Wish

When we feel sorrow, it is because we are working up to saying the last goodbye to a broken wish: one that we sense can no longer be fulfilled. The stronger the wish, the deeper the sorrow. We mourn the links from that wish to its object, but we can’t yet finish that process of mourning; we can’t yet accept that the object of those links now exists only in our memory.

Sing With Your Feet

The way that a human walks – on two legs – is [I think] one of the true wonders of the natural world. It’s a hugely complex process of continual balance, of muscle stress and counter-stress, of controlled, not quite falling. As would-be toddlers, it can take up to 18 months before we have the knack of it, and even then, we’ll take many a tumble. Training robots to do it is proving to be massively difficult, yet we humans can cope with a whole range of different terrains. Well, mostly.

Self-Made Man

When one abandons a slavish attachment to religion – to the forms and assumptions that religion teaches – one is left with an important question: namely, “What am I to do with my life?” Here it is, this ‘given’ existence, whether given by god or by biological accident. If I don’t just snuff it out, for lack of knowledge of what to do with it, then I must surely continue, and ‘make’ something of it.

The Plates Don’t Fill Themselves

I have written on many occasions about how we get so identified with what we believe to be ‘necessary’ that we end up living a life that’s filled with thinking about what’s not happening, rather than what is. We are constantly looking for what should be, or what could be, and then trying to make the right things happen. Plenty of philosophers have pointed this out. We can even get so we’re trying to do “God’s work” after we deduce that He must need our help, because He isn’t doing it fast enough, Himself. My old grandmother would have made a sour face [just an act, but she had plenty of practice] and would have said, “That’s all very well, young man, but the plates don’t fill themselves.”

Finding Rest

This post was going to be called “Finding Purpose”, but the more I let that concept sink in, the more it became clear that ‘purpose’ is easy. People always have ‘purpose’, even if it is not their own; even if they have adopted it as an external duty. Indeed, it fills our lives to such an extent that we can only come to freedom – and to rest – if we first lay down our ‘purpose’.

Liberty Dies

As I watch politics in both Europe and the US unroll, I see a dirty truth. Too many people – on left and right of the political spectrum – are tired of Liberty; they want to kill her and bury the body. They shout, foaming with their cruelty, “Those other bastards are taking your freedom away – killing your rights!” But they wish the same. They wish to turn everyone into slaves of their ideals, just as they already are. This is the ugly face of fascism, of totalitarianism.