Life by a thousand cuts

               Thalassa, Thalassa, said the older fish.  Can't hear you, replied the younger one.               I've got an ear infection, spent too much time on ice, and fish don't speak anyway.

"Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite" is a wonderful book by Robert Kurzban and the site where you can read a bit about it has a great URL too: https://www.hypocrisybook.com. It is all about evolution and the mind that has different compartments, creating this apparently terrible habit of noticing inconsistencies in all but ourselves. As our mind is a kind of cabinet with many drawers and some of them are full of junk and others of exquisite art objects, things can look a bit incongruous. Our inner balance depends on ignoring the co-existence of junk and art and happily thinking of the whole cabinet as a solid piece of furniture.  This is of course a bit of a simplistic review of the book and the theory behind it, but it serves the purpose of my own theory: that physical beauty is our greatest source of hypocrisy. If there is a drawer that very few people dare to open, let alone examine its contents, that is the drawer of our looks. The real physical appearan

Trees are the most underrated subject. Also the most difficult one, really. A human face changes all the time, visibly. A tree does not. All of its essence is running much deeper, inside each of the small netted veins of each and every leaf. They move with the wind, fooling everyone that they have no power whatsoever. They lie.

Must have read it somewhere, that no one wakes up and decides that they are going to ruin their day. Every day starts with the best intentions. Then it all goes pear-shaped. Most of the time. So never look at how many days have already gone since the time of birth, despite the fact that it's quite tempting to use online calculators that throw at you a horror-inspiring number. What, so may thousands of days already behind me? That cannot be true. Denial is the first symptom of the disease calling flight of fantasy.  As it has been carefully and abundantly nourished by various stories, first by fairy tales and then by novels and movies, the disease is like a severe eye condition. Wearing glasses can make it better only up to a point. Then an operation is needed. Then as luck would have it, some eyesight is regained, but never fully. Ideally, we should be exposed to reality from a very early age, and then never go too far from it, the same way most people don't walk a