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It is never personal, you're not the protagonist

It's so easy to become offended. It actually comes pretty natural. Someone says something.  You feel it's directed at you Strong reaction follows No need to react, it's got nothing to do with you as a person Imagine some remarks about academic work versus manual one, a bit dismissive about the latter. You don't have a degree and never wanted one. You know very well it takes years of experience and training to do what you're doing. Talent is involved too, as some people do have "two left hands".  You still feel you should add something to the conversation, but not sure if it is going to be well-received. No need to enlighten the other party right now Most people think in terms of opposites. If it's not this, it's that and it can't be anything else. Certainty of one's convictions is also a form of self-reassurance that everything is stable in one's world. Other points of view cannot be allowed because they are disruptive. Cognitive disrup

It is never personal, you're not the protagonist

It's so easy to become offended. It actually comes pretty natural. Someone says something.  You feel it's directed at you Strong reaction follows No need to react, it's got nothing to do with you as a person Imagine some remarks about academic work versus manual one, a bit dismissive about the latter. You don't have a degree and never wanted one. You know very well it takes years of experience and training to do what you're doing. Talent is involved too, as some people do have "two left hands".  You still feel you should add something to the conversation, but not sure if it is going to be well-received. No need to enlighten the other party right now Most people think in terms of opposites. If it's not this, it's that and it can't be anything else. Certainty of one's convictions is also a form of self-reassurance that everything is stable in one's world. Other points of view cannot be allowed because they are disruptive. Cognitive disrup

Kids, adults and time do not go well together

What is not to hate in discovering something too late in life? It is not just resentment against poor timing. It is also a new burden on top of an already heavy load, a life lived, experience and mistakes in one bundle. Knowledge revealed which could have been so useful 30 or 40 years before, who needs it when almost down to the last mile? Would you like a new source of regret? Here is one, just for you, sing the sarcastic Eumenides.  The scene could not be more idyllic, waiting for a grandchild to get dressed, with the prospect of a whole new day of outdoor adventures. Gentle prompts are spoken suavely. Total fail. Maybe going away for a while, under a fake pretence, would work? No, it does not. If the Invisible Man would have left and then returned to the room containing the kid, there might have been some  reaction. Invisible does not mean non-existent. A small cry of impatience is trying to work its way up the vocal cords, but is suppressed. After all, it's the era of adults ma

Time -out for kids? How about time- in?

Prequel (as they say in the movie industry): a few days after publishing this post, I came across an advertisement   that contained the very idea I had written about. Actually the very phrase, 'time-in'. Synchronicity is very real. Glad to find out others think the same. The missing toy Child has a tantrum. Child starts screaming. Parent has no idea why and prosecutorial interrogation does not work.  "Why are you shouting? Why are you not listening? Why?" Most adults don't have any trouble explaining why they are moody, irritable or simply unpleasant. "I'm stressed" is the generic label for a variety of deeper feelings and emotions, as well as pure biological reasons, such as lack of sleep. Are grown-ups being told to have a time-out when they behave like their children? God forbid, they're grown-ups. Kids are not basketball players. Time-out, shouted by the coach and meant to break a free fall in players' tactics and successive mistakes, is

Death, statistics and reality

 They are usually buried deep in official statistics folders, far away from awareness.  Death figures are not something anyone likes looking at on a regular, let alone daily, basis. Not even actuaries, presumably. It changed with Covid-19 (why 19 when the pandemic started in 2020, but that's another question). Daily death figures are everywhere. They do not make comfortable reading, listening to or talking about. For anyone who lost a relative or a friend, they are horrifically painful. If not, fear for one's own fate is a powerful enough trigger. Starting with the ancients, not just classical Greece and Rome, death was a topic to ponder and draw wisdom from. Every thing that was left undone, all the words that could have been spoken, the impermanence of life, they were brought to the forefront of consciousness, or so we like to think. It's not modern philosophers who invented "Memento Mori", nor are these two Latin words widely quoted. How could they be? They are

Why are cats so popular? It's envy, guys

  Question of the day: how come cats are so popular on every social media platform?   Answer of the day: popularity is just disguised envy. Cat owners, more acutely, and the rest less affected, due to lower exposure, all wish they were like cats. Free, independent, vaguely domesticated. Doing what they please, when they feel like it, and unflinching when confronted with an obstacle. All of the above has been already said, written and read many times. I claim discovering the feeling behind general fascination with cats.  Envy, that is. Without going all biblical about it, let us agree envy is one constant layer of human composition. This one ingredient is lurking behind an adoring gaze: if only we could be like cats. 

Ambition drives us all

Good old reliable friend, the dictionary, is going to co-author this blog post. I would have posted its photo as well, but I was not too sure if it did not involve some copyright law infringement. Only half-joking. "Ambition drives us all' sounds very much like one of those insufferable sweeping statements, forgotten as soon as read or heard. I am not aiming for posterity here, just to make a point. A word's origin reveals its meaning better than long philosophical notes. Words, much more than people, are taken for granted because of their longer life span. Ambition is just an example. It comes from a Latin word, ambire, which means to go around. Going around is not a particularly interesting pastime, and that's being polite. It is frankly quite boring, a feature compounded by its obvious aimlessness. That's why no one goes around for any long period of time. Hidden or covert, there is an aim for being present one moment here and a bit later there.  In ancient Rome

Zoon Politikon is not political

 Did you know which are the top blogging topics?  I did not, until I looked them up, using the predictable search engines available to Internet tribes. The results were quite interesting. "How to.." and "Self-development" take the lion's share of the blogosphere, which is itself expanding at dizzying speed. Is everyone after some form of competence and also keen of becoming a better version of oneself? It seems so, but why? The ancients have the answer, nothing surprising here. Aristotle's view of man as "Zoon Politikon", for instance. Often quoted and rarely used correctly,  these two words do not refer to man as a 'political animal",  such as someone who is totally enamoured of politics as understood in today's parlance. Zoon is a living creature and "politikon" comes from polis, which means city, the complex social structure where people live and do things together.  Man is a social creature, who needs to be part of a grou

Dating in Covid Times

I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, including the novel "Love in the Time of Cholera".  I confess that I paraphrased his title for this blog post.

Venus should listen to Mars

What an opportunity these days to cure ourselves of the confirmation bias! Sharing the same views with someone else can be a source of comfort.  Too much of it leads to mummification. Naturally, it feels good to be part of a group, it's in our genes. No one would deny that. Apart from families, there is some strong solidarity manifesting itself among people belonging to the same generation or football club.  Does it matter they can have more men than women, or the other way round?  Same as families,  any socially formed  groups are not less of a club or association if one type of chromosome combination is represented in greater numbers.  Or not? On the internet, new types of communities spring up all the time. Gamers, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, real and fake gurus, you name it. Choice is enormous. Do men and women gravitate towards one genre or another? Podcast, video, blog? Lecture or dialogue?  It's hard to say, still early days, but there is one distinct advantage in the n

The magic and curse of a new diary

 It's only mid-October, why are diaries and wall calendars already up for grabs?  There must be some inexhaustible demand for these memory aids and planning tools. Old style, of course, printed format. Sure, the present moment can be quite unbearable or just boring. The unknown titillates imagination. Despite later disappointments, a jump into the future fascinates, subjugates and throws open the gates of possibility. Possible is not equal to probable though. People who know the finer details of risk theories can explain the difference in marvellous ways. They also warn against mistaking one for the other. For quite a long time, I have been blind to the fact that what is possible in general can be quite improbable in particular. Day-dreamers will understand. Naive ladies and gentlemen will do too. We have been the ones buying a new diary each year and taking deep pleasure in filling in the first pages. Some of us, the adventurous-type ones, are going further. We write down reminder

Dear Cinderella

  If you read this and you think it's an exercise in self-victimisation, you are so right and you should stop...  at the full stop. You came to this blog to find out something new, insightful and useful when talking to people you need to impress. Did you?  It's very unlikely that anyone would spend any amount of time reading about another inner crisis and how to overcome it in 10 steps. Where is the self-victimisation, you may ask. Hang on a minute, it's round the corner, just needs to be summoned. Let us get Cinderella first, the one and only rags-to-princess story that makes grown-ups, irrespective of gender, fantasise about miracles and chance. Has anyone felt bit Cinderelly while toiling in a very normal existence? Was there any remote possibility of a fairy godmother?  If the answer is no, you have a second opportunity to stop reading, yet again, at the upcoming full stop. What comes next is for Cinderella types, those who dance away the night, but just one night only,

The Arm and the Grabber (how could you do this to me, part 2)

  Picking up litter, piece of cake. Before The Arm's insurrection, of course, and implicit dereliction of duty. A heavy blow to carrying out trivial tasks, like collecting various objects strewn all over the place (personal bad habit) or other people's leftovers (their bad eating habits, irrespective of age). The Arm and its Hand used to be able to pick even tiny bits of paper or specks of dust fluff (but that's another story, the OCD one). Much faster than the vacuum cleaner and instant disposal, true? Now The Arm is just hanging there, apparently recovering, although no traitor should be ever given the benefit of doubt. It has been replaced by a tool mostly seen outdoors, where brave people do their best to keep streets and parks clean by cleaning after lazy people's rubbish. Besides an increased sense of appreciation for cleaners' work, The Grabber comes with an unexpected benefit. It's a focus aid, it trains the eye and the working hand to turn picking up in

The bearable side of social distancing

The carefree and the cautious, the well-behaved and the morons, they all walk up and down the same pavements (sidewalks if you prefer). Whoever wrote a book on how people behave when they approach a stranger, needs to add a new chapter. It could be called the Virus Effect. Before the pandemics, there used to be a kind of social ballet, especially on narrow lanes. One step to the right, maybe a bit of backtracking, eyes averting direct connection. At times, so many of us have been fooled by the fellow passer-by's moves (neurons mirroring someone else's neurons , as they do). We would move in the same direction, ending up in an amused half-collision. Nowadays that benign bumping into each other is not on at all.  Social distancing, or physical distancing rather, has altered pedestrian behaviour. People scan the approaching human traffic and assess pretty fast if they need to stop, step to the side and wait. A lot depends on how rushed or distracted the other party seems to be. Wa

Black and White

Lockdown reflections 1.2 It's not easy to spell the adjective "manichaean". The word that has ended up meaning "black and white thinking" has its origin 17 centuries ago.  At the time, it was not that simplistic. I think it is definitely worth looking into Manichaeism, the religion founded in the 3rd century AD by a Persian prophet and the idea of a battle between light and darkness. Modern use of "manichaean" is pretty much divorced from the ancient belief system. Rarely employed in writing, it has the undertone of a rebuke. These days, it is not exactly a compliment. Could it be that we are so in love with nuances? There's always a "but..." dangling from the end tail of a sentence. To be more precise, there used to be a "but", before all nuanced conversations went out of the window. Or were rather locked down. Duality in its strictest, most dogmatic form is reigning supreme. It's an either/or situation,  no mid

The new normal is the old normal

Lockdown reflections 1.1. It started with the frequency of phone calls and messages. Everyone was worried. Interest in other people's welfare took on an unexpected turn. "Are you alright"?  became a magic phrase. The speed of sharing immunity tips increased. There was a definite fervour around any bit of new information. Some became suspicious that others may know something and hide it. The spurt of activity on various channels was matched by what happened in the media and to a more significant degree on the internet. The two spheres, the personal and the public one, were in synch up to a point only. Then some sort of fatigue started gnawing away at individual hyper-communication. Phone calls became less frequent. Text messages turned into forwarding funny videos and memes, mostly. Family members and friends, let alone acquaintances, settled back into their usual routine. The new normal, under lockdown, reverted to the old normal, and it's a comforti

Get your own pocket dictionary, learn it by heart

I think I have stumbled  upon something which could be life-changing. Not arrogant enough to think it could change other people's lives. Let's stick with myself. Get rid of the old dictionary in your head. Someone says; "You are too over-sensitive, that's the problem". Automatic translation: "I am at fault, they don't like me". You're going to fail the exam if you use that translation. Try: "I am not thick-skinned enough for you, you would like me to be able to withstand an outburst of frustration so that you can get relief from what's praying on your mind and needs bringing out". Think of what people do when there is no one around and they need to release some internal pressure. Do they get on with their life as if nothing is whirling inside their brain? I very much doubt it. My theory is that if they suppress it, they become ill, and if they seek relief through external methods, they'll do anything, from banging their

Bitterness is a healthy substitute for sugar

If you were expecting some diet advice, sorry for disappointing you, this is not a dieting blog and advice is such a cheap commodity nowadays that it's practically worthless. Bitterness is a... almost wrote metaphysical... state, the result of being bashed around the head with other people's best intentions. One wants to relieve you from some innocuous agitation that has got nothing to do with them.  You start by telling them about some upset and end up defending your reaction. Moreover, you get some extra bashing disguised as genuine interest in your welfare. Resist, and the final blow will be administered as a suggestion to go and see a therapist. Another one assesses your moods with clinical precision. Variations get quickly pushed into generalized statements. "You're always so and so on Mondays". Really? Who could have thought that being as emotionally active as a corpse is the desired state. Everyone, apparently, everyone apart from you, the fick

The mind jail in total lock-up

You've heard it before: master your emotions, keep the lid on random thoughts. Is it good advice? I think it is. The idea of thoughts and emotions being some kind of inimical entities under close supervision was at first dismissed as too New Age, liberal, self-indulging theory. After all, who has got any time to stop and think if they are doing something that requires total focus? This applies to both physical and mental labour, including the one needed for giving birth. Agreed, there is not much room left between this kind of real activity and the rest of the world, with all its distractions. Focus is the saving grace, provided nothing changes. As soon as there's a technological leap and things get easier, there would be less of the old type of focus, would it not? Washing or toiling the land was a day-long affair. When it stops being so, is a door being opened to emotions and thoughts that would have otherwise stayed silent? In ancient Greece, different schools o

Trust, what’s that?

Prologue - This is the very first ever post written on a mobile phone. It feels like walking in very tight clothes while trying to be graceful and not miss the train at the same time. Squeezed between the rush of inspiration and the small screen, what a terrible situation.  Better get this out before an attack of RSI or an unwelcome interruption. The idea of trust and trustworthiness has been undermining the reality of human connections forever, or  so it seems. It is viewed as an essential element of any emotional architecture, something that could make the whole edifice of a relationship go down. The premise is that as soon as talking to someone goes beyond the shallow end of trivialities and into ‘soul’ territory, a new feeling is being born. If we did not trust someone, why would we share so much of the unseen self? I am not talking here about heartbreak stories. The unveiling is part of a ritual that new friends-in-the-making like going through. I tell you this and you recip

The pleasures of being judgemental

Come on, don't recoil in disgust, as if you have just been the victim of a selfish dog-owner. You know the type, walking the dog and not picking up the poo. We all like being judgemental. The more we deny it, the more we do it. The art of making grand pronouncements about our fellow human beings must have been born in the depths of the cave, where everyone was a rival, someone to compete with for the best place near the fire. Backbiting, I can only imagine, could become quite literal. It's so understandable, with few resources and a constant danger lurking as soon as you stepped outside. This is to say nothing of the dangers that sneaked inside, as everyone is hungry at some point, from fleas to lions. If you believe in epigenetics  (big word, I know, so big that the auto-correct puts many red dots under it, just through sheer ignorance), so if you do know a thing or two about epigenetics, you can only conclude that human temperament had to incorporate the 'judgement