So here is a more unsettling question: if life is, at its core, absurd, would the extinction of humankind really deserve our grief? One might be tempted to say no. After all, we rarely mourn what we believe has no lasting purpose; we let it fade without ceremony. But the thought refuses to settle soContinue reading “Would the End of US Matter?”
Category Archives: Reflections
Against the Tide: Why We Still Create
People have long sought a kind of immortality by leaving behind legacies—works of art, writing, institutions, traces of themselves meant to endure. This impulse stretches back across human history. Shakespeare, for instance, imagined that his poetry could grant a form of permanence, declaring, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / SoContinue reading “Against the Tide: Why We Still Create”
Travelling Light
I recently made the decision to move out of my home and into a long-stay hotel — and honestly, it wasn’t that big a deal. As a pensioner, I travel light these days, so I spent no more than half an hour stuffing everything I needed into a rucksack. Done. For most people, moving homeContinue reading “Travelling Light”
Telling Stories to the Night
Amber light seeps into the dark, softening the edges of the things in the care home —chair, curtain, glass of water—until everything becomes mere smudges of shadows. I take up my pen, as I often do at this hour, to write. Habit, almost: to trawl the day for small truths, to catch brief scraps ofContinue reading “Telling Stories to the Night”
You Simply Are: Two Plum Blossoms and the Art of Immortality
Your peers blossom in a sunlit room,By curtain, cabinet and New Year’s knot;They wear the season’s warm and hopeful bloom,Yet all that lives in time must live and rot.No sooner do they flower than they fade—For all that dwells in place must know an end,And every gift that light and context madeIs but a loanContinue reading “You Simply Are: Two Plum Blossoms and the Art of Immortality”
The Quiet Moment of Waiting
Waiting is not wasted time. It is the quiet threshold between what was and what will be — a space where we are invited, not to do, but to be.
Unhousing Myself
I’ve been living in a hotel for a few months now, and I’m beginning to see it not as a temporary arrangement but as a possible long‑term way of life. At my age, why should I feel bound to the convention of maintaining a “home” in the traditional sense? If one can afford an extendedContinue reading “Unhousing Myself”
Where Grief Becomes Language
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er-wrought heart and bids it break. Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3 Grief often reshapes the way we see art, and sometimes it reveals the hidden stories behind the works we think we know. Reading Hamnet made me reconsider Hamlet not as a monumentContinue reading “Where Grief Becomes Language”
The Mythic Life of Ordinary Days
A simple morning routine—waking, making coffee, pulling back the curtain—quietly mirrors ancient myths of chaos giving way to order. By seeing our inner upheavals (especially grief and change) as underworld journeys within a larger cycle of renewal, we recover meaning and dignity in ordinary life, much like Joyce’s Ulysses turns one day in Dublin into an epic.
The Ordinary as a Test of Freedom
I meet my brother for lunch every week. I tap a heart to my beloved. I scroll through my photo album and notice faces I haven’t seen in years. And then it hits me—how quickly time has passed, how quietly distances form, how easily a life can drift without anyone meaning to drift. In thatContinue reading “The Ordinary as a Test of Freedom”
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