The Mechanics of Happiness
My book, The Mechanics of Happiness – engineering a positive approach to your life is available to pre-order. Details to follow.
Mumming or the mummer’s art
In my travelling days, some decades ago, I watched a group native fishermen in the South Seas go out to catch fish. The men would leave their village early, just before dawn in their small boats. It was spectacular to see the sun rise and for those of you who have greeted the new day [...]
Old Ben
I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ~Benjamin Franklin
The hijack and the smokescreen
There are quiet news days in the media. These are days when it seems that not much of headline grabbing significance is happening so news editors will have stories they have been saving or what are called ‘human interest’ stories to beef up the bulletins. The planet has become a feel good story, so if [...]
The journey ahead
Ultimately this journey of yours is about personal fulfilment and happiness. It’s a trek without rights and wrongs and will have many course corrections en route. Before you there are two bodies of work that represent your potential guidance systems. If you are prudent you will look for guidance, you will try to find a [...]
Stars
Getting out to the wilder places offers one of the great anchors of sanity for me. It is, when night falls, the opportunity to gaze at the stars. The swathe of black, the inky night punctuated by the engine of light that is the Milky Way and the myriad sweep of constellations scattered like a [...]
Virtue
“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Baruch Spinoza, and why not? Like happiness, there are virtues, qualities and states which are themselves descriptions of states of being. These are beings rather than doings. We don’t do certain things, they are [...]
One day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy
One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy. Aristotle
Multum in parvo
Much in little. Simple things. The atom, the ant, the huge reserves within the small. I was recently in Wales. Land of valleys, hills, mountains and spectacular scenery. The reminders are quite exceptional there. Reminders of what the real world is like. We urbane sophisticates, statistically urbanites now make up the majority of the world’s [...]
Belief and intelligence
Here’s the strange thing about belief. What you believe in can be anything. It doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t need an externally verifiable point of reference, it doesn’t need to be based in anyone else’s reality at all. This, like so much in the human experience, is a dichotomy. It allows great freedom [...]