https://www.theguardian.com/money/2002/oct/06/wageslaves.careers

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/well/plan-your-life-again-but-keep-it-simple.html

When the pandemic started, Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist and the author of “Your Next Big Thing: Ten Small Steps to Get Moving and Get Happy,” advised his clients to stop planning. To survive the tremendous changes happening, he told them not to think about any future beyond the next week or so. “Planning was working against them,” he said.

As the pandemic continued, the usual markers that define lives and help close one chapter and enter another — birthdays, graduations, weddings — took place over video,…………..

https://poets.org/poem/lullaby-0

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/arts/02iht-defiance.1.19000454.html

Ed 8

The triumph of the three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael, who fought the Nazis in the deep forests of Belarus and saved 1,200 lives, was unlike anything I had ever read about that dark time. Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns. Instead of helplessness and submission, here were rage and resistance.

I knew of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, yet it seemed to stand alone in the popular imagination as the only moment in which organized opposition took root. Yet I have learned that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the impulse to fight back was everywhere: from the streets of Vilnius to the forests of Bialystok, even unto the concrete slabs of Sobibor and Treblinka, thousands of Jews doing whatever they could, whether seeking refuge in the sheltering woods or recklessly taking up arms against overwhelming odds.

Learning of these defiant acts awakened in me something utterly primitive and deeply personal, a wave of awe, humility and admiration.

And outrage, too. Why, I wondered, had I not known these stories while growing up? Could it be that the necessary commemoration of six million dead had so 

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/opinion/patient-therapist-and-personal-boundaries.html

Please print this letter so that when my patients Google me they will see that their psychiatrist and psychoanalyst has been published in The New York Times.

The fields in flames, the stubble set alight
The earth herself was burning in our sight
The ancient lands of Essex still grew grain
As hares ran into hedgerows fearing pain

The empty road, the smoke, the land on fire
The ashes left a newer crop would sire
The land to Epping vast and flat was bright
Yet covered in its smoke there was no light

Our little human world is but a skin
Destruction easy with a word or bomb
Dependent on the government, those liars
Weak as watered gruel, they must be fired

Caught inside the symbols of the Earth
From destruction comes a brave new birth

Autumn time in Essex  where we drove
When farmers burned the stubble of the corn
The earth itself was  fiery  like young love
The smokey air rose like a  cloud  new born

The Kentish  landlocked   cliffs  are  wide and steep
The farmers grow  their grain on land beneath
And there too we  have seen the holy fire
The flames  and smoke arrest me with desire

The earth and soil, the  harvest  we find there
Give me joy  both full of wheat or bare
Why did burning stubble   make me glow?
These images affect the heart’s deep core

Now  fires are banned., they damage our pure air
And I   did not like the murder of the hare

https://www.contemporarypsychotherapy.org/volume-6-issue-1-summer-2014/bookreview/

P

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/

Note: the author says it’s better for us to believe in free will.

For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires.

This lady has lost her head

Did she also cut off her nose to spite her face?

No she can’t bare the site of blood.

Why ,is it private? .

She doesn’t know how to interpret mens eyes.

Oh those scandal eyes

What caused the scandal?

Why do you think there was a cause for it?

In any case I don’t understand how you can interpret someone’s eyes.

Well I’m speaking metaphorically

They can be dark looks, or they can seem to issue an invitation .

At times I have felt men’s eyes rolling all over my body.

Lucian Freud painting there

What about John the Baptist?

He had an air of je ne sais qua. Then he lost his head completely :unfortunate man.

I wonder how it was how people I could watch beheadings

Well they had no televisions and got bored frequently.

Have they never heard of sex?

What’s that?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/books/review/life-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html

Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths. Happiness is a matter of definition; Setiya cites Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor and psychologist who writes about not only happiness but also the importance of accepting reality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/health/covid-impact-personality-change.html

My old blue fountain pen allows
The ink across the page to flow

Like wet paint from the artist’s brush,

And words come in a rush.


Enchanted through the hand which writes,

Bewitched  by art, beauty alights.

The script is like a music score

Through which we pass as through a door.

Imagination’s home.

As,mysteriously.to you, to me,

The spirits of our hearts are tamed,

By rhythms of pen,of brush,of mind.

They enter vision quite unplanned,

Like moths to flutter softly round

Fire joined heart and hand.




The pen slows down,the hand goes still

And just as dreams at daybreak will,

They shrink,they disappear,they’re gone.

I almost caught that one

https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-dark-side-of-self-control#:~:text=Self%2Dcontrol%20can%20restrict%20emotional%20experiences.&text=For%20example%2C%20high%20self%2Dcontrol,raises%2C%20and%20outstanding%20performance%20appraisals.

D

But is resisting temptation always beneficial? A small but growing body of research has begun to illuminate a dark side of self-control, with important implications for organizational life.

Self-control can restrict emotional experiences. One of the reasons why people high in self-control resist temptations is that they experience less tempting desires. But this might also mean that these people have less intense emotional experiences; that is, they respond to situations in more neutral ways. For example, high self-control might prevent employees from fully enjoying positive career outcomes, such as promotions, raises, and outstanding performance appraisals.

Self-control may lead to long-term regret. When people reflect on their lives, they tend to regret exerting too much self-control (e.g., choosing work over fun) and missing out on the pleasures of life. This experience of regret emerges only after time has passed. For example, a very successful CEO who had to make a lot of sacrifices in her life in order to pave her way to the top might feel that she has missed out on many pleasures when she gets older and reflects on her life as a whole.

Self-control can lead to increased workload. People tend to rely on others with high self-control, and this might make the latter feel burdened. For example, an employee who is very good at exerting self-control might be overloaded by her colleagues

https://allpoetry.com/Thrushes

Thrushes

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living – a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce,
a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
And a ravening second.

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful ol?…………

Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more

1. a broadly accurate guide or principle, based on practice rather than theory.”a useful rule of thumb is that about ten hours will be needed to analyse each hour of recorded data”

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Many people will never get to that stage. Those who are functionally illiterate can’t read for practical reasons. Emails, payslips, train timetables, road signs, letters: these basic aspects of adulthood appear to them like hieroglyphics. They can’t even read to their own children. But there is another tragedy: they can’t read for pleasure. From the greatest works of literature to the subtitles of magnificent foreign films, their life is culturally impoverished.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5330cbd8-638f-11ed-9ccc-9d160947f622?shareToken=baa5dbf7c45519e6a35f97bb991f64e

Down the slanting, new laid garden path

I saw the young wood pigeon in the bath.

We rarely went down there in recent years

The bird was not afraid, he stood and stared.

Then having splashed in joy, he flew away.

I miss my quiet garden and its peace.

My heart is overflowing with this gried

What’s the point of living, keeping safe?

When we shall no more feel love’s sweet embrace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/well/mind/laughter-may-be-effective-medicine-for-these-trying-times.html

While the long-term impacts of such a practice remain unknown, Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London, said that laughter has also been shown to reduce the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline and increases the body’s uptake of the feel-good endorphins.

There also appear to be cognitive benefits. Watching a funny video was tied to improvements in short-term memory in older adults and increased their capacity to learn, research conducted by Dr. Gurinder Singh Bains of Loma Linda University found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_justice

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_one_foot_in_front_of_the_other

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/kieran-setiya-philosopher-self-help-life-is-hard

She got out of bed at the wrong station today

Very moving

I ate one chicken before it was snatched

She always keeps affairs underhand.

Many tans make doctors work

She kept a SIM card in her vest
It kept warm against her chest
But if she put her smart phone there
Its ringing sound would curl men’s hair
Every body stares

How much does a SIM card know
As the numbers go by slow?
Is it proof you are a thief
If you hide it in your briefs?
Noone even cares

What a peaceful world it was
Just the radio and God
No landline phone,no TV set
Wilfred Pickles, what no net?
Never cared to dare

Playing rounders in the road
Helping mother with her load
Learning how to stitch a hem
Buttons came off now and then
Just another year

Now it’s USB cords fine
Sign yourself up , wi fi time
Get connected to someone
From Palestine to Wellington
Photos are the lure

Time has shrunk, our posts impinge
Messages and twenty rings
I have three phones in my bag
One for mother, one for dad
They are dead but I ain’t sad
It’s much worse,I’m going mad.
Oh,everybody shares📷