“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.” Ursula Le Guin I joined the local library this week. What an incredible resource. So many books. The librarian told me if there was any title that I was interested in, she would do what she could to help me access it. …
Author Archives: muser
Time and winning in life
I’m sitting here, looking out of the window. Time is passing. I’m fast approaching middle age. I’m not sure what I’ve achieved. Time is passing. I’m writing this blog that nobody reads. You get the gist. I struggle with time. I don’t know what it is. I certainly don’t know how to make good use …
Love
“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” M. Scott Peck …
Reading, wonder and adventure
Books were my refuge, my window to the world. Reading books helped me answer questions I had. More importantly, books helped me ask bigger, deeper, more challenging questions. Books painted pictures of people and places I hadn’t seen. Books took me to forests and castles, gave me an audience with queens, scientists and ogres. Books …
Write every day
Today, I’m not sure what the hell to write about. As I write, I put pressure on myself to write better, to be more interesting and clever. A few people might actually read this, and in the main they are people that I know. The original aim of this blog was to capture my thoughts, …
Podcasts are my new friends
I used to have friends. Friends I used to talk to about the world with. Friends I used to joke with. Friends who loved football like me. At some point, I discovered podcasts. I found podcasts who know much more about the world than my friends and I. I found podcasts funnier than my friends …
Nepal, lovely people and the double-edged sword of contentedness
We often talk about a place we have travelled to as having “lovely people”. Nepal is definitely one such a place for me. Let’s start with the obvious. When we talk about travel we often talk in sweeping generalisations. “I’ve done India”. “I’ve seen London”. We know that the reality of the experience is much …
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Avoiding dehumanisation
We are programmed to create categories and so to think of the world in terms of ingroups and outgroups. We understand and care for our ingroups (for example, our family and friends, our national brethren, members of our race) and aim to propagate them and help them thrive. Between our ingroups, we sometimes have moral …
The meaning of a life less chronicled
If a meal is eaten in a fancy restaurant and it isn’t posted on Instagram, has really been eaten at all? We have been seeking immortality ever since we became conscious of ourselves and our mortality. There have been many means of reaching immortality: People write their names on buildings, start wars and build business …
Thankful
This post is the result of my experience of a juxtaposition of giving food to poor young children in India vs. my behaviour when eating in a restaurant, as well as a conversation on a bus. This experience and the conversation that made me realise how unknowingly I (and perhaps we) can fall into a …
musings of an untrained mind 