“Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it’s not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience” — Erich Fromm, Humanist Psychotherapist

I’m working on a new book that follows the theme of writings here on The Reflectionist. Working title is “An Assemblage of…” Signup for Reflections and I’ll let you know…

To be clear, I don’t write because I have wisdom or knowledge I wish to impart. That would be at best naive, at worst arrogant. Like a stuffed shirt full of my own self-righteous importance and moral superiority, would I suppose to have anything worth a damn to anyone else? It’s why I have no time for preachers and evangelists. Now I need to go back over everything I have ever written to make sure I haven’t preached at you. Or, you can take it that all of that is here corrected.

Consider the things I write instead as ideas…

“What was there before the sky? Was the sky always there, Dad?” She said smiling from below my left elbow as we walked down Blackhorse Avenue.

Cara comes out with these profound questions and statements from time to time. One night about six months ago as I was painting the landing ceiling, being blasted in the eye by a halogen downlighter, she said from her bedroom; “Funny isn’t it dad, you need light to see, but if you have too much light you can’t see.” As I write those words I seem not to do justice to the weight of…

Well now Bob, this is a very complex thing...putting thoughts into words. They never quite get there. Always reaching for it, never catching it. The thing about this question "who am I?" is that it's a universal question, always being asked by everyone everywhere, and even though we might say we know who we are (by thoughts, words or actions), truth is we don't. Any knowledge is merely a memory of something, an experience, like a photograph. We think it's reflective of permanence, but Whitehead warned against falling into that trap. Nothing is stationary, everything moves. Change is ever-present and…

Here’s a couple of articles from Aeon that caught my attention in the last week or so…

While you’re here, you might as well do something that you enjoy. Yeah, sure, you’re just a stuffed shirt or a poor unfortunate eegit — there’s no escaping that —…

I stared at myself in the mirror and I wondered, who was it staring back? I imagine we’ve been asking this of ourselves since the birth of self-consciousness. The very moment the first of us became aware of ourselves as a separate entity in the world of things and people, the question has occupied our minds. The problem is that no matter how many attempts by whatever number of people or means, it remains unanswered. Lots of words, hypothesising, talking, but no definitive answer.

There never can be it seems.

The more I know my place in the world the…