The world is crazy until we make sense of it.  We spend our lives making sense of it, giving it meaning.  The problem for each of us is that, once meaning had been ascribed, the world seems to conform to that meaning and we relate to it as if that is the way it is.

What is difficult for us to grasp, is that the person standing next to us probably lives in a different world, shaped by whatever meaning they have placed on it.  I’m not suggesting that this is wrong or bad (we can’t do otherwise), or that we should remove all meaning from our experience (we can’t). (more…)

I remember, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, that from time to time our sense of security would be shaken by another account in the media of increasing tension between the USA and the USSR. The threat I felt was that an idiot president (on either side) would press a red button, leading to annihilation of all life on earth (except perhaps the roaches).
In the 1980s the perceived threat seemed to be more about lifestyle – computers and robots would firstly take on our boring and menial jobs and then get smart and take over everything. Humans would feel useless and life would have no meaning. (more…)

Madness can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.  Insanity is sometimes defined as not being able to properly interact with the world as it exists.

Both madness and insanity are evident in the Australian medical system.  To a large extent it is not a healthcare system because, despite its rhetoric, it appears more enamoured of medication than health. (more…)

We live in a world that appears complex to many of us.  It is crowded with people, things, information and events.  We can only deal with a small part of all this in a lifetime and an even smaller part at any one moment.  We have to choose what to do, who to be with, where to be, what to read; even from the small slice of all possibilities that we have access to.  To assist us in this, helpful people create catalogues, indexes, compendiums, digests, directories, databases, search engines, fortune cookies and book reviews. (more…)

Earlier in the week I decided to do some (more) cleaning out of old stuff.  There are boxes in the roof that went up there when I moved to Mount Eliza thirteen years ago.  Some I have not looked at in all that time.

One box’s contents I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years.  Most of it consisted of memorabilia from a number of former lives, including an address book from my almost four years of travelling in the 1970s.  Dozens of people I’d met and/or stayed with, and their contact details (pre-internet, of course). (more…)