What's Changing? - Curiosity
Curiosity is the lust of the mind - Thomas Hobbes
Please see below selected recent curiosity-related change.
See also:
May 2023
Halcyon actively monitors change covering more than 150 key elements of life.
Curiosity
On Awe
Halcyon Inspired
21 January 2023
Award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains.
In a fascinating talk with the RSA in January 2023, Keltner identified opportunities such as introducing "awe design" into hospitals, in order to turn clinical, tiled, bright but sterile environments into contemplative spaces where people can peacefully live...and die.
What's Changing? - Empathy
Halcyon Imagines
1 January 2023
Please see below selected recent empathy-related change.
See also:
December 2022
What's New? - Curiosity
Halcyon Identifies
1 January 2023
Halcyon curates the most significant curiosity-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with culture-related challenges.
On Ancestry
If the past is replayed too fast, life seems futile, and humanity resembles water flowing from a tap, straight down the drain. A film of history for today needs to be in slow motion, showing every person who ever lived as a star, though dimly visible in a night sky, a history still unexplored - Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
A call to action. Time to explore these unexplored histories together.
On Calvin and Hobbes
Halcyon In Kal…
27 June 2018
"Possibly the best comic strip EVER in the history of the entire universe", claimed one commentator.
I think Dennis the Menace (in its heydey), Gaston Lagaffe and one or others may occupy the same pantheon as Calvin and Hobbes, but there is little doubt that, for all those of us who have been deeply touched by the warmth, humour, sheer humanity with which Bill Watterson blessed us over so many years, these creations occupy a very special place in our hearts.
On Holism
A.S. Byatt tells us that "for the Victorians, everything was part of one thing - science, religion, philosophy, economics, politics, women, poetry. They didn't compartmentalise - they thought big." - quote in New Statesman, 27/04/09
This is the Halcyon philosophy too, as much of what's most interesting and important in life appears to come from the interconnectedness of ideas, from the alchemy of putting together - in the words of Theodore Zeldin - two ideas that have never met.
On Wisdom
"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth", so said Goethe, as quoted in Jostein Gaarder's philosophy primer-cum-mystery novel Sophie's World.
On Virtual Experience
Imagine anyone being able to travel virtually anywhere...such as along the Trans Siberian Railway. No substitute for the original, certainly, but perhaps a relatively green way nonetheless of democratising curiosity.