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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

Empathy

What's Changing? - Empathy

Empathy

 

Please see below selected recent empathy-related change.

 

See also:

 

January 2024

  • A study in Nature showed that AMIE, a Google chatbot, diagnosed heart and lung conditions more accurately than doctors in online healthcare. More surprisingly, the chatbot seemed to also rank higher on empathy - a trait considered beyond AI’s reach. 

 

September 2023

On Others

Others

 

For me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have - Theodore Zeldin

 

Imagining seeing how everybody else lives, just for one day.  Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.

On Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

 

As we pass the 70th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death - or rather his work - has remained dear to me, one way of another, for nearly 40 years, from his poems, through the biographies I consumed at Edinburgh and subsequently, a profile on Great Lives and an excellent BBC commentary on Under Milk Wood.

During a guided "green meditation" in the summer of 2023, while focusing my attention on the beauty of a nearby plant, I was reminded of Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

On Humour

Humour

 

For Psyche, a sense of humour is virtuous because it helps people govern and express the emotions of contempt, trust, amusement and hope. And these emotions answer to the universal flourishing-related needs of criticism, connection, coping and capability. All in all, a sense of humour is a virtue.

We often assume that laughter occurs when we hear something funny, but research has shown that it is the people doing the speaking who laugh the most - 46% more than their audience.

 

On Xenophilia

blog image

 

During dark days of worsening refugee crises and increasing populism, can we still imagine reaching a state of "xenophilia"...overcoming our "homophily", i.e. the love of that which is like us, and reaching the love of that which is different?

Indeed, if we're ever going to care enough about conflict, genocide, poverty, hunger etc. enough to act on them properly, then we need to try much harder to avoid conflict with people we might not yet fully understand.

 

 

On the Forgotten

Ancestry

 

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts...half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs - George Eliot, Middlemarch

Authoritative lists of supposed global role models provoke approval and controversy in equal measure, but also raise the more important question: who is honouring the vastly greater number of non-celebrity role models among our human family of perhaps 7.8 billion alive today?

On Ancestry

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.