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The 52:52:52 project, launching on this site and on social media in 2025, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

This site addresses what's changing, at the personal, organisational and societal levels. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 elements of life, from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and much more besides, which will help you better prepare for related change in your own life.

Halcyon In Kaleidoscope features irregular and fragmentary writings - on ideas and values, places and people - which evolve over time into mini essais, paying humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.

A Mundane Comedy is Dom Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

On Metaphor

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  Metaphor
On 25 November 2010, Melvyn Bragg and his In Our Time guests discussed the history of metaphor, famously encapsulated in Shakespeare's As You Like It, where the melancholy Jaques declares: "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players." 

Generally, the use of metaphor gets the thumbs up.  Yet metaphor has its dark side too: e.g. Jonathan Haidt argues that viscera and emotion often drive our decision-making, with conscious cognition mopping up afterward, trying to come up with rationalisations for that gut decision.  Haidt even suggests that part of the emotional contagion of the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda arose from the fact that when militant Hutu propagandists called for the eradication of the Tutsi, they iconically referred to them as "cockroaches". 

(Will we individually, or as societies, ever to be able to "count to 10" before launching ourselves into such negative spirals?)

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