Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in early 2020. We will be publishing extracts on this site and across social media during the first quarter of 2020. Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the book.

This is a work in progress. Please contact us to discuss further.

See also:

• Novelty and heresy

On an alternative world view

The sheer novelty of the ideas of such leaders not only addresses the issues at hand and but gives the world a new perspective to address issues of the future. The outmoded ways of leadership, of securing selfish interests and of exploiting public sentiments, should be relinquished. The new age leaders must look forward to lead the global thought rather than leading only a particular country or a section of society - Club of Amsterdam

Our lives are characterised, above all, by change.

“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.

No one has been able to capture this 3,200-year-old tree in one image before – until now.

I was first attracted by Camus, "prince of the absurd" when I was 16.  Camus still fascinates me, now well beyond what would have been his 100th birthday, and close to 60 years after his premature death in a car crash in Burgundy (it's said that he was found with an unused train ticket in his pocket - he'd planned to go by rail to Paris to rejoin his wife and children, but had accepted at the last minute the offer of a lift from his publisher).

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 = #Acceptance: on unrequited love as a vital force http://bit.ly/1Sl7Eh0 

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on why it may pay to be pessimistic https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/on-pessimism/

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on living with the psychology of regret http://bit.ly/2ieps5l 

This is an evolving manifesto, more modest than great charters calling for widespread political change, or updated commandments for our time, or even simple poems for our time.

Instead, Halcyon's small charter is primarily a call for inner change, leading to outer change.

We want to help people think more about how they can nurture key values, chief amongst them kindness.

Kindness

This evolving paper will examine the overall Ethical Development Goals (EDGs) that Halcyon is developing to complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Introduction

The EDGs are inspired by the SDGs, officially known as ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, an intergovernmental set of aspiration Goals with 169 targets.

However, ethical considerations need to play a more central role in the implementation of the SDGs, according to a coalition of countries who co-sponsored a meeting at UN headquarters in January 2016; the meeting heard that despite unprecedented collaboration, many businesses still need key ethical reforms.

"There are two great forces of human nature......self-interest and caring for others" , according to Bill Gates.

If true, then:

(1) What is the approximate balance between the two today - in individuals, organisations and societies?  How much time do we really spend thinking about and then acting on other people's needs?

Since the cave we have tried to make the old gods smile. Each year we fail and winter comes. #CLNolan

"Wings are for flying, not frying" ...nice quote, nice sentiment.  Animal-friendly consumerism could be a major future trend.  Until 14 years ago I too gorged myself on turkey every Christmas Day, Boxing Day, 27th...and my mouth watered long after at the remembered taste of turkey soup on the 28th or 29th, a meal which constituted one of the culinary highlights of my year.

"Sauin" is the name in Manx Gaelic of the festival marking the start of the year's dark half, celebrated from dusk on 31 October to dusk on 1 Nove,ber. In Gaelic & Irish, "Samhain"; a liminal time, marked by fire, haunting & the crossing of thresholds.

A beautiful seasonal quote from the inspiring Damh the Bard.

Above and beyond the many unread volumes in our library, there are many other books that I'd still like to read, given sufficient life and leisure, including the following:

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear

You tried, in your way, to be free. Thank you. Now go join that great gig in the sky. So I wrote a year ago, when Lenny left us. However, the legend lives on - listen for example to How the Light Gets In.

'We Love Leonard Cohen' celebrated his 81st Birthday, and then, for his 82nd and final birthday, Leonard gave us a present. "You Want It Darker" is the title track to last album, his 14th studio album in his 49-year recording career. (See also Leonard Cohen Makes it Darker.)

"Leonard Cohen offers the possibility of living with grace, dignity, and integrity, without submitting to illusions, without succumbing to indifference, and without indulging in denial of our own failures and flaws, in a world that is too often corrupt and malevolent" - Allan Showalter

Imagining not allowing our "projections" to hold us back, as argued in this thoughtful piece? The idea that we are often very wrong in the assumptions we make about what other people are thinking and feeling strikes a chord. Is there a word for "false empathy" - i.e. for trying to put ourself into the other's shoes, but coming to completely wrong conclusions? Maybe we'd benefit from "cognitive reframing".

So often we seem to impute to others far worse feelings and motives than we subsequently learn were really there, and often isn't the truth that the other person was focused on his/her own problems and, far than condemning us, was probably not thinking about us at all? Even if/when they were, what harm does it really do us?

Reading Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and subsequently speaking with people with first-hand experience in Rwanda, makes one wonder about gradual disengagement from morality.  For example, anti-Israel sentiment can morph into anti-Jewish sentiment. Del Amitri warned 30 years ago that "they'll burn down the synagogues at six o'clock and we'll all go along like before".

Children’s book illustrator and Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, in an NPR Fresh Air interview less than a year before his death in 2012, made a heartwarming call to "live your life, live your life, live your life".

Azeem Azhar in conversation with Yuval Harari on how the advances in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will transform humans and human society. Fascinating - and worrying - ideas include:

The most crucial decision-making skill, some scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition.  According to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgement isn't intuition or experience or intelligence, but willingness to engage in introspection, to cultivate "the art of self-overhearing".

Not quite the same thing as blogging, I feel.  A fool with a tool is still...well, let's just say that perhaps not all humans demonstrate all of the time the "floodlight intelligence" that's supposed to distinguish us from the "laser-beam" intelligence of other animals. 

Dave Pollard wrote thought-provokingly of the "Now Time”, a multidimensional recursive eternal present familiar to aboriginal cultures the world over, and recalling Friedrich Nietzche's desire to be a "yes-sayer" to each moment.

This recalls Camus' celebration of Sisyphus starting afresh each day and more recently, Eckhart Tolle's "power of now".

For the White Horse of summer, with its crown of hope made from fern and flower, has left the land. Now we must wait till the Grey Horse comes amid the dark days of winter shivering - Hookland