Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

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. 

“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.

2020

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

Please see the first extract below.

Introduction

This book is about what’s going wrong in the world, and about how people are trying to make things better, a hard task made harder still by the fact that, while we have the illusion of constancy, our lives are in fact characterised by continuous change, both out there in the physical world and inside our heads.

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.

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?

Very few have overcome greater obstacles than Helen Keller, who learned to communicate through the eyes and ears of others after a fever left her deaf and blind as an infant.

In The Light Of A Brighter Day, an essay first broadcast in 1951, the author activist and lecturer discussed her vision of faith.

Below is a selection of Helen Keller's most inspiring ideas.

Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run, life is either a daring adventure or nothing

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar

My friends have made the story of my life. they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation

Swimming in open water - ponds, lakes, rivers, oceans - is like crossing a boundary into another world. The ancient Celts even believed that submersion could provide a link to the supernatural - Carpe Diem

Entranced many years ago by Roger Deakin's wonderful Waterlog, which I have lent subsequently to others and they've had similarly joyous reactions. 

See also:

Is it possible to appreciate fully Dante’s work without understanding the man himself and the society in which he lived? A recent book attempted to shed new light on what some have called the greatest of all European poems.

See also:

"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?

(2) How can we start an open and ongoing debate about what the balance should be - next year, in 2030 etc? If we don't do this, then how can individuals really know how to lead a "good" life, can organisations know what their wider responsibilities really are and can societies really know how to develop fair policies for all?

In the long run, the pessimist may be proved to be right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip - Daniel L. Reardon

Prima facie, this "feels" true. However, the BBC's panel show, It's Only a Theory, featured psychotherapist Lucy Beresford who argued that there is a modern epidemic characterised by the "pursuit of happiness" (often fed by pills), and that sadness is actually a normal part of human life which we should embrace rather than shut out.