Inner

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

Please see below selected recent kindness-related change.

See below: Halcyon Kindness Headlines

September 2018

• A new book from The School of Life wants to help us to be nicer: that is, less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer, less prickly. Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless and one that we neglect at our peril. TSOL's guidebook to the uncharted landscape of niceness, promised to gently lead readers around the key themes of this forgotten quality, to help us learn how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural, and how to reassure.

August 2018

Halcyon curates the most significant anxiety-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with anxiety-related challenges.

Please see below selected recent alternative lifestyle-related change.

See also: Halcyon Alternative Headlines

September 2018

Please see below selected recent loss-related change.

See also: Halcyon Loss Headlines

September 2018

• Loss can be cultural, as well as personal. The fire that tore through Brazil’s vast National Museum destroyed nearly all of its 20 million specimens. Among the items feared lost are a priceless collection of Egyptian and Andean mummies, artworks from Pompeii, a dinosaur skeleton unique to Brazil, rare records from the country’s imperial era, hundreds of audio recordings of extinct indigenous languages, millions of insect and marine specimens, and the oldest human fossil found in Latin America - a skeleton named Luzia.

August 2018

Please see below selected recent listening-related change.

See also:

• Halcyon Listening Headlines
• What's Changing? - Therapy

September 2018

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them - David Hume

When I was studying, inter alia, Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh many years ago, local boy made good David Hume was a name never far any philosophy professor or tutor's lips. Aeon now writes movingly of Hume's life:

"While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’."

According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published.  The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book.  It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. 

However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984.

See also:

• George Orwell: A Life in Pictures

Please see below selected recent humanism-related change.

See also: Halcyon Humanism Headlines

August 2018

• The modern age is inherently anthropocentric in outlook (from anthropos, Greek for human), that is, it places human beings and their experience and concerns at the centre of the hierarchy, above the claims of nature, animals, gods or the universe more broadly. We are now, in every way, in our own eyes, the centre of the show. But it was not always thus, noted The School of Life.