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?
Please see below selected recent simplicity-related change.
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April 2024
Halcyon's 52 ideas: 52 weeks campaign will start in mid 2024, featuring a range of responses to issues you may be facing at the personal, organisational and/or societal levels (see examples below).
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April 2024
Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God have been a constant companion to me for more than 30 years, while his The Hero with a Thousand Faces outlines the common journey of the archetypal hero across a wealth of ancient myths from around the world.
A short animation from TED Ed presents a synthesis of Campbell’s foundational framework for the eleven stages of the hero’s quest - from the call to adventure to the crisis to the moment of return and transformation.
Please see below selected recent hope-related change.
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April 2023
The modern age equates a good life with being extraordinary and distinguished. But the truth is likely to be quite different: learning to cherish and appreciate an ordinary life belongs to wisdom and the art of living, notes The School of Life.
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star - Friedrich Nietzsche
Ah, Nietzsche. Always so fashionable, always so little understood and even so little read, although the young man I vaguely remember being enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil, in which he argues that the good person is not the opposite of the evil person; good and evil, rather, are different expressions of the same nature, which bubble to the surface by complex and nuanced currents of potentiality and choice.
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March 2024
Award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains.
In a talk with the RSA in January 2023, Keltner identified opportunities such as introducing "awe design" into hospitals, in order to turn clinical, tiled, bright but sterile environments into contemplative spaces where people can peacefully live...and die.