I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering of people I didn’t know, who regularly host discussions of thoughtful topics. In a little while I was deep in conversation with two women, one of us Chinese, one of us Brazilian, and we were so relaxed and open together that our peels of laughter attracted a man […]

Why such strong reactions to this week’s cruise ship melodrama? Could be because as spoilt Western people with our five-planet lifestyle we resent other spoilt Western people exposing the scam? I am tasting an element of that in my own responses. I feel like: these Americans have finally experienced a thin glimpse of what it […]

Pessimists (cynics) invariably believe they are ‘realists’ and therefore can smugly feel that optimists must sooner or later knuckle down ~ that is, be beaten down by ‘reality’ & ‘experience’ ~ and join them. I’ve realized the reason optimists know we are optimists is because it is jolly hard work. To assess the world truthfully […]

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On the first day of life-drawing class the teacher said, the mistake you all keep making is, you are trying to draw the outline. ‘The outline is an abstraction,’ he pointed out: ‘it doesn’t exist.’ One of the challenges in learning to draw for the first time, as an adult, is to see past your own expectation of what ‘a face’ looks like.