Collared!

Look away now if you enjoy these!

Typical values: Per 100g, 17.0g of fat of which saturates 3.3g

OMG who would have thought that? Not me.

Where did all that fat come from?

And I love those one-eyed green monsters!

When it comes to movement, a plant usually has its whole body fixed to the ground, whereas an animal's body can move from place to place. A plant's movement is usually slow and is merely growth, whereas an animal's movement is relatively speedy about the place.

Once a belief takes root in you...

Do plants have a nervous system? They certainly respond less quickly and can't match an animal for sensitivity. Try getting a plant to change and it would usually more readily die.

Is your belief sensitive to your experience?...

But when it comes to nutrition, a belief is surely more like an animal... it's got to feed off something, even though it claims the opposite.

Lots of questions in life have answers, but I sometimes wonder if there is some scattergram somewhere that shows a relationship between the more trivial the question, the more clear-cut to answer.

It doesn't take long for a mind, well perhaps a complicating mind like mine, to find exception clauses in even simple question-answers. But that brings stress. Tell me!

Leaping forward to what are sometimes called the big philosophical questions in life…

Is the question the answer?

With a background in science and prescriptive religion, I often wonder if I am conditioned by society to believe that THERE IS AN ANSWER and WE JUST HAVE TO FIND IT, whereas maybe the best we can do is to state the problem fairly, and then out of this might flow tolerance, stress removal and possibly, yes, even insight.

By insight, I mean insight for me. If this insight is shareable, and it 'works' somehow for others then that is good. I don't need to share it with a sword! Neither do I need others to accept it to validate it.

I wonder if 'truth' that is shared forcefully, is shared out of fear, and shows that the original problem has not matured to bring the benefits I described above.

On validation, the sharing of insight can bring refinement, but this is not always necessary, and perhaps it actually seldom happens. Otherwise, we would be forgiven (interesting choice of word!) for believing that THERE IS AN ANSWER and WE JUST HAVE TO FIND IT! LOL

Do you know, it took me years and years as an adult for the penny to drop that everybody else didn't think like me?

I'm not saying that I didn't recognise when other people had different opinions from me. When that happened I suppose I just thought that what they were taking into account was different from what I had taken into account, or that they were somehow giving different arguments different weights before forming their conclusions.

Of course, I usually thought that they had just got it wrong. And as someone who hated to rock the boat (still do), it didn't really seem to matter that much anyway.

But in recent years I've started to take a few more risks, and that has been one of the things helping me to become increasingly convinced that other people think differently.

The logical mind has been de-throned?

And you know what? There have been more positives than negatives so far.

There is no 'one truth' that we can more or less reach depending on nature and nurture.

We all just live together on this great big rock.

Every now and then I feel as if I've just woken up a little bit more to where I actually am.

It calls to mind the ideas in the Talking Head's song, Once In a Lifetime, "How did I get here?", etc.

Having had more than my share of prescriptive religion, there's always the temptation to invent some theory around it.

But I think I'll just enjoy the moment… let my little collection of atoms savour their little difference in self-awareness.

The website is like the way it used to be when I log on.
I found it difficult to read the terms and conditions. That's all.

In my religious past, I was conditioned to believe that everything was revealed or to be revealed. It took me years to diagnose how this belief had transferred to gave me an exaggerated view of what I had to reveal to other people.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in being honest (for the most part), but now for a sound reason... not a superstitious one.

As a humanist I relate it to survival. If we're never sure where we stand with people, then life gets to be so much more hard work. We need to be careful with our physical and emotional energy to aid survival.

I still have problems from time to time with how open I think I should be with people, and with how open I expect them to be with me.

But just as you can miss out because you are too 'closed', so you can go too far in the opposite direction.

I think it applies to every relationship in life. Once I realised what I was doing with my "openness" I could take a more adult approach to managing relationships.

Of course, if you feel you have to be "brutally" honest about yourself whether to a priest or a partner you can see how useful that is to them and how powerful it makes them.
In the case of partners perhaps not even a power they want.
Why wander into that minefield...?

If there were such a thing as Blog Olympics, what would the individual events be ?

How often would they be held?

Would some groups feel obliged to boycott them from time to time? Why?

Your thoughts are invited.

Perhaps they already exist and I just didn't get through the qualifying heats?

Hmmm...

Sometimes I just wander at random round this website when I should be doing boring stuff like defleaing my shirts or ironing the cat.

I stumble across posts that really grab my attention, so I then descend into the comments.. the word 'descend' deliberately chosen. Bit harsh, I know.

I'm talking about a subset of the posts on relationships.

I follow a thread and get increasingly gobsmacked by the opinions expressed. Then it dawns on me…. I'm eavesdropping on a chat-up conversation.

Now that's fair enough. Live and let live.

But for me it's a bit like "The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night".

I just don't seem to understand what's going on till I've spent minutes trying to follow what's being said.

Is it just me?

...if you try to hold on to too many things... and preserve things the way they were...  you get dragged down.
Hard and bittersweet though it can be, there are times to let go.
For me, there are no magic spells in life, but one that came close was "Life is about what happens next".
I think I had forgotten that one for a while.