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“Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.” With this message, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, launched the telephone. The door had opened to distant, personal and instant contact.

They live in five European countries and could not be more different in age, interest or inclination. However, that made no difference. They were all infected. Some were not scared. Others were terrified. They have all gone through an experience that, without exception, has marked their lives.

"The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice" (Peggy O'Mara).

I just got back from the funeral of a fifty-four-year-old mother who left behind a grieving teenager. His father told how the boy wanted to ask his mother for forgiveness, on her deathbed, for all the stubbornness typical of a seventeen-year-old. He was already forgiven.

Loss begets pain, but pain is not one-size-fits-all, so there are no recovery methods that work in all situations. We do have at hand, however, explanatory models of pain, studies that dismantle myths about grief and, above all, "a psychological immune system" that helps us recover from painful experiences.

I have always imagined that well-being, bright prospects, good health and a clear purpose in life tend not to inspire questions about the meaning of life very often.

"When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both." This is a line from the postmodernist novel "White Noise", written by Don DeLillo. This way of thinking encapsulates one of the defining features of consumerism: the idea that more is better.

A seemingly endless stream of needy causes compete for our attention and money every day. Our emails, mailboxes and phones are bombarded by charities asking for generous donations to help.

What Indigenous peoples have long understood about our relationship with the natural world.

“Why are you still single?” Even though I have been asked this question countless times, I still never know how to answer it. 

In 1997, Dr Gary Chapman released the book "The 5 Love Languages of Children" as a follow-up to his bestseller, "The Five Love Languages."

Besides carefree days, Christmas carols and traditional sweet breads, any respectable December also includes an evaluation of the achievements of the previous year and making plans for the future.

We live in a world in which the news is far more pervasive than the events it reports. An event happens in one place but is almost instantly repeated and echoed in millions more. And while the event might be shocking, tragic or horrifying, a wider and sometimes greater toll is exacted by its reportage, by the slow-motion replays, by the breathless punditry...

The movie Nomadland, which was awarded Best Motion Picture (Drama) at the 78th edition of the Golden Globes, is a poem; a poem following a rhythm ever more strange to the lives that we—those who have climbed onto the carousel of adult life and have discovered that we are no longer free to get off—are so used to.

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.