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We love stories, and Hollywood knows how to dramatise them. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Hollywood is first and foremost an industry driven by ratings and profits. Children are more vulnerable and more likely than adults to pick up identity models from the film world.

"Loneliness irritates me like a broken nail," says a line in a Romanian poem. The truth is, loneliness stings, pulls apart, and resembles the coffee dregs left at the bottom of the pot in which joy and love once brewed. Although the fear of loneliness is natural, we can choose to see solitude as something more than a "flowering wilderness" and embrace it...

The prevailing message in the context of the pandemic was clear, but also disturbing: "Don't go out! Stay home! Work from home!" But what about those who do not have a home?

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

If optimism helps us get rid of problems more easily, too much optimism does the exact opposite: it amplifies them. Pushed to the extreme, positive thinking prescribed as an antidote to suffering prevents us from accepting reality as it is and starting to look for solutions that can make our lives easier.

"A friend in need is a friend indeed. Be that as it may, near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin." Is this an outdated saying, or is it still relevant? To whom, when, and how are we prepared to offer help?

No matter how hard we try to hide it, there are days when we are struck by the overwhelming feeling that our lives, however beautiful and enviable, are missing something essential.

There are no small acts of kindness in times of peace, let alone in times of war. It is a simple truth, which I have rediscovered these days, observing the acts of kindness made by the Adventist Church volunteers helping the refugees from Ukraine, and the reverberations that this help—which has become the epicentre of a great need—has had.

I open the window and breathe in the air, trying to guess the weather. Floating around, mixed, are scents and miasms alike; it's hard to decipher these intricate clues.

Things happen anyway, whether good or bad. Why put extra effort into trying to respond positively when certain things happen? Why be grateful?

I spoke very little in my early years and my mother says that my silence scared her. She never knew what was going through my mind. She was afraid I was hiding something.

Ask any cinematographer what gets them excited, and I guarantee there’s a fair chance they’ll answer with “lenses”. Having spent many years studying film and many more practising it, I can safely say that I now understand why this is—and it’s probably the first response you’d hear from me if you asked me the same question.

Since 2020, the wealth of the world's five richest people has doubled. Over the same period, almost five billion people in the world have become poorer[1]. Such an absurd expression of equality is, sadly, not unique and shows once again where injustice has reached in a society that thinks it is on the cusp of progress.

In the case of the well-known tension between the church and the younger generation, only one conclusion is possible. It’s not hard to figure out what we’re missing, it’s just hard to accept—on both sides.

If, biologically, a person becomes a parent when their child is born—or, civilly, when they adopt a child—from a practical and even moral point of view, a person only becomes a parent when they master a series of crucial skills.