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A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

Right at the start of the political thriller, The Post, a scene portrays military analyst Daniel Ellsberg with an empty gaze and a soul burdened by the horrors of the Vietnam war he was forced to document for the United States Department of Defense.

Since the beginning, human life on Earth has been an assiduous battle with the unknown and a series of unprecedented risk-taking. Exposure to danger seems to be the price to pay for progress. This is the first lesson learned in childhood, when the need to move from dependence to independence pushes us beyond the limits of safety and personal comfort. It familiarises us...

Fundamentalist movements, extremist and sectarian religious beliefs, manipulations of the mass of believers, conspiracy theories within religious sects, and other such threats, emphasise the need for critical thinking.

Psychologists recommend all sort of things you should have to develop a healthy and strong mind, like tenacity, ambition or optimism. To achieve this objective, however, there are also some things you should avoid.

Can you be happily married to anyone? The idea of ​​happiness as a thing of one's own creation persists in our times, although its cultural sedimentation belongs to the modern age.

Problem gambling in Australia and New Zealand is an issue seldom talked about, but we ignore it at our peril.

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.

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.

No one can live life without gathering regrets. An opportunity missed. A situation handled poorly. A conversation you wished you’d had before things got out of control. All of us have done more than enough to cringe in the dark about. But there are ways to have fewer regrets. Here are seven. 

Five seconds. And everything smells of heaven, wet grass and happiness.

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.

Education is not the same as schooling. The role of the family, the group of friends, the community, the church, and so on must harmoniously complement the school's role in this process. However, in the end, anyone who wants to succeed in life will work on their personality and self-education.

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

What can you do in the face of a terrible diagnosis, which condemns you to life in a wheelchair? What can you choose besides despair or resignation? Kayla chose to run.