Mindfulness: Little Red Riding Hood does not live in the present moment
"It was dark inside the wolf." Like a chef who reinterprets a traditional dish for an expensive urban restaurant, writer Margaret Atwood proposed to the students of her masterclass a reinterpretation of the story "Little Red Riding Hood", in line with the most current tastes and attention skills: a Little Red Riding Hood that lives in the present moment.
The queen of small, guilty pleasures
"Did you hear what he did?" "Guess what we found out about our new colleague!" In spite of their apparent enthusiasm, gossips—people who laugh loudly and try to capture the attention of others through the tantalising information they have to share—are often not as happy as they seem.
How to give your money away and make it count
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.
Journal entry
I remember precisely the moment and the place where I realized that I was free to choose what kind of person I want to be. However, this construction requires courage, suitable materials and the perseverance of not leaving the project in ruins when there are deviations from the plan.
Saving creativity
An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher
Who Am I?
I guess my mid-life crisis kicked off when I turned 26. What is my purpose in life? What have I accomplished so far? Am I caught in a treadmill of mediocrity? Who am I? Am I basically a good person or a selfish person? Do I have a destiny? These kinds of questions have a way of recycling themselves—they turned up again around my 31st birthday,...
Everything about the person who can hold you back: A short essay about you
Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was 4 years old, and didn't read until he was 7. His parents thought he was mentally disabled, and one of the teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and denied admission to the Zurich Polytechnic.
My Friend’s Friend | Friendship and God
You really don't realize what your thoughts about God are until you have nothing left but the conviction expressed in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: My Father, my friend from my youth (Jeremiah 3:4).
Life after lockdown: a return to the rat race?
On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.
How to sleep well in the age of anxiety
Sleep is perhaps the most important, complicated, and misunderstood physiological mechanism that keeps us alive.
Depression, the silent killer
In 2020, depression became the second leading cause of global morbidity and it is projected to be the first in 2030,[1] according to a forecast by the World Health Organization (WHO).
What could console our terrible fear of death?
Along with the rising death toll due to coronavirus complications, a usually latent aspect of our fear becomes harder to ignore. Despite the fact that it is the only certainty we all share, realising that our own end is a reality we might need to confront sooner than we had thought leaves many of us fervently searching for consolation.
Overcoming boundaries without crossing the line
I was a young student looking for a good paying job to support my family and my studies. On that day, I found myself in the head nurse’s office at the nearby nursing home for the elderly.
Reviving compassion | What not to say to someone who is suffering
Although grief is a universal experience, we respond differently to its onslaught, so it's no wonder that words meant to comfort often add more suffering to an already heavy burden.
Resilience to shame
Where there's fear, there's shame, says a Romanian proverb. What the proverb doesn't say (and what many of us don't know) is that the folds of shame hide a multitude of emotional problems and dysfunctional relationships that are passed down from one generation to the next.


























