My Renaissance or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Everything - A Guest Post

It's like Christmas - only better. Today two very good friends of mine wrote some great content for a couple of guest posts. As you will see tonight their writing is great and it's a privilege to be entrusted with some important and personal messages. I hope you enjoy reading them both as I have. The first is by someone who even I am dwarfed by when it comes to thinking about thinking. Enjoy. 

The notion of starting with just a title is one which has always appealed to me. Well, I’m not sure if it’s a matter of appealing or more a matter of the alternative being much less attractive. You could spend an infinite amount of time planning and crafting a perfect sentence that could sum up your life in a way which conveys whatever emotions and experiences you’ve gained from it, but even if I managed to do just that, I don’t think I would be satisfied. 

For me it has to be about the journey. 

The process of documenting my life is one that I began the summer of 2011. Granted, I only get the chance for reflection when my desk isn’t covered in various papers – so not very often – but reflection still remains a big part of my day-to-day life. How I reflect is a bigger issue. I like to be able to discover things about myself. To sit and not know what I’m going to think about, or write about and through this process find out what’s important to me; to pinpoint that one thing that happened today that made me happy. 

This post is going to be a discovery for both of us.

This is getting a bit heavy already. Come, sit down by the fire, pour yourself a fruit-based drink. Let’s talk.

Just One Emotion at the End of Another Exam Diet

It's been a tough couple of months for one reason or another. Well actually it was really only one reason: exams. On Friday I sat the last of three massive exams - probably the most important I've ever done - and one emotion really marked the occasion a lot more than I thought it would: a real sense of emptiness. When I look back on the last few weeks in particular I start to question whether I've ever really wanted my exams to be over just because they were a nuisance or they were getting in the way of watching crap on the TV. When it comes down to it, the thing that I wanted the most was for them to be done well, rather than just done. Maybe that explains my feeling of emptiness.

The Great Delusion

It was pointed out to me the other day - in fact, on many occasions - that my posts are usually quite bleak affairs. This is partly by design and partly a reflection of what my mood is when I write, particularly recently. If it's not been one thing that's been getting me down recently, then it's been another thing. Then I read a book: a book that has shifted my view of things ever so slightly.