We live as flesh and blood bodies with emotional reactions and, frankly, that matters more to us than all the axioms and statistics.

This life has depth - and 'having soul' in this sense means that, along with passion come conflicted, complex and agonistic experiences.

Emotions aren't just little butterfly feelings without much context or consequence, but real signals of our world view.

Last week I went on one of my favourite walks. I wanted to see if the linseed was fully in flower, which it wasn't.

When I hear the sound of the cat settling into the pillow next to me, I'm also recreating mentally his actions and seeing him in my mind.

What really matters might be best summed up as exploratory engagement. Or, engaged exploration.

Insomnia has benefits. I came down and read this article on Aeon, which I found very useful.

Emotions are difficult to 'verify' as we only have the subject's description of what they're feeling, combined with their behaviour.

You can work hard and win more often - but there are no guarantees. Life lessons.

In some societies, it would be too shameful to leave a truck-load of litter in someone's field.

The ladybird was only there because I looked for it.

I'm not good at painting manes, so I decided not to bother. It's still a horse, though. Sort of.

In the time we have, we should take time to learn the lessons time has taught.

Richard had the sense that he was trying to capture a kind of ideal form that the clay 'wanted' to express.

Our friend Nietzsche liked this fable. So much so that he used it to develop a genealogy of morality in the Western world.

I'm grateful here to Maude Ouellette-Dubé, whose Masters dissertation I have been reading.

My main reason for giving up meat was that I knew some cattle very well and eating them 'felt' wrong.

As long as we, as individuals or societies, see some people or groups as irredeemable, we have a long, long way to go.

Prepare for a load of old cog.

This is the text of an email I wrote to Scott Barry Kaufman after listening to him on Sam Harris's podcast.