What if our real problem is not that we haven’t had time to travel enough – but that we don’t know how to make the most of what is already to hand?

Seneca built a small chamber not unlike a prison cell. Once a week or so he would sleep there, on a bare bunk, eating only old bread and olives and drinking water. This activity was part of what he called a ‘premeditation’ – a rehearsal of what it would be like actually to face his fears. ‘We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,’ he wr

Material objects – silent though they are – can be eloquent sources of important psychological messages; they can prompt, encourage, upbraid and generally remind us of our better selves – and by doing so they make a powerful, positive contribution to our lives.

what am I reading for? And this time, rather than answering, ‘In order to know everything,’ we might decide on a much more limited, focused and useful goal. We might decide that while society as a whole is on a search for total knowledge, all we really need is to gather the knowledge that is going to be useful to us as we lead our own lives.

because parents are a generation older, much of what shaped them stemmed from a world with priorities, values, anxieties and hopes that seem strange – even reprehensible – to their children, but that were, and still are, urgent and real for them.

Our preoccupation with money feels highly respectable, but its true cause is poignant and unexpected: we keep wanting more money because we haven’t yet identified a passion that matters enough to us that it replaces money-making in our minds.

A ‘simple person’ is someone who speaks plainly about what they really want and who they really are.

We can also recognise that our complicated behaviour doesn’t please people as we might have hoped. Most of the people we deal with would far rather face frustration head on than be sold a fine tale and then have to suffer disappointment in gradual doses.

What draws us to leave home and attend a party or social gathering isn’t merely a sense of duty; it is the desire to connect deeply with other humans, to attenuate a perhaps painful sense of isolation and to find an echo of our fears and longings in the eyes of others.