Skip to main content

An unexpected exchange

I don't consider myself to be much of a creative person even though I love art. I frequently find myself alone in reacting with emotion to certain pieces, so I tend to hold back my enthusiasm, maybe to avoid looking foolish.

Recently, I took a photo that somehow spoke to me. There was something about this one. I kept going back to it and enjoying it a lot. It is almost like a painting of a lonely person walking into the unknown - a bit how I feel these days.
Image

Out of pure impulse, today I shared it on Twitter, partly because I wanted to find a name for it and partly because I wanted to know if someone else would see what I saw in it.

This was the tweet:



I got a few suggestions, some good, others funny. But one stood out: "Solitary steps in marginal visibility". I didn't expect that!

All I could answer back was "Impressive" to which I got the response "In essence this is a lovely photo of someone purposely striving forward alone in adverse conditions in the service of others."

I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while... thank you Graham Hurley.










Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Irish Education is Failing Our Kids

Screenshot of the drawing made during the video RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms (YouTube) My heart shrinks a little bit every day when I drop my kids to school, specially the younger ones. It shrinks because I know that their experience ought to be so much better than it is. While some benefits exist in how education is delivered today, much damage is also being caused, and even worse, the knowledge exists about how to improve things, but teachers and the catholic church control of education in Ireland are incredibly powerful points of resistance to change. Take my four year old daughter as an example. She started school last September. Within three weeks, she could recognize three letters of the alphabet, but she had already been taught to pray, word by word at least two prayers. My 13 year old, who is facing some challenges in secondary school recently was offered support. He had to give up one normal class during the week to meet a support teacher. The option...

History: national baggage or an asset?

I read recently a suggestion that countries that experience severe drops in population levels due to traumatic events might never recover psychologically. Today Ireland's population remains 25% lower than what it was before the famine (from 8 to 6 million in the whole island). Ireland is a country that re-lives its history everyday. The almost genetically ingrained memories of pain from the great famine and the long process of securing independence are obvious on a daily basis. Much progress and healing has occurred in recent years, but it doesn't take much to raise the old resentment. Even apparently innocuous mistakes by UK press such as naming a famous Irish person as British (They actually tend to claim Irish actors and athletes as theirs in the good days, but remember correctly the person's origin when they are associated with any bad news) can trigger highly protective feelings. Northern Ireland has one of the most fractured societies in the world, and intoler...

Effective tax rates: Taxing times | The Economist

The Economist come to the rescue! I had endless discussions with people in Ireland about how we get far less value for money on our taxes than the Swedes. My argumentation was based on comparing notes with a Swede before the crisis started on a similar gross salary to mine and similar 'overheads', like car, children, mortgage, and so on. The finding was that although the 'take home' salary was slightly higher in Ireland, the disposable income was far lower after paying for child care, road tax, insurance and other transport costs. Since 2007 the comparison makes Sweden look even better. The table below doesn't show Ireland, but puts Sweden in a good light that might surprise some people. Effective tax rates: Taxing times | The Economist : 'via Blog this'