How Children Learn About Others’ Needs
In contemporary, patriarchal societies, mothering often leads to mothers giving up on their own needs, because of the lack of a communal context of togetherness and support. One of the results of this is that, as children, we don’t learn about the needs of others as an organic limit we …
Needs Choreography and Mutual Influencing: Decoding the Flow of Interdependence
“I would like to end this conversation now and focus elsewhere. Is there anything else you want to share before I do that?” This is a simple question, so simple you may wonder why I would start a blog post with it. I chose to start with it, because it …
The Trouble with Mourning
Apart and Together: Mending the Tear
According to my initial plan, this piece would not have been written. The original project included nine pieces: an introduction, and eight peeks into one area after another that the Coronavirus crisis has exposed for us to dig into, see what may have been hidden before, to understand better how …
Apart and Together: Finding Collective Wisdom to Move into a Future for All
In 1961, at five, in a conversation with my mother, I was working out what to say, as a future prime minister, to all the prime ministers of the world. In 2017, with the same global passion and a larger vision, I convened a group from several continents to submit …
Apart and Together: Reengaging with the Full Range of Our Emotions
“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.” – R. D. Laing
The appearance of the current Coronavirus, and the major disruptions that both the pandemic and the responses to …
Responding to Breakdown of Trust in Police
“The belief that if you don’t do “anything wrong” you would never be bothered by the police is deeply entrenched in many places, especially in those countries where the dominant population believes that country to be democratic, which many do. It’s extremely difficult to show: anyone who is not in …
Apart and Together: Blurring the Distinction between Public and Private Spheres
“The personal is political” was one of the rallying cries of second-wave feminism in the US. As much as this slogan has been contested and put to different uses, it came to my mind as I sat down to write this piece (the 7th in my “Apart and Together” series …
Apart and Together: Accepting our Vulnerability to Consume Less
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This is the 6th piece in a series I named “Apart and Together” to capture the paradoxical reality of the pandemic we are part of: we are being asked to be apart from each other, physically, in the most elemental ways that we are, even as our …
Apart and Together: Restoring Dignity and Meaning to Work and Separating it from Sustainability
As a child, I was always struck, when reading 19th century novels, by figures about annual amounts of money given to people. I couldn’t figure out, even taking into account insane inflation rates, how it would have been possible for anyone to subsist on those amounts. …