Sunday, May 29, 2022
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Friday, May 27, 2022
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Monday, May 23, 2022
Get into this. Most powerful.
Saturday, May 21, 2022
Friday, May 20, 2022
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Monday, May 16, 2022
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Thursday, May 12, 2022
One of many tools for your toolbox.
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Thought for today
Martin Wroe ∙ 3 min read ∙ View on MediumThe Struggle For The Legal TenderOn the disappearance of cash and what money can, and cannot, measure. Standing in a slow-moving supermarket queue this week, everyone was getting a little impatient. The customer being served was having trouble paying for her shopping. Very slowly she was drawing from her purse round bits of metal and pieces of folded paper. Hard cash. The episode was awkward but also endearing, a clumsy antique moment in our sleek and shiny digital times. Our pockets and purses jangle less and less every day. Almost without noticing cash is disappearing in favour of one-tap transactions with card or phone. Life becomes quicker, more convenient…but also, depending on who you are, more difficult. Especially for people on low incomes. According to a report from consumer group Which, half of regular cash users say that using cash helps them keep track of their spending… and more are turning to cash as the cost of living crisis worsens. It’s hard to compete with the efficiency of the virtual transaction, but something is lost when the visible is replaced by the invisible. The passing of notes and coins, the receiving of change — hand to hand, eye to eye — is a brief relationship freighted with the mystery of human connection. And cash leaves no digital footprint, no clues for anyone to track us. No one chasing us down the online high street to persuade us to spend more. ![]() A relationship captured in the emergence of the word ‘monetise’ — the belief that anything and everything can be weighed and measured and turned into money. The beauty in the idea of a Sabbath day, rooted in the ancient creation story when God is said to have taken a day off — after the labours of making everything out of nothing in the previous six — was its sense of uselessness. It wasn’t for anything. A sign that not everything needs to be commodified or have a price tag hung on it. In the National Gallery the other day, my friend Mike was looking at Jesus and his friends in Caravaggio’s painting the Supper At Emmaus. He overheard a child ask her teacher about how much it was worth… and whether, if she won the lottery, she could buy it. The teacher replied there was no need to buy the painting… as she already owned it. What a wise teacher. Galleries with no charge to enter, where everyone can borrow the view and briefly own the art, are a symbol of the good society. A world where people are not locked out by the breathless march of technology. Where the slow are not disregarded by the fast, the old by the young… or the young by the old. We may measure the convenience for some of life without cash, without comparing the trouble it brings for others. As the early Christian teacher Paul put it, ’Let each of you look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.’ — — — — — — — — — From BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on Saturday May 7th. Other recent radio thoughts :‘I don’t want your apology, I want you to be sorry.’ ‘The Renewable Energy of Silence’, ‘How To Be Good Ancestors’, ‘This Bright Sadness’ and ‘I Can’t Speak For The Tree.’ Medium, 548 Market St, PMB 42061, San Francisco, CA 94104 Careers·Help Center·Privacy Policy·Terms of service |
Monday, May 09, 2022
Thursday, May 05, 2022
Tuesday, May 03, 2022
Monday, May 02, 2022
May 1
Time Travelling
When there’s no substitute for the body language of presence.
I travelled back in time last week. A friend texted from New York and asked me to send best wishes to another friend — let’s call him Jack.
The text landed on me like a punch because Jack died last year but my friend in New York hadn’t heard. It was as if he was living in an earlier time. In his world Jack was still alive.
Jack had not been a fan of social media, so when he died his partner asked that the news was not posted online.
This meant people learned of his death when a relative, or family friend like me, rang, or wrote, to tell them.
I spoke to a lot of people, and each time it helped me to understand more of my own loss.
Waiting in silence as people received the news… the loss of words, lump in the throat, tear in the eye. (Them too.)
But it dawned on me that this had a certain rightness to it, that news this weighty demands a weighty moment. The death of a loved one is more than information or data.
Of course for many people living with serious illness, posting social updates may be a crucial way to stay in touch. A sense of people traveling with you in your own uncertainty can be balm for the soul…. offering consolation at bad news or celebration at hopeful milestones. A kind of talking therapy.
But digital media can talk too much and often oversells itself. Perhaps Elon Musk, who this week paid 44 billion dollars to buy Twitter, will transform the platform with the sort of innovation with which he pioneered electric cars through his company Tesla.
Or perhaps the sale will further tilt the tendency of these sites to grandstanding, attention-seeking and instant score settling.
The public square of social media rarely makes room for news that must be told slowly, that takes time to be received.
It’s not comfortable sitting with you in the silence. It’s already moved on to some new noise.
‘Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness,’ wrote the mystic Meister Eckhardt. I doubt he’d have been a social media influencer.
The emotional abbreviation of emoji — praying hands or sad face — are no substitute for the body language of presence, the vulnerability of the patient and personal. With the quiet time that we must give each other to receive the ultimate news of our own mortality.
‘The only reason for time,’ quipped Einstein, ‘Is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’
Some news must be received quietly, slowly, personally. ‘To everything there is a season,’ reads the book of Ecclesiastes. ‘A time to keep silence and a time to speak…’
Even on social media, some day