To know someone who you think could understand you entirely, with a bit of time and effort as is usual, and yet who cares not to... this may be worse than never meeting or knowing such a person, which is a great sobering sadness itself. At least then there is a certain comfort in thinking that it is because you have never crossed paths. But if you have, and they do not wish to care, how can you not take that a bit personally?
What's worse is to not be let in to understand them; being understood and appreciated means little if it is not done in return. Still, what can we do but persevere and try to maintain some optimism, hoping to be useful to people when it's needed and not let self-centred introspection get in the way. A worthy aim, or a forlorn hope.

Drifting loose without a tether
Longing to escape foul weather
Forlorn hopes dashed to smithereens
Flung down into the dark ravines
To float detached from all around
Is not as fun as it might sound

paranoia

Fears biding time peeking out, in cracks lying hidden

‘Til doubt grows in waves slowly ebbing and flowing

The tide turns unbidden, humours unbalanced

Insidious creep, evil tendrils unfurled

Clawing and clasping, grasping and grabbing

Calm thoughts overtaken, blocked out by the thunder

Of barely glimpsed shadows, terror concrescence

reliving

The difference between reliving and reminiscing... not a comparison I’ve much thought of before, but the subtle differences between the two have recently been brought to my attention. I’m not sure I necessarily agree that reliving implies the desire to do something again in real life (I suspect in this case the latter led to the former), but the mention of this distinction made me ponder.
They sound similar, both evocative of delving into and sifting through memories. But whilst reminiscing is the recollecting or re-telling of past experiences, reliving implies more emotion, more contact with the memories; it is experiencing the situation again, even if only in the imagination, and with this comes a far more powerful experience. If the memory behaves and retains enough of the bones of a happening, you can immerse yourself in a past experience, reliving it again and again, often with different details each time, or a veneer of idealism over the top. Reliving can be as much about the parts we don’t care to dredge up from the memory as those we adored and focus on. This is the other side of a rose-tinted reliving of the past; the unbidden and unwanted flashbacks to times of trauma or unhappiness... such reliving can be disturbing to the point of illness.
With any such foray into the times gone by may come nostalgia, a more bittersweet yearning for the past - people, places and phases. We tend now to use ‘nostalgia’ fondly, but it’s not hard to see why it was once considered a medical condition; an excessive tie to the past, whether a longing for happy times or an inability to overcome past pains, can be debilitating.
The kind of reliving I’ve been doing of late, though, has been a delicious indulgence. Rose-tinted yes, but a tad bittersweet too. Maybe it does indeed mean I want to do it all again... the question is, would I have learnt anything from the first time around?

What we're offered via email sums up the wants of our misguided world rather well: money, viagra and valium.

Science vs Nature

There are many tensions between Science and Nature; this one churned in my thoughts during a particularly dull lab meeting many moons ago. Old words.

Science involves trying to understand natural processes by dissection (not always literal) and examination of the composite parts, then trying to fit these parts into the grand scheme of the process in question. So much of Science involves classifying and sorting entities, from butterfly species to serotypes of Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates. In doing all of this organising and strict classifying we are imposing our way of thinking on Nature’s products. It’s a fundamental difference in concepts. Science attempts to compartmentalise natural processes, but there will inevitably be overlaps where what we find in Nature doesn’t conform to the artificial organisational system we have created. We don’t have enough boxes into which Nature’s offerings can be put, and continually creating new ones seems to defeat the point. Science and Nature should work together, not be in battle.

icy

She felt like an ice sculpture; frozen and numb, melting slightly, some part of her drifting away.