The most basic and never-to-be-forgotten fact about any infant is that it is born into a state of radical immaturity. It cannot understand its condition; it doesn’t know how to communicate; it has no way of empathising; it can’t help but be muddled about its own needs. Over many long…
From an early age, kindly people are liable to leave us in no doubt that gossiping about the private lives of well-known or prestigious people is despicable. At the same time,…
For most of history, however disappointed you might have been with people close to home, with your own hurtful family or maddening colleagues, you were at least able to hold on…
There is a complicated truth behind our nastiest impulses: we are nasty chiefly because we are unhappy. The paradox is that if only we could understand this about ourselves, and forgive…
One of the things it’s easiest to forget about children is that they are aliens recently descended from another planet. In the way they look at everything around them, in the…
A near-universal goal of parents is to try to imbue their children with confidence; to try to lend them the energy, self-belief and courage to eventually be able to act decisively…
The useful thing about children is that they don’t let their imaginations get hampered by the more irritating or incidental aspects of reality. They will take one look at a sofa…
Perhaps the finest way to develop a loving attitude towards other people is to recall, in the face of their difficulty, that we are, in the end, all children. The claim…
Of course, we’re supposed to shrug it off. We’re supposed to have a quick look at a gallery of images – the kiss in the ocean, the breakfast on the veranda,…
One of the ways in which we can accelerate, and keep faith with, change is to look forward to a time when it has occurred and anticipate what it might be…
There is a kind of person who seems at first glance to have an admirable degree of self-motivation, thoroughness and drive. They are up at dawn, they rarely take holidays, they…
In 1821, the 45-year-old English painter John Constable went out on to Hampstead Heath and did something very loving. He set up his easel and looked closely at an elm tree.…
When it comes to our sense of who does and doesn’t deserve punishment, we tend to operate with a simple dichotomy: either someone is guilty, and therefore must pay for their…
Some of what holds people back from showing greater love is a sense that it would be dangerous and woolly-minded to do so. Too much sensitivity and sweetness, too much tolerance…
One of the reasons why we may end up acting more destructively and cruelly than we should is that it can take us a long time to fathom how someone like…
We hear so much about how difficult childhoods can damage people that we sometimes fail to consider the fascinating and telling obverse: what happens in emotionally-nurturing families, what does it mean…
It might seem – at first glance – as though the people we term high-achievers could not possibly have any relationship to self-hatred: they are the ones who did exceptionally well…
There is a particular kind of romantic pilgrim whose love life attracts a high degree of sympathy. Despite their best intentions and apparently ceaseless efforts, they seem fated to move from…
One of the odder features of self-hatred is that the affliction may escape our notice for the greater part of our lives. We may simply not be aware that we don’t…