Peace in a Pod

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to complete the Duolingo French course (I’m anything if not ambitious, clearly). It was while I was sitting on the couch a few days ago testing myself on my reflexive verbs, the weak Spring sunshine gleaming through the window, that I was suddenly filled with this feeling of just pure exoticism? (Read again, that’s EXOTICISM, not EROTICISM. I know French is a sexy language, but please, take your tête out of the gutter.) It felt like I was in holiday mode, basking in the sun (albeit indoors) and uttering phrases in smooth-sounding French. And of course, me being me, it made me think about additional-language-learning and how it impacts on us emotionally and psychologically. I have always loved languages and, in my time as as a psychology student, the field of psycholinguistics, which is the science of language acquisition. I was raised more or less bilingually, English being my native tongue followed closely by Irish, passed down to m...

Not a day goes by when we don’t come in contact with it. We experience it in real life, on the TV, through the radio, over the Internet. It makes us feel a whole range of emotions. And no, I’m not talking about incessant COVID news updates. I’m referring, of course, to music . While the concept of music is a bit of a tricky one to pin down and define, the Oxford dictionary makes as good a job of it as any: “ vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion ”. Like, how stunning is that?? The amazing thing about music, in my opinion, is how it can be enjoyed by literally everyone - it is deeply personal, it transcends language, culture, generations and nationality and touches us in a way that is very hard to explain. The fact that it is carried through the air via vibrations makes it a multi-sensory phenomenon too, thus opening it up to those who have hearing difficulties, making sure no-one is excluded from t...

Don’t give me that look. I know the one. When you hear the word ‘meditation’ and straight away images of dreadlocked, baggy-pantsed, incense-burning hippies singing ‘Kumbaya’ come to mind. While the idea of meditation or mindfulness seems very new and trendy (especially to the Irish), it has been around for thousands of years, playing a huge part in Eastern religions. Having said that, you don’t need to be a Buddhist monk on a mountaintop to be able to meditate; cultivating your own mindfulness practice is actually easier and more accessible now than ever before. I would like to preface this post by informing the reader that this here is merely an introduction to meditation ( my understanding of it anyway), and will not address its every facet. I felt I needed to do a series of blog posts around the concept of meditation and mindfulness because to try to condense it all into one would be like trying to put the ocean in a glass. The Cambridge dictionary definition of meditation forms a...

Generally, in life, a simple problem requires a more or less simple solution. Nothing in the fridge for dinner? Go food-shopping or order takeaway. Device about to die but you're not done using it? Plug it in to charge. The time and energy put into solving small problems are usually in small quantities themselves. Similarly, to solve an immense problem, we feel, requires an immense amount of resources. Manpower, money, and a monopoly on time - nothing less. We throw all including the kitchen sink at whatever tantamount issue faces us, because we have learned subconsciously that if we are presented with a big problem, our response needs to match in size and weight. But what if I told you that one of life’s biggest and scariest threats - the threat being that of a meaningless life - could not be solved, but, at least, eked away at, with the simplest of solutions? I remember hearing it years ago, probably in my teens, and scoffing, if even. I was not the most self-aware adolescent to ...