Jean-Paul Sartre’s most famous dictum — existence precedes essence — was meant as a liberation. Human beings, he argued, are not born with a fixed nature or divine blueprint; they become what they are through action and choice. In this, Sartre was surely right. No pre-written essence guarantees meaning or redemption. Yet Sartre stopped one …
Society exists to establish order, not fulfilment. Social constraint makes collective life possible, but it does not recognise the autonomy or particularity of the individual. This essay explores the tension between survival instinct and human meaning, arguing that conflict arises not from moral failure but from scarcity, fear, and the limits of social design. Between raw survival and moral idealism lies the harder task of living truthfully within constraint, without illusions of purity, rebellion, or final harmony.
Rousseau’s Émile confronts an uncomfortable truth: human beings are shaped long before they are capable of judgement or resistance. Social constraint precedes understanding, and autonomy arrives late, already burdened by what has gone before. This essay examines Rousseau’s attempt to manage that problem through education, its paradoxes and limits, and why return and revision are possible — but reset is not.
This essay reflects on desire, vocation, and the search for a significant Other, not as a romantic ideal but as a structural need for recognition, continuity, and shared judgement. Drawing on lived experience and on the 2001 RTBF film C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand, it explores forms of love that organise life rather than console it: relationships that arise without design, endure disappointment, and aim not at permanence but at growth and eventual release. Meaning, it argues, is not found in depth alone, nor guaranteed by intensity, but emerges slowly through constraint, responsibility, and return.
People’s motives differ, but they are almost always shaped by dynamics of attraction that operate below conscious awareness. Choices are made before they are understood, and only later explained in the language of interest, ambition, or necessity. What draws us into a life is rarely transparent at the time.
Meditation is not an escape from life, nor a technique for manufacturing insight, but a way of learning when consciousness can safely let go. Human beings live through rhythms of attention, rest, and drift, and change unfolds over time rather than through heroic effort. What sustains a life is not constant awareness, but the capacity to return—again and again—to meaning, structure, and relation as life moves on.
Knee replacement is properly a last resort, but under pressure the NHS often offers it before slower, systemic alternatives have been explored. Weight loss, strength, balance, and habit form a quieter but more coherent response — one that replaces moralised “discipline” with structure. Like AA’s Just for today, progress comes not from heroic resolve but from staying inside a workable programme, one day at a time.
— Psalm 150 (Vulgate / Hebrew)Laudate Dominum in sanctis ejus By GRAHAM JOHN The final psalm abandons petition, argument, and narrative. What remains is praise alone — sound answering being, breath answering gift. 6 verses total VERSUS 1–6 (LATIN + LITERAL ENGLISH + WORD NOTES) 1 Laudate Dominum in sanctis ejus: laudate eum in firmamento …
— Psalm 149 (Vulgate / Hebrew)Cantate Domino canticum novum By GRAHAM JOHN A psalm of communal praise that binds joy, identity, and justice, portraying worship as both celebration and moral commitment. 9 verses total VERSUS 1–9 (LATIN + LITERAL ENGLISH + WORD NOTES) 1 Cantate Domino canticum novum: laus ejus in ecclesia sanctorum.Sing to the …
— Psalm 148 (Vulgate / Hebrew)Laudate Dominum de cælis By GRAHAM JOHN A universal summons to praise, calling all levels of creation — heavenly, earthly, animate, and human — to acknowledge the sustaining word and exalted name of God. 14 verses total VERSUS 1–14 (LATIN + LITERAL ENGLISH + WORD NOTES) 1 Laudate Dominum de …