Involution Labs

Tag: life

  • Between Safety and Risk

    Exploring Another Way of Reading Freud

    Freud’s psychosexual stages can sound strange when reduced to notes about sucking, toilet training, masturbation and forbidden desire. Perhaps part of the difficulty lies in what he meant by sexuality. He was not always describing sexuality as adults experience it. He was trying to connect bodily pleasure with attachment, frustration, independence and identity.

    Freud may have noticed something important about the emotional intensity of childhood while interpreting that intensity through the sexual framework he had developed. What might happen if we viewed his theory through a different lens?

    What if some of what Freud understood as sexual desire could also be explored as attachment, separation and the gradual movement from safety into risk?

    The oral stage: can I trust the world?

    During infancy, much of a baby’s experience centres on the mouth. Babies suck, taste, bite and chew. Through the mouth, they receive nourishment, comfort and contact while also beginning to explore what exists beyond themselves.

    Freud wondered whether experiences during this period could influence later habits such as smoking, nail-biting, chewing pencils, kissing or overeating. These associations remain speculative and should not be treated as straightforward explanations of adult behaviour.

    Yet the oral stage may still offer an interesting question:

    Will the world respond when I need something?

    A baby depends on others for food, warmth and reassurance. The person who repeatedly responds may become the baby’s earliest experience of safety. This is often the mother, though it could be any consistent primary caregiver.

    Perhaps the importance of the mouth is not only that it provides pleasure. It is also where trust and dependence first meet the outside world.

    The anal stage: what may I control?

    During toddlerhood, children become increasingly aware of bodily functions. Toilet training introduces ideas of holding, releasing, timing, privacy and approval. Something that once happened automatically becomes an area in which the child may exercise control.

    Freud connected experiences during this stage with later tendencies towards rigidity, withholding, disorder or carelessness. His proposed connections are difficult to establish, but the symbolism may be more useful than the personality categories.

    Could this stage be partly about discovering what belongs to the self?

    The toddler is also learning to say no, mine and I’ll do it. Retaining and releasing might form one small part of a much larger movement towards autonomy.

    The questions raised during this period may continue in different forms:

    What belongs to me? What can I control? When is it safe to let go?

    Perhaps the struggle is not really about cleanliness or bodily waste. It may be one of the first negotiations between a child’s emerging will and the expectations of other people.

    The phallic stage: why the phallus?

    Between approximately three and six, children often become curious about bodies, anatomical differences, reproduction and the taboo language surrounding bodily functions. They may touch themselves, ask direct questions or display jealousy when a parent gives attention to someone else.

    Freud called this the phallic stage. The term immediately places the male body at the centre of development, which raises questions of its own. Why should agency, movement or power be represented by the phallus? Does that reflect something universal about childhood, or something about the culture and period in which Freud developed his theory?

    If we temporarily treat the phallus as a symbol rather than an anatomical organ, could it represent outward movement, agency or the courage to venture beyond the familiar?

    And if the mother—or another primary caregiver—has become associated with safety, could the child be negotiating between the desire to remain protected and the impulse to explore?

    This does not mean that mothers necessarily provide safety while fathers provide risk. A father may be the child’s safest person. A mother may encourage independence and adventure. One parent may perform several functions, and these experiences can also come through grandparents, siblings, teachers and the child’s own curiosity.

    Still, the symbolic contrast raises an interesting possibility. Could development involve learning to move away from safety without believing that love will be withdrawn?

    Another reading of the Oedipus conflict

    Freud believed that the young boy unconsciously desired his mother and experienced his father as a rival. Fear of the father supposedly led the boy to identify with him, contributing to the development of the superego and a male identity.

    A related idea, later called the Electra complex by Carl Jung, described the girl as desiring her father and competing with her mother. Freud’s understanding of girls and women was strongly shaped by the assumptions of his time, and many aspects of the theory are no longer persuasive.

    Young children may say:

    “I’m going to marry Mummy.”

    “Daddy belongs to me.”

    “Don’t kiss her. Kiss me.”

    How should we interpret such declarations? Do children mean desire in anything resembling its adult sense? Might they instead be expressing attachment, possessiveness or anxiety about losing a special position?

    A young child may not yet understand marriage as an adult partnership. Marriage might simply mean permanent love: You will always belong with me.

    What Freud described as rivalry could perhaps also be a response to discovering that the caregiver has relationships and desires beyond the child. The child is no longer the centre of that person’s entire world—if they ever were—and this may be difficult to accept.

    The third person in the relationship, traditionally represented by the father, interrupts the imagined completeness of the mother-child bond. But could this interruption also open the child’s world?

    If the caregiver exists separately from the child, then perhaps the child can gradually become separate too.

    The question may not always be:

    Which parent does the child desire?

    It could sometimes be:

    Can I become separate without losing the person who makes me feel safe?

    Latency: practising life beyond the family

    Freud proposed five psychosexual stages rather than four. Between the phallic and genital stages, he placed the latency period, roughly covering the school years until puberty.

    He believed sexual energy became less visible during this period and was redirected into learning, friendship, play and competence. Another interpretation might be that the child is practising how to belong beyond the original family.

    Friends become increasingly important. Teachers and other adults acquire influence. The child discovers skills, rules, hierarchies and social identities that do not come entirely from home.

    Perhaps the question of this stage is:

    Can I enter a larger world without losing myself?

    Even this will vary enormously between children and cultures. Some children may experience school as expansion; others may experience it as conformity or separation imposed before they are ready.

    The genital stage: intimacy after separation

    Freud’s genital stage begins around puberty, when sexual interest develops in a more recognisably adult form. He believed that successful development would lead towards mutual heterosexual relationships.

    His treatment of homosexuality as the result of unresolved development is outdated. Sexual orientation should not be understood as a failed resolution of childhood conflict.

    There may nevertheless be something worth exploring in Freud’s interest in how early relationships affect later intimacy. Could adults sometimes look to partners for the safety, approval or completion once sought from parents? Might some conflicts arise when a partner is unconsciously expected to repair an old wound or provide unconditional parental reassurance?

    Not every adult difficulty needs to be traced back to childhood, and human relationships are unlikely to fit one developmental explanation. Yet it may be useful to ask what we are hoping another person will provide.

    Can we experience intimacy without possession? Can we depend on someone without asking them to become our entire source of security? Can love include both attachment and freedom?

    Do we carry safety with us?

    Perhaps the mother and father in psychoanalytic theory can sometimes be read as functions rather than fixed people.

    The maternal function might represent being held, nourished and welcomed. The paternal or phallic function might represent separation, uncertainty and movement into a wider world. These descriptions are culturally loaded, however. They may reveal as much about traditional ideas of motherhood and fatherhood as they do about childhood itself.

    Perhaps we do not need to preserve the gendered division in order to explore the underlying movement.

    A child may need both secure attachment and opportunities to venture. Too little safety could make exploration frightening. Too little freedom could turn protection into confinement. But even this balance cannot be prescribed in the same way for every child.

    Might healthy development involve leaving and returning repeatedly? A child wanders away, looks back and discovers that the trusted person is still there. Over time, perhaps some experience of safety becomes internal. The child may venture further because connection no longer depends entirely on physical closeness.

    Adults may continue making similar movements. A new relationship, migration, parenthood, bereavement or a change of identity can return us to old questions:

    Is it safe to leave?

    Will I still belong if I change?

    Can I enter the unknown without abandoning where I came from?

    I do not know whether this interpretation explains Freud better or simply takes his theory somewhere else. Perhaps his sexual reading and this attachment-based reading illuminate different parts of the same emotional territory. Perhaps neither can fully contain the complexity of childhood.

    But changing the central question may allow another conversation to begin.

    Instead of asking only what or whom the child desires, we might ask:

    How does a child leave safety without losing love?

    And perhaps growing up is not a final departure from dependence. It may be the continuing practice of moving between safety and risk, attachment and freedom, home and the world beyond it.

  • End of Year Ceremony

    Karin read the joint email from the city’s schools one more time.

    The principal of the secondary school wrote that they would very much like to continue the tradition of holding the end-of-year ceremony in the church, but that her speech must not contain any religious elements whatsoever. Not like last year, when she had ended by wishing the children a pleasant and blessed summer.

    One word.

    Blessed.

    “Then why are you holding the ceremony in a church,” Karin muttered as she typed her reply, “if you want to restrict my right to say what lies closest to my heart—the very thing I have been called to say in my role as a priest?”

    She smiled to herself.

    She always built her sermons around the infinite love of the cosmos. She intended to do the same this time.

    Karin practiced a form of spirituality that not even the Church of Sweden quite knew what to make of, but her message had always been the same: to bring people together, not divide them.

    When the day arrived, she was unusually nervous.

    What was expected of her and what was about to happen were not necessarily the same thing.

    She reminded herself that light had always made people uneasy.

    Karin welcomed everyone into the church, dressed in its summer finery. Once everyone was seated, she closed the doors and, her legs trembling slightly, climbed into the pulpit.

    “When I stand here before you,” she said, “I am dazzled by your light. The inner light that shines so brightly it can sometimes be difficult to see. But I can see clearly that the future is bright because of you.”

    She let her gaze wander across the room.

    “You have chosen to celebrate an ending and a beginning here. You are ending a school year and stepping into a summer of unfamiliar things. You do not need to go to church to be loving, and you do not need to be here to believe in something greater than yourselves. But sometimes people need to gather in ways they otherwise would not, to acknowledge what brings us together.”

    She paused.

    “Light.”

    The children sat quietly.

    “You celebrate your birthday once a year. You come here once a year. Days like these are for letting go and replenishing yourselves. You are concluding a year of worldly learning in a place that can remind you of something larger. The cosmos dissolves boundaries.”

    She smiled.

    “I hope you at least catch a glimpse of your own greatness. I don’t mean followers or comments, but your inner light.”

    She stepped down from the pulpit.

    “To see yourselves and one another more clearly, we are going to do a simple exercise.”

    Karin demonstrated with her hands.

    “Stand like warriors. Follow the movements and sweep away whatever no longer serves you. What truly belongs with you will remain.”

    They followed her lead.

    “Now take each other’s hands. Form an unbroken chain.”

    The church fell silent.

    “Close your eyes if you wish. Think of something you are grateful for. Say it silently or aloud. Feel that gratitude moving through you, like a wave of light.”

    Karin walked slowly through the church, between the rows.

  • The Same Book. Two Completely Different Experiences.

    “I didn’t expect a book to understand me.”

    I’m fourteen and I’ve spent years feeling like adults hear me but don’t actually listen. Like school decides who I’m supposed to be before I even know myself. Like being young means waiting for life to begin.

    I picked up Warriors of Change expecting another story about brave kids changing the world. I was wrong.

    This book made me feel something stranger: recognised.

    It felt like someone had taken all the thoughts I’ve had but never said out loud—the anger at unfair rules, feeling different, questioning things everyone else accepts, wanting adults to guide instead of control—and put them into words.

    The Declaration of the Children of the Universe made me cry. Not because it was sad, but because for the first time I read:

    Maybe children are people now, not future people.

    I know some adults will think this book is rebellious or unrealistic. Maybe it is. But I think what scares people is the idea that young people might already know who they are.

    I didn’t agree with everything. I argued with parts. But weirdly, I think the book wanted me to argue.

    My favourite idea was that questioning isn’t wrong and change isn’t betrayal. I’ve always felt guilty for wanting different things from my family, my school, even my culture. This book made me think:

    What if becoming yourself isn’t selfish?

    After finishing, I didn’t feel inspired in the usual way. I felt… braver.

    I think some readers will hate this trilogy. Some adults especially.

    But if you’ve ever felt too loud, too sensitive, too imaginative, too rebellious, too different—or like no one takes you seriously because of your age—this book might feel less like reading and more like finally being heard.

    I wish I’d found it sooner.

    “Interesting, strange, and surprisingly sincere — but I’m not sure who it’s for.”

    I’m 16 and picked up Warriors of Change because the title sounded dystopian and rebellious. I expected something more like The Hunger Games or a YA fantasy about overthrowing a system. It’s not that.

    This book feels less like modern YA and more like someone trying to remember exactly what being young felt like before adulthood took over. Sometimes that works really well. Some parts made me stop and think:

    Why do adults always assume they know better?
    Why are children treated like unfinished people?

    The ideas about school, freedom, questioning beliefs, and being allowed to become yourself are interesting. I liked that the book doesn’t automatically side with authority.

    But I also kept wondering:

    Was this written by someone who was raising children or thinking about their own youth?

    Because sometimes the characters sound less like teenagers now and more like what adults wish teenagers would say if they could explain everything perfectly.

    Also… almost no phones? No social media obsession? No constant notifications? No AI? No influencers? No group chats exploding every five minutes?

    At first it made the world feel dated.

    Then I started thinking maybe that’s intentional.

    The book seems weirdly uninterested in trends and more interested in older questions:

    Who decides who you become?
    What if school isn’t helping everyone?
    Can traditions stop people becoming themselves?
    What do children know that adults forget?

    Those questions don’t really age.

    Some parts (especially the declarations and speeches) felt long, and occasionally it sounded more like a manifesto than a novel.

    But I respected that the book actually believes in something. A lot of books now are ironic about everything. This one isn’t embarrassed to care.

    I didn’t agree with all of it, and I’m not sure I was supposed to.

    I think readers will either feel deeply understood or roll their eyes completely.

    I ended up somewhere in the middle:

    I questioned it.
    I argued with it.
    But I kept thinking about it afterwards.

    Which might mean it succeeded.

  • The Courage to Think

    Thinking is often treated as something automatic. We assume we’re already doing it because we have opinions, reactions, beliefs, and conclusions, but real thinking requires something more demanding. It requires openness.

    To think isn’t just to process information; it’s to allow ourselves to be changed by what we encounter. That isn’t easy. It means letting go of certainty, questioning what feels familiar, and staying with ideas that don’t immediately make sense. That takes courage.

    Inspiration is often treated as something external, something that arrives when the conditions are right. But it’s closely tied to thinking itself. It emerges when we stay open, when we’re willing to engage without needing immediate answers or clear outcomes.

    When I was growing up, characters like Pippi Longstocking, created by Astrid Lindgren, suggested that it was possible to move through the world differently, without needing to fit neatly into expectations or social norms. That kind of influence doesn’t just inspire behaviour; it changes how you think about what’s possible. In a different way, Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomin books, encouraged a deeper kind of reflection, a willingness to examine and question rather than accept things as they are.

    Thinking doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s shaped by what we read, what we experience, who we encounter, and also by the language we move through every day. Language does more than communicate ideas; it shapes how we understand them. The words available to us influence what we can describe, question, and even notice.

    When language becomes simplified, shortened, or reduced to immediate reactions, thinking can become narrower too. Quick responses replace reflection. Nuance disappears behind slogans, captions, and certainty. Even digital forms of communication—text language, constant scrolling, emojis, and rapid exchanges—change the rhythm of thought itself. They’re expressive, efficient, and useful in many ways, but they also encourage speed over depth. And deep thinking rarely happens quickly.

    There’s a tendency to avoid discomfort by simplifying things, by turning challenges into easy explanations. Phrases like “everything happens for a reason” don’t open thinking. They close it. They offer resolution without understanding.

    Challenges aren’t interruptions to thinking; they’re what make it possible. To think well, we have to be willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn. That means meeting new situations without assuming we already understand them and allowing doubt, uncertainty, and contradiction to exist without rushing to resolve them.

    In that sense, thinking isn’t just an intellectual activity. It’s a way of being. And it begins with something simple but difficult: being open enough to change.

    Excerpt from Thinking Out Loud: Notes on Being Human

  • What Astrid Lindgren Understood About Children That We Still Don’t

    We like to believe that we respect children. We say we care about them, we protect them, we educate them, and we make decisions for them in what we call their best interest. But respect is something else entirely, and if we’re honest, we’re not very good at it.

    Astrid Lindgren understood that, not as an idea, but as a way of being. She didn’t just write stories for children, she wrote from their perspective, which is a very different thing. Most adults write down to children, simplifying, correcting, shaping, but Astrid entered their world without trying to control it.

    That’s why characters like Pippi Longstocking didn’t make sense to adults. She was too independent, too strong, too unpredictable. Adults were uncomfortable with her, but children weren’t. Children recognised something in her that adults had forgotten or perhaps never really trusted in the first place.

    We often say we love children, but love without respect easily turns into control. We decide what they should feel, what they should learn, how they should behave, and we call it guidance, when in reality it often becomes management. Astrid believed something much simpler and much more radical: give children love, more love, and then some more love, and common sense will come by itself. It sounds soft, but it isn’t, because it requires trust, and trust is exactly where we struggle.

    We don’t trust children to know themselves. We don’t trust them to feel deeply. We don’t trust them to grow without being shaped into something acceptable. And it shows in how we speak to them, how quickly we correct them, and how little space we give them to be fully themselves.

    Astrid didn’t just write about children, she defended them. She influenced how people thought, and her work contributed to Sweden becoming the first country to ban corporal punishment. That didn’t happen by accident. It came from a very clear understanding that children are not something to control, they are people.

    And yet, even now, that idea still feels radical. We celebrate her stories, we turn them into films, we quote her, but we don’t always live by what she believed. Because if we did, we would have to change how we listen, how we respond, and how much control we think we are entitled to have.

    It’s easier to admire Astrid Lindgren than to take her seriously. But maybe that’s the point. We don’t just struggle to understand children. We struggle to respect them.

  • How to Love Your Body

    We spend a lot of our lives worrying about how our bodies look. Not because we chose to—but because, somewhere along the way, we learned that how we look matters more than how we feel.

    We learn it early. At home, in school, and later through social media. It’s not always said out loud, but it’s there—in comments, comparisons, and the quiet understanding that some bodies are “better” than others. Over time, this voice becomes our own. We stop questioning it and start believing it’s just the truth.

    But what if it isn’t?

    We are all living in different bodies, yet most of us grow up feeling like the one we have isn’t quite right—that there’s always a better version we should be working toward. And so, we spend our time trying to fix something that was never broken.

    The female body is incredible. It can lose blood every month and keep going. It can grow a life and bring it into the world. And still, too many girls grow up feeling like their bodies are something to fix.

    The male body is incredible too. Strong, capable, resilient. And still, too many boys grow up believing their bodies are something to hide or be ashamed of.

    Somewhere along the way, we learned to look at our bodies as problems instead of partners.

    Instead of criticising your body, what if you started speaking to it differently?

    • Thank you for keeping my heart beating, even when it was broken.
    • Thank you for every instinct I felt in my gut.
    • Thank you for keeping me standing when I felt like falling.
    • Thank you for staying with me, even when I pushed you away.
    • Thank you for carrying me through everything I’ve lived through.

    Your body has been there for you your entire life. It has never left you, no matter how you’ve treated it.

    Spend time seeing your body as it is. Not dressed, not hidden—just as it exists. It’s hard to feel comfortable in something you avoid looking at. Wrinkles, lines, scars, marks, softness, changes—they are not flaws. They are evidence. They are signs of a body that has lived.

    Your body is not something to decorate. It’s something that carries you.

    Don’t restrict food in a way that punishes your body. It won’t cooperate—it will push back. Your body is not against you. It’s always trying to support you, even when you’re not listening.

    Stop forcing yourself into things that don’t feel right, whether that’s food, clothes, or expectations. Wear what makes you feel good. Eat what feels right for you. Live in a way that works with your body, not against it.

    If social media makes it harder, step back. You don’t need to constantly see bodies that make you question your own. You are allowed to create space for yourself.

    Your body was never the problem. The way you were taught to see it was.

    Start small. Once a week, write down something you appreciate about your body—not for how it looks, but for what it has done for you.

    Your body is your home. It’s where you live your entire life.

    It deserves your respect.
    It deserves your care.

    And so do you.

  • Choosing to Live for Yourself

    At some point in life, many people confront a difficult question: why am I living the life I’m living?

    For some, the answer is simple. For others, the answer is less clear. Life can become a series of expectations — from family, society, culture, or circumstance. We follow paths that others believe are right for us: school, career, marriage, stability. Often these paths work well. But sometimes they leave people feeling that their life no longer belongs to them.

    When people feel powerless or trapped in roles that do not reflect who they are, despair can follow. Sociologists have long argued that weak social ties, isolation, and lack of belonging can deepen this sense of disconnection. When a person feels they have no control over their life, they may begin to question its meaning.

    Yet this crisis can also become a turning point.

    Confronting the limits of one’s life can force a deeper question: What do I actually want? The moment someone realises that they have the right to live differently can be the first step toward reclaiming their life.

    Living authentically does not mean rejecting others or abandoning responsibility. It means recognising that a meaningful life cannot be built entirely on the expectations of others. At some point, people must decide that their life is their own.

    Not everyone will follow the same path. Parenting is not for everyone. University is not for everyone. A traditional career is not for everyone. Some people find meaning through relationships and family; others find it through creativity, independence, or solitude.

    What matters is not the specific path but the freedom to choose it.

    Learning to listen to oneself,  to understand one’s own values, limits, and desires, is an important step toward living authentically. When people begin to see themselves as worthy of care and respect, they may find new reasons to live differently and more fully.

    Life does not always unfold according to the scripts society provides. But that does not make it meaningless. Sometimes meaning appears only when we take responsibility for our own lives and begin to shape them consciously.

    Choosing to live for yourself is not selfish.

    It is the beginning of an authentic life.

  • Don’t take a photo if you want to remember

    Presence is the memory

    I’ve had a smartphone for years. I do take photos. Just not of everything — and I don’t share them with everyone.

    The problem isn’t photography. It’s what happens when documenting replaces paying attention. The moment a camera comes out, something shifts. We start framing instead of feeling, managing instead of being present. The camera doesn’t just record the moment; it changes it.

    Some experiences imprint themselves precisely because they are fully lived. When we rely on photos to remember, we often remember less. Attention gets outsourced. Memory weakens. If the phone is doing the remembering for us, we don’t have to.

    When my son and I talk about Paris, we don’t scroll through images. We describe it to each other. What we noticed. How it felt. What stayed. The memory lives in language, not pixels. It remains active, shared, alive.

    What unsettles me isn’t the photo itself, but the need to show everything. Why does every moment require an audience? Why do we feel compelled to prove that we were somewhere, that something mattered? And why does the approval — the likes, the hearts — feel so good?

    That rush is not harmless. It trains us to measure experience by reaction rather than meaning. Moments become performances. Memory becomes external, dependent on validation.

    I take photos when something calls for it. I keep many of them private. Some I never looked at again. They exist as quiet markers, not content. And many moments are left unrecorded entirely — because they deserve full attention.

    Not everything needs to be captured.
    Not everything needs to be shared.
    Some things are meant to be remembered by being lived.

  • CURRICULUM VITAE — FAILURES EDITION

    Because the highlight reel doesn’t tell the whole story.

    Name: Tina Brescanu
    Objective: To keep showing up, learning and creating.

    Experience

    Job Seeker (since redundancy)
    • Applied for hundreds of jobs; secured a handful of interviews.
    • No offers yet — but learned the art of resilience and rewriting cover letters in my sleep.

    A Stint in the Corporate World
    • Failed to fit in, didn’t understand the jargon, and couldn’t appreciate the infantilisation of adults in the workplace.
    • Allergic to KPIs, buzzwords, performance reviews, “circle back,” “touch base,” and other corporate rituals.
    • Learned that pretend urgency and scheduled enthusiasm are not my natural habitat.
    • In hindsight, redundancy wasn’t failure — it was freedom.

    Author — 20+ Books (ongoing)
    • Wrote over twenty books, none of which became bestsellers.
    • Consistently failed at marketing because writing felt more meaningful than algorithms.
    • Created Involution Labs as a way to store all my far-out ideas — not a failure, but something that grew out of failure. It became a way of holding myself accountable, and now I’m designing courses from that ever-expanding creative ecosystem.

    Various Online Work (survival era)
    • Took on various online work during difficult periods, including emotional labour and boundary-testing roles that taught me more about human psychology than any textbook ever could.
    • Learned resilience, communication, and the courage to navigate unconventional spaces.

    Print Journalist Trainee
    • Trained for a world of ink and presses… just as the industry went digital.
    • Failed to build the professional network needed to pivot when everything changed.

    Full-Time Parent (career break)
    • Managed small humans with complex needs and strong opinions.
    • Gained skills in management, conflict resolution, diplomacy, advocacy, and negotiating with multiple authorities.
    • Failed to convince employers these were “real” workplace skills.

    Early Career Misstep (mid-90s, Ireland)
    • Posted a job ad titled “Swedish girl looking for work.”
    • Failed to anticipate the replies this would generate.
    • Learned the importance of precise wording.

    Early Education + Work Life Wanderer
    • Left school early, failed to get on the straight-and-narrow career path.
    • Moved from one job to the next — quirky, fun, physically demanding work like grave digging, baking and farming.
    • Moved from town to city, from Sweden to Finland, and eventually Ireland.
    • Didn’t get the posh job. Cleaned toilets in a caravan park in Wexford before starting in the home care business, where I failed to keep a “professional distance” and instead made friends with everyone I encountered.

    Education

    • Learned that success is never linear.
    • Learned that failure isn’t the opposite of success,  it’s part of it.

    References

    My children — they can vouch for my authentic parenting style, and will give both the positive and the negative, because authentic parenting is about being real.

  • Love Education

    Love Education

    None of us is shown or taught how to love, but we should be. We may learn facts and skills in life, but rarely do we learn the deeper skill of loving. We can choose to live without sex, but we can’t live without love. How to love deeply and broadly is what we need—and what the Earth needs too. We must learn how to love strangers, how to love nature, and how to love everything we encounter.

    Our goal in life should be to make love. Not just in the romantic or physical sense, but in the way we move through the world. We can learn to live in love without being in love. Turning living into loving is a lifelong path.

    Yet society’s idea of love often misleads us. We are taught that love is something that happens to us, a reaction when we encounter something “deserving” of love. But deep love is not a rare event to wait for—it is something we practice. Don’t wait for the big love. Love the ordinary people and the small things. Loving the ordinary makes it extraordinary. Saving your love until something better comes along is not loving at all.

    If your culture has taught you to hold back—to wait, to make sure who or whatever is “worthy” before you give love—what are you losing out on? Love is not a prize to be earned. Love is a decision. Love is action. Love is a choice you make again and again. And there is no need to be loved back in order to love.

    We should also be careful not to mistake love for its imitations. To seduce is to lead astray—to try to make someone become who we want them to be, instead of loving who they really are.

    True love goes deeper. True love is core love. True love is mutual love. We don’t simply fall in love—we practice love. To love takes energy, especially when love awakens feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, or vulnerability. Real love takes work.

    And yet, this work transforms us. When we are courageous enough to be ourselves with another, to grow and change together, love keeps growing. Passion can ripen into something more real when we dare to take the risk of loving fully. Because real love changes us.

    It is only when we dare to have our heart broken that we can truly love. True love gives and forgives.