Pen Hanley

Author: Pen

  • Happiness and the What if…? questions

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    ‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ Ghandi said that. It makes me happy just thinking about it. Although for most of us it is more an ideal to strive towards as we flounder our way through life trying to earn a living. In our society…

  • Eliminating the Inessential

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    ‘Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.’ Helmut Jahn. That’s out of a book by Alena Hennessy called Cultivating Your Creative Life. I buy these things but never have time to read them. But I can flip through them and get a lot from the gorgeous…

  • The Valley of Pitch

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    ‘I’m hoping that the Greeks will discover a long-lost patent on the isosceles triangle. They could then threaten to bankrupt all northern economies by collecting unpaid royalties, and then forgive our debt providing we abolish corporations.’ Rob Newman in The New Internationalist, May 2013, p. 38. Rob Newman is an English comedian. He has written…

  • My father gave me the gift of sleep

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    ‘At our most moving moments are we not all without words?’ Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime artist said that. Or wrote it, I suppose. It’s enigmatic and powerful, I reckon, because it says so much. Doris Lessing had a phrase about the thinning of language against the density of our experience. But you wouldn’t…

  • Playing with language and playing with food

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    This blog is about language and literature and health and life so today I’m going to share the websites and blogs of three people who improve our mental and physical lives by their brilliant ideas – the first one is Jules Clancy, the second Sarah Wilson and the third a Canadian guy called James Harbeck.…

  • Measuring our lives

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    In Seneca’s time, ‘Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great paradox of information: the more of it that’s available, the harder it is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a thoughtful way. So there was a tendency to graze, skim the surface, look for shortcuts.’ (William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry,…

  • Hamlet’s Blackberry

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    William Powers in his provocative, accessible book Hamlet’s Blackberry (Scribe, 2010), relates what happened while he was leaning from his boat to disentangle a propeller blade from a piece of rope mooring another boat to the jetty: he fell in to the water – splash! After some floundering and embarrassing moments he climbed back up…

  • Capitalism and gardening

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    A businessman was on holiday in a small Greek coastal village where he started chatting to a humble Greek fisherman who had just come in with his small fishing boat with his morning’s catch. When asked why he had come in after only a few hours’ fishing, the fisherman replied he had enough for his…

  • How to be Idle and The Two Percent Solution

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    It was the old days of telegrams. You paid per word for the speedy delivery of your message, so they often had a particular tone of terse urgency. They had a tendency to contain either very good or very bad news, news that could not wait for the post. Robert Hughes, late with his commissioned…

  • Creativity and Time Management

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    I’m working on a commissioned book (more on that another time), I have a four day a week writing job already plus I go routinely to the library and borrow the books I’ve reserved and try to find the time to read them before their due date. Some of the books relate to the commissioned…