THE GOVERNANCE CIRCLE

"...So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself, / and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace, / for nothing is owned, only borrowed..." — James McCrae. James McCrae’s poem titled “ Instructions Before Visiting Earth ” seems to be having another viral moment these days. The man has unwittingly created a masterpiece on the art of living gracefully, one that is worth revisiting from to time.   The extract above inspired some thoughts which I would like to share in this piece to help anyone dealing with invasive dark thoughts. When we are in the depths of depression, our thoughts feel like heavy, permanent fixtures of our identity. We treat them as if they are solid truths—as if they are us . But what if we started treating them as guests? What if we acknowledged that our thoughts, our moods, and even our current mental states (even the happiest of them) are not possessions we own, but experiences we are simply borrowing for a time? Western education has us co...

  He leaned across the table, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his coffee mug. His eyes narrowed, and his voice trembled with a fierce, burning rage. "I will never forgive him," he hissed. "The way he looked at me, the exact words he used to steal that project from under me. It was absolute betrayal." If you listened to him speak, you would think the betrayal had happened yesterday. You would imagine he had just walked out of the boardroom minutes ago, still reeling from the shock. But it hadn't happened yesterday. It hadn't even happened this year. It happened fifteen years ago. The company he was talking about had gone bankrupt a decade ago. The man he despised had long since retired and moved across the world. Yet, here he was, still carrying the heavy, rotting corpse of that moment into every room he entered. He was treating a distant ghost like a living, breathing enemy. The Heavy Price of Mental Dead Weight Many of us operate just l...