A Pause for Reflection

I was all fired up and inspired earlier this week for writing today’s post on a somewhat technical topic carrying on from recent themes, and excited about introducing some ideas quite new to me in what was to be a somewhat technical but nonetheless practical piece on epistemology, which was to be written in an entertaining and cheery style.

My plans never materialized.

I have been on a month’s sick leave, with one week still to go (my previous post, “Reclaiming the Scientific Mainstream” was literally written from my sickbed), and in consequence I’ve hardly set foot outside the house, and for weeks hadn’t seen a single newspaper headline or been aware of anything going on in the outside world.

Then in the small hours of Wednesday morning, unable to sleep because I’d been asleep too much of the day, a chance reading of a Substack post prompted me, with some alarm, to check the news online, and only then did I learn of the terrible, cataclysmic events that took place in Israel on the morning of Saturday 7^th October, which most of you have known about for nearly a week now.  After that, I hardly slept a wink all night.

So I found myself sitting here at the keyboard in my pyjamas late Wednesday morning to write today’s Substack post, reference books each open to the right page—still deeply shaken, shocked, and saddened by the news of last Saturday’s tragedy, feeling only numb and morally sickened.

Even if I could have pulled myself together sufficiently to do it, for me to go ahead with writing and posting my planned article suddenly felt inappropriate, even callous, in the wake of this past week’s terrorist atrocities, which I knew would still be very much on the minds of so many of our readers.

This is a time of tragedy for all.

My post originally planned for today will have to wait for a fortnight from now, or later, even though it will undoubtedly still, sadly, have to be published in a time of terrible war.

But one cannot, any of us, indefinitely put off getting on with our own life and work for the betterment of humankind until the day that there is no more war in the world, or else that day will never come, and if it did, there would no longer be any point in that.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with these words written a millennium ago:

Lord make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is error, truth.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may seek more
to comfort than to be comforted,
to understand than to be understood,
to love than to be loved.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in seeking that we find.
It is in forgiving that we are forgiven.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
—St Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)

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