NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

In his Philosophical Investigations [1953],  Ludwig Wittgenstein uses this analogy. Imagine, he says, that everyone has a small box in which they keep a beetle. However, no one is allowed to look in anyone else’s box, only in their own. Over time, people talk about what is in their boxes and the word “beetle” comes to stand for what is in everyone’s box. How clever! Even while I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of Wittgenstein’s private language argument, the analogy he used to explain it does resonate with me. Imagine a group of people sitting around a table. Each of them has a box. In each of their boxes is something that that person calls a beetle. The catch is that no one can see what is in another’s box, so they have no way of knowing that the other person’s beetle resembles their beetle in any way. The only way they can find out anything about the other person’s beetle is by listening to what the other person says. Eventually the group ...

To take the first question first, just what are the two choices eternity gives me? I see them as being ‘Do I believe in eternal life or do I not?’ I have to agree with Marcus Borg who says  “ So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don’t have a clue. ” [ ‘Speaking Christian] .  The only way that I can be sure to live on is in those  whose lives I have impacted  for either good or bad   'to the third and fourth generation' during my lifetime. What becomes important are the choices I have made out of the many choices that life has offered me. For the first part of my life I tried (and succeed to a large extent) to have it all: marriage, career, and a family. It was only once the family reached an age and stage of life where I was no longer needed 24/7 that I was able to make choices about finishing my university degree and resuming my teaching career [both of which had been put on hold for 20 years]. I was fortunate to ...

My husband and I both wear hearing aids, and have for a number of years now. More importantly to this story, we wear identical types of hearing aids. Now for all these years he has been carefully looking at his hearing aids before inserting them each morning looking for the red mark that identifies the one for the right ear and the blue marking which identifies the one for the left. Now I am challenged when it comes to distinguishing my left from my right, and so my preference is to look at the hearing aid and let its shape guide me. Does it really matter just how we get the hearing aids into the correct ear? No! What really matters is that we do. However for years I have watched him peering at the hearing aid, especially when he was in need of cataract  surgery, trying to see the tiny coloured spot, and have wondered (sometimes quietly, and sometimes not so quietly) why he didn't just look at the overall shape as I did. After all,it was so much easier! The end result, that we ...

While it wasn’t my first inclination on reading this sign, I feel a need to unpack what it is saying to me. Too often I am apt to pooh-pooh an idea or a metaphor without looking more closely into the meaning within. It is a saying first of all that relates to a first world problem. We are part of the minority in this world who actually have keys to worry about…who have houses [yes, more than one often] who have cars, who have valuables that we feel the need to protect.  So the person doing the hanging is prosperous with the goods of the world, if not by their own standards, by the standards of the majority of people living today. So what else do we hang on nails?  Car keys! I’m sure we have all heard at some time in our life, the story told of someone going to the nail where they always hang the car keys, only to find that they aren’t there, follow by frantic searching which fails to unearth the keys. Sometimes this story ends with the person saying a prayer askin...