Whether religiously we celebrate the birth of Christ and perhaps the promise of a life hereafter, or we celebrate the turn of a season and the coming beauties of spring or autumn, we are celebrating the future.

The three blessings nomenclature has not always served Positive Psychology well. To some people, it can seem silly. Others are put off by the religious implications. Yet this exercise has lasting benefits, more reliably attached to reducing depression than stopping smoking is attached to reducing cancer.

We swim in the soup of constant discourse. The content and meaning of that discourse flavors our lives.
Say you are driving your child to school, and I cut you off in traffic (dead …

Why start with spicy soup? Because it is easy? Because it is nutritious? Because it is warm and somehow enveloping without ever suffocating? Because it is global, utterly. Love isnʼt spring-time. What brings a man to hit a baby? what brings a mother to ignore her own feelings of love to let it happen? If love ruled we would all have more courage, more hope. Hard stuff but remember fear, not hate nor indifference, undermines love. Love is all-time. [...]

You can be unhappy any time, any place. Moreover, life without unhappiness would probably be unbearable for it would have no light and so shadow, no day and so night, no loss and so no real gain, no sorrow and so no real joy. It would be devoid of meaning. Discontent is the source of creativity, perhaps of creation.

I am amongst other things the Secretary of the Howard League in Scotland. John Howard was the 18th century founder of the penal reform movement: between 1775 and 1790 he toured Europe seeking humane forms …

Rabbits are ancient symbols of fertility and so symbolize the return of spring. In thinking of them, of Easter, and of Sherri Fisher’s excellent article, Positive Psychology is more than happiness, I spoke with a …

Our brains are attics – they have to be, storing all our past stuff. But we live when we can in the dizzy day-room delights of children’s laughter, family chaos, and even work. Spring seems to arrive earlier each year. So we are tempted to spring-clean our brains: let’s not. Let’s leave the attic to gather what dust it will, and let’s freshen the day rooms – the present and the future of our lives.

Europeans generally don’t celebrate Thanksgiving[1]; we have important, though quieter harvest festivals, and we wish you North Americans ease.  Sitting between Diwalli (Hindu) and Christmas (pagan in its timing), the Thanksgiving celebration of harvest …

Is it wrong for anyone to be happy in prison? Is there to be no redemption once banished? Should the exchanges between the guards and the prisoners be always suspicious, judgmental? The US, …