According to my iphone from March 2010 to Jan 2012, I

wandered along The South Bank ...

sang along very loudly at a Noah and the Whale concert ...

built some random magnetic bridge at the Science Museum with a little girl called Bryony

tried kayaking and was frozen to death down the Jurassic Coast ...

said helloooooooo to Sara's bunny ...

punted unsuccessfully down the River Cam ...

greeted the Beat poets at the City Light bookshop at San Francisco ...

ate a lot of ice-cream at the Ben and Jerry's Sundae Festival ...

collected buckets of pebbles at Devon ...

caught a beautiful sunset at the Itsukushima Shrine ...

contemplated in silence among the dazzling white snow at South London ...

 made a cardboard reindeer at work (courtesy of Graze box) ...

danced at a Secret Cinema event ...

daydreamed at Rhode Island...

read lots and lots of books in the beautiful sunshine ...

screen-printed Totoro with much help from my dear friend Aroushka ...

got completely confused by the famous tennis players at the French Open ...

tried to grow some sunflowers ...

discovered some stunning sunflowers at the Columbia Flowers Market ...

got completely soaked in a storm at a remote island off Dubrovnik ... 

baked a chocolate hazelnut cake for a wedding which was never delivered by Cranston ... 

 left a book on a train to Waterloo for a stranger as part of The Guardian book swaps experiment ...

greeted my birthday with an unexpected Egyptian chocolate cake ...

rode a very stubborn camel into the desert ...

walked through tons and tons of fallen maple leaves at Westonbrit ...

got slightly drunk (by mulled wines?!?) at a folky Christmas Carol concert ...

had long meandering conversations with friends over lots of cakes and cups of teas ...

ran barefoot on the sandy Gambian beach and ....

greeted 2012 with my sister's beloved Jacob while look forward to many more exciting adventures with my iphone in the coming years ... 

A beautiful letter from John Steinbeck ...

.. to his son Thom about love ...

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Proust ...

... And his Swann's way ...

"yet the moment it was past and a new week has begun, she would look forward with impatience to its return, as something that embodied all the novelty and distraction which her frail and disordered body was still able to endure. This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did to experience some of those exceptional moments whet one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something now, even if it is worse, some emotions, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, ever if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel.

Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the dice is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at the moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when -in this moment of deprivation- the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational weed which the laws of the would make it impossible to satisfy and officer to assuage -the insensately agnoising need to possess exclusively.

Lucky Jim ...

... is a short novel by Kingsley Amis. Its main protagonist may not be the cleverest person in the world but below is some sensible-albeit-dispassionate advice from him;

People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realise that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. You don't ask yourself what greengages are, or how you know whether you like them or not, do you? Right?

Carl Jung ...

wrote in Psychology and Alchemy , "We simply do not understand any more what is meant by the paradoxes contained in dogma; and the more external our understanding of them becomes the more we are affronted by their irrationality ..."

Yet, the search of meaning and understanding continues (for me anyway) ...