What is a word you feel that too many people use?
words
A word once spoken, cannot be called back.
So my first choice would be sorry.
However the context and situation are most important.
Why?
In some countries, the word sorry has become part of the culture.
The effect is, people say sorry not to apologize or fix a problem or relationship, it is just a word to get away with what they did or what happened. Just an unimportant incident, that would not need a sorry in other cultures / countries at all.
In some relationships the word sorry does not exist!
The hardest word for some men. (Elton John)
In short: The cultural use of sorry in NZ and Australia is generally said an act of being polite, instead of rude.
Which countries – in your mind – stand more for being rude, not polite?
What happens, when education fails?
When adequate behaviour is not learnt?
More here soon to come!
#culture
#gaps
From Candlelight to Boot‑Scoot: Two Rooms, One Rhythm of Belonging
I. Jena, Winter 1799
Snow fretted the panes of Caroline Schlegel’s home, muffling the town beyond. Inside, the room was an orchestration of voices — Goethe’s measured cadences, Novalis’ luminous musings, Caroline’s deft interjections that kept the air alive. Around the table, thought moved like a dance: philosophy circling poetry, poetry spinning into song, song grounding itself in lived experience. The pace quickened, slowed, changed partners. Every participant — whether a titan of letters or a newcomer to the circle — found a place in the set.
Here, ideas were not defended so much as shared. And though the topics spanned Shakespeare, botany, metaphysics, the true lesson lay in the form: each mind attentive to the others, each step taken in time with the conversational whole.
II. Queensland, Winter 2025
A timber‑floored hall in the hinterland thrums with banjo and bass. Ten rows deep, ten dancers wide, a hundred people move as one. A heel‑dig here, a grapevine there — the sequence repeats, but it’s never mechanical. Laughter ripples down the lines when someone’s turn goes the wrong way, but no one is left adrift. Newcomers are folded gently into the current. Elders hold the beat steady while younger legs test the flourishes.
Between songs, the hall hums with story: “I learned that step from my grandmother”; “We danced this one at my first Tamworth.” And when the next track begins, the floor resets into its democratic formation.
III. The Thread Between
Two centuries apart, these rooms are bound by more than coincidence. In each, the dance — whether verbal or physical — is an art of inclusion. The Jena Romantics bridged disciplines through conversation; the dancers bridge generations through music and movement. Both reject the loneliness of the uninvited. Both demonstrate that form — the order of steps or the etiquette of turn‑taking — can be the vessel for genuine freedom.
This is why such gatherings matter in education beyond the classroom. They model a pedagogy of rhythm: listening, responding, making space, repeating until the pattern becomes second nature. They show that belonging is not a static state but a choreography renewed with each meeting.
And so, the candlelight of Jena still flickers in the dust‑soft boots of Queensland. The rooms may differ; the rhythm remains.
The people may be different. However, what they are looking for is generally said the same over the planet.
Love, attention, pleasure, music, joy, fun and more ….
Beyond the candlelight of Jena and the music‑warmed air of a country hall lies the same quiet truth: human beings, when gathered in a circle or a set, create something neither one nor the other could have made alone. The steps might be words, might be heel‑and‑toe, might be the shared silence between verses.
If there’s a thread to follow, it’s one each reader must pick up for themselves. It may lead to a dance floor, a kitchen table, a garden path, or the turning pages of a book. It may lead nowhere obvious at all — only to the recognition that in movement, in conversation, in the making of something together, the world briefly feels less lonely.
#music
#country
#dance
#poesie
#Novalis
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