Something about this article rubs me up the wrong way — maybe it’s the title itself, “Master your emotions”. The cheerful, practical, common sense tone reinforces the idea that we are messy souls who need keeping in line, and who need to enforce a certain wholesome discipline for our own good. It sounds as if an adult is taking charge of a child.

While studies tend to confirm that no sudden stroke of good or bad fortune can shift your basic level of happiness much, from the results of this study it does seem that taking a few minutes a day to note specific things we are grateful for, as opposed to hassles and random things, can up baseline happiness by a full 25%.

As we swam in the covered pool, I looked through the windows at people walking to the shops wearing coats, hats and scarves. Outside, at four o’clock in the afternoon, it was dark, and freezing. Inside, just on the other side of a thin pane of glass, it was bright and steamy, and we moved around in the water freely. It made me wonder about the different worlds we all live in.

“How do I know how if what I think and feel is right? Maybe everyone else is right? I think I know what I think and then someone comes and says something different and I automatically believe them! Why do I do that? Then I forget what I thought in the first place so I must have been wrong!” Sometimes all we need to do is relax, make a space inside and ask ourselves in a friendly way…

Today everyone in Poland is out in the cemetaries, carrying flowers and candles to freshly scrubbed graves. The day is an illustration of the way death is ever present in the midst of life, and vice versa…

Depression is the most isolating thing. It seems as though there were an invisible sheet of glass between you and other people. This sheet of glass comes, in fact, between you and the world itself, between you and your own experience. Everything is covered in a kind of fog, everything is wrong, tasteless, dull, not as it should be, an insurmountable task, a deep pointlessness.

One of the most amazing things for my younger daughter, fifteen months, is appearing and disappearing. Being visible and then not. Hiding and reappearing. Curtains are the best for this, but any old surface will do, if it’s possible to get behind or under it. But it is already quite a grown-up game, she has already started to see the world as adults do, split up into separate entities.