Midnight on a Wednesday - not time to be writing on a blog, so just a quickie. My favourite word of the week is 'harmony' - I'll get back to this, anon. But in a nutshell, it seems to me that we humans might have some strand of DNA that seeks harmony. We have evolved the tendency towards harmony - through harmony we are less likely to make a mess of things and more likely to succeed and enjoy life. So we are drawn towards harmonious activities and circumstances. When we find harmony we call it 'beautiful' - the natural world is full of it, for one thing - which illustrates a good point about harmony - it doesn't necessarily mean love and peace all the time - animals naturally kill and eat other animals, plants aggressively compete for space - but the overall consequence is harmony. In Japanese by the way, it's called chowa - I learnt this as I was trying to encourage my basic writing students to write about their hobbies. I used myself as a model and waffled about music, art, hiking and sailing, and then tried to find a common theme for a conclusion: harmony. 
Next week's word is passion.
