Morning Stories

Stories are — as the very word suggests — the many different layers that come together over the course of a life. Shaping a life story. The story itself.

Brian is full of meaning. Not the man, mind you, but the name itself. When Brian was still a freshly minted Celt having a look around Ireland, his name gained a little extra weight. The Celts and the Irish agreed that nomen est omen. Brian is the noble one, the strong one, or simply the hill, depending on which way you interpret five letters.

Motion is pure physics. Emotion is purely human. E-Motion is an electric vehicle. Anyone who has emotions — and occasionally shows them — has more than just trace elements of humanity to offer.

Oh no! There he is again – popping up out of seemingly nowhere, without warning. When a word gets dissected into its parts, the original meaning starts to crumble a little. But the variants that emerge are all the more revealing. More often than not, the man – or, well, the man – steps out from the shadow of the word combination and makes himself at home. Again. Or maybe he never left.

"Who is the most interesting man in the world?" a friend asked me ten years ago. Hmm. What does he expect? Should I name someone? I stayed silent.

On the 115th International Women's Day: why women hold only 64% of legal rights worldwide — and why leadership belongs to the most competent.

"Stand up! Right now!" How can anyone resist such an enticing and friendly invitation? After all, it's not every day you're graced with such a request. And yet you do it anyway — that whole standing-up thing. Who wants to be known as someone who was "left sitting" or "left lying around"? Exactly.

It’s astonishing what this group of imaginative teenagers keeps coming up with. Their sole mission each day seems to be driving every authority figure they encounter straight to madness. They’re true pubescent creatures — and will surely go down in human history as The Unruly.

There’s something about a Tracht. Something special — both in meaning and in memory. It’s tradition you can wear.

Some words are so loaded with emotion that they practically hum when you speak them. Barely have the first two letters appeared around the corner, and entire worlds of feelings are already in turmoil. Associations, it seems, have a power of their own — wild, uncontrollable, and often irrational.

It’s practically impossible to avoid them. They’re everywhere. Sometimes coming toward you, sometimes walking away. They move through the days — sometimes loud, sometimes in groups — but always present: people.

The driver drives — and leads — a moving something from a real point A to an imagined point B. Once upon a time, such people were called coachmen, train engineers, or captains.

Some words are born with heavy baggage. “Decision” is one of them. When a word carries that much emotional mortgage, life is hardly sugarcoated. And to make matters worse, even the word itself can’t hold together.

Does intelligence need a PhD? Or is it enough just to be inventive — to find solutions where others see walls?

There are certain words that never sound good to teenage ears. Tradition is one of them.

I don’t see stumbling as an accident — not when it makes your feet lose rhythm or your routine take a detour.

Ah, look at that: a two-seater word. “Believable.” It splits neatly into belief and able. That’s what I’d do—believe, I mean. Or at least, I think I would.

Oh yes, they are. People make mistakes. And people are often mad. Those with unusual behaviour or strange ways of thinking are one kind of the mad ones. The other kind are those with a medical condition — people who could, if they wanted to, pick their diagnosis from a vast catalogue of brain malfunctions.