This feature talks about how Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool aided a small victory over depression by answering an age-old question: why do people and football fans keep falling in love?

Liverpool — Artwork by Debanjan Chowdhury

August 10 – Ring of Fire

A shaft of light fell on a highlighted passage in the Tao Te Ching: “The teacher holds the student’s head underwater until the bubbles become fewer, but the teacher knows just when to pull the student out. Upon revival, he tells the student: when you’ve craved life less and craved more the greater truth that lies beyond the immediate suffering, you’ll start craving life and its truth as air.” There I found myself, for the first time, asking the right questions instead of the easier ones.

What do you do when you’re burning up – not of, but, because of love – when you’ve had your heart broken? This infernal inferno could make the paint on your moral foundations flake off. Smouldering the mind, clogged by the mild mitral chimney smoke and friction between what you believe in and what your reality is. The dialogue in your mind becomes two opposing flints constantly striking.