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Leaving traces, making marks

July 9, 2026 by bobleckridge

You’ll have noticed I’m pretty keen on stories. In issue 10, I wrote about the need to change the dominant stories about immigration. Racists and xenophobes, and those who crave dictatorships, flood our lives with their negative stories about immigration, yet human being have always moved around this planet. We need to counter this negativity and hatred with stories of diversity, of the richness of diversity, of the poverty of monocultures. We need to counter them with stories of compassion and love and the power of good, mutually beneficial relationships. 

Then in issue 11 I shared with you the philosophy of stories, of what stories do for us, helping us to make sense of our lives, how they help us to create “concord” out of “discord”. 

In the midst of writing those two issues I was reading Erin Morgenstern’s “The Starless Sea” which is one of those novels which puts stories front and centre. I’m not a big reader of fantasy novels, although I do have my all time favourites in that genre (Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast) but a novelist who can create a whole othewr world for you to get lost in for a bit, is a good novelist in my opinion. Anyway, “The Starless Sea” is simply bulging full of stories. She sprinkles tales and fairy stories throughout the narrative, and my favourite one is “The Inn at the Edge of the World”. In fact, for me, the book was worth reading just for that story alone. I decided to record myself reading that story, The Inn at the Edge of the World one, uploaded the mp3 to Dropbox, and shared it. If you’d like to hear it, send me an email, or message me, and I’ll send you the link. 

However, I noted a couple of passages in The Starless Sea which really got me thinking. Here’s the first one – “Everyone is part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, “I Was Here and I Mattered” mind-set.”

This set off a couple of trains of thought for me. The “everyone is part of a story” made me think of how everyone changes the world just by living. There really is no such thing as a disconnected, entirely separate individual. The way we live our lives changes the world around us. We might not intend that. We might not even be aware of it. But we change the air by breathing it. We change the planet by what we eat and drink. We change the planet by what we choose to do every single day. That’s why I’m so keen on “awareness”, because instead of making unconscious changes, driven by habit and algorithms, when we become aware, we become the heroes of our own stories, making conscious choices about how we might affect the world we live in. 

“….what they want is to be part of something worth recording” – the “I was here and I mattered” mindset really stopped me in my tracks. 

When someone close dies, we have an immediate sense of loss. Their physical presence disappears so quickly and feels so complete. But the person who they were was more than their body, and, even at the funeral, we celebrate that, by telling the stories of their life. We share memories, events and experiences. We share the phrases they used, perhaps the jokes they told. We share the feelings they evoked when we were with them. And we share the marks they made, the works they created. In some ways, I think, a person is never quite gone as long as we still tell the stories about them, and as long as we still enjoy their creations. 

It’s easier to be aware of that in people who made a big impact on the world and became famous…Shakespeare, the great poets, writers and artists….the great composers and musicians, each with their utterly unique, distinct, and instantly recognisable styles. 

But I also see that from the stone circles, the cairns, the ring and cup markings left by the first settlers in Scotland. Two of my most favourite place are Orkney with its stone circles and remains of ancient villages, and Kilmartin Glen with its standing stones, circles, cairns, and, especially the spirals, circles and cup markings engraved on the rocks so many thousand years ago. Nobody knows why our ancestors made these marks. One theory is it was to say “I was here”. Maybe that’s as good a theory as any, but I can’t help thinking these marks meant more than that.

Everyone leaves some marks, leaves some stories, some memories and creations. We keep others in our lives that way. 

The second passage which struck me was “Stories – something was, then something changed. Change is what a story is, after all.” which comes after she reminds us that change happens all the time. This is maybe another aspect of story I didn’t touch on in my last two newsletters…change. 

Change, transience, and flow, are all important to me. They seem so fundamental to our existence. Nothing is fixed. We are, all of us, in a continuous process of becoming. In fact, that’s the sub line on my blog, Heroes not Zombies, “becoming not being”. It’s a phrase I picked up from reading two French philosophers, Bergson and Deleuze. In many ways I think it captures the essence of being alive. The importance and the beauty of transience really came home to me when I visited Japan and encountered how fundamental that was in their aesthetic, demonstrated not least, in the annual festivals of the cherry blossom. Do you know that, during the season of the cherry blossom, TV news programmes, and national newspapers show maps of Japan, just like the weather maps, but instead of showing the weather, they show the progression of the appearance of the cherry blossom, from the South East up to the North West of Japan. And once the blossom appears, people come out in the thousands, to wander below the trees, taking photos of each other, taking selfies, settling down under a pink cloud with a blanket and a picnic. It’s really something. 

“Stories – something was, then something changed” OK, you can capture everything about what a story is in one phrase, but, that’s a really thought provoking sentence. Many of the patients who came to see me had been suffering for a long time. One of my favourite questions to ask them was “when did you last feel completely well?” Pretty much everyone can answer that question, even if it takes a little time and patience. But getting someone to think back to when they last felt completely well often opened up not only the details of what changed in their life, but, the circumstances, the time and place, the events, which occurred and, maybe influenced those changes. It was a way of understanding this present illness in the context of a whole life. 

Another of my favourite questions was “What has changed?” A question I would always ask during follow up visits. How else could I make any sense of what my treatments were doing without asking what changes the patient had noticed since I saw them last? How else could I follow the progression of the disease, or, hopefully, the expansion of healing? 

So, yes, the idea that “change is what a story is, after all” is a good one, a useful one. 

I started my podcast, More Good Days, as a way of drawing together and sharing some of what I’ve learned about what goes to making not just good days, but a meaningful life, because I think that’s our path, individually and collectively, towards making this world a better place. 

But I said right at the start that life is nuanced, that there aren’t simply two kinds of days, good ones and bad ones. Pretty much every day will be filled with experiences which we will rate all the way along the spectrum from good to bad, and back again. There are delights, wonders, joys, moments of peace, of calm and of loving and being loved. And there are challenges, difficulties, sadnesses, moments of anxiety, anger and disconnection. It’s never all the one and none of the other. My focus has been on the former….what brings all those positives, and how our quality of life can be increased by paying attention to them. But, I want to keep this real, and June turned out to have many challenges and difficulties for me. 

The whole of France experienced a “canicule”, a heat wave, like never before, with temperatures rising into the forties for several days in a row. The thermometer out in our garden reached 44 in the shade. It was exhausting. It was hard work to keep the plants alive in the “potager”, rising early before the Sun rose above the trees, to do some watering, and returning again late in the evening to give the plants some more. We live in a traditional, old, stone house with thick walls and wooden shutters, so were able to keep the place pretty comfortable by having all the shutters closed all day, but it was strange to spend day after day in semi-darkness. If you stepped outside, you felt like you were stepping into an oven. Millions of French people would have found it tougher than me. It was a huge challenge for those who lived in apartment blocks with no air conditioning, and buildings that got hotter and hotter every day. 

At the beginning of the month I was hit by some weird but potent virus which floored me like I’ve never been floored before. As the fever raged (reaching 41 before the rest of France would reach 41 a few days later!) the symptoms progressed and followed a path which baffled me. I’m still not sure I understand it, but, thankfully, I’d say, I’ve recovered. 

Then an old school friend of mine passed away the other day. We’d lost touch decades ago, but it still came as a shock, still made me sad. It also precipitated a flurry of communication between old friends, each of us sharing our memories of Ian, sharing old photos, and stories, some personal to each of us, and others we heard from the first time in the script prepared by the Humanist Celebrant for the funeral. Stories help us to remember, help us to know another, and helps us to connect. 

But we did something else, too, my little group of friends who share a life long love of music. Ian was part of the original Stirling Record Club, and so each of the four of us in the current version which emerged during the pandemic, shared the music we most associated with our old friend. 

Music helps us to remember, helps us to know another, and helps us to connect.

So, maybe take a moment, to reflect about a loved one…..either someone still in your life, or someone who has passed…..and think of the stories you associate with them, then think of the music you shared. Those connections, those stories and that music, together make something quite unique, something that connects you, something that will always connect you. Because just as every one of us is unique, so is every relationship. There are no two the same.

There’s one particular song which came to me this week was – Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends”

“How terribly strange to be 70. Memory brushes the same years….”

Yet, throughout this challenging month, I’ve continued to find flowers and plants in the garden which have amazed me, bird song which has delighted me, and moments of joy and beauty sprinkled through the days. More than that, however, has been the experience of the relationships in my life, the reality of being cared for and looked after by my wife, and supported and encouraged by family and friends around the world with messages, emails and video calls. 

Not every day will feel like a good day, but even in the more difficult days, we can experience love and wonder and beauty. We can be aware of, and strengthen, our connections with others, and share with them, this one precious life. 

Au revoir et bonne journée

PS if you’ve missed any of my podcast episodes (there are eight of them available now) you can find them on Spotify ….. search for “Bob Leckridge’s More Good Days Podcast” …. or follow this link – https://open.spotify.com/show/42bZ4WoIZ0WqiMfyqOKiVD?si=c055dbcc3caf49d6

And if you want to catch up with the newsletters as well (there are twelve of them so far including this one) then come and find me on Substack – https://bobleckridge.substack.com/ – and if you sign up, for free, you’ll get access to all the past newsletters and podcast episodes, and get all future ones delivered direct to your inbox. 

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Bridges and connections

June 14, 2026 by bobleckridge

I recently read an article by Richard Collett, author of “Along the Borders”. Here’s what struck me.

“Four millennia ago, a Sumerian king, his frontier beset by nomadic tribes fleeing prolonged drought in their own lands, ordered the construction of the world’s first border wall: a 177km-long boundary laid in stone between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Since humanity’s earliest city-states and kingdoms arose in ancient Mesopotamia, walls, ditches and fences have defended territory, marked the edges of empires and projected political power across the void. But the world’s first border wall failed. It now lies buried beneath Iraq’s desert sands. Rome’s legions abandoned Hadrian’s Wall long ago, and the iron curtain’s razor-wire fences fell with the eastern bloc’s collapse in the late 1980s.”

I was born in Central Scotland and lived my whole life there until I retired to France. From childhood I was aware of the remains of two walls – Hadrian’s and the Antonine Wall. Both had been built by the Romans at the edge of their empire to try and keep we Scots out. Both were little more than piles of stones and mounds of earth centuries before I was born. I could visualise those remains came as I read Richard’s opening paragraph. 

When someone takes a historical perspective it can help us to see the present day in a different, often clearer, light. Thousands of years on from the Sumerians, we humans are still building walls, still calling for “taking back control of our borders”, still trying to prevent our fellow human beings from escaping the suffering and hardship of drought, famine, and war. 

The answer has never been walls. 

Wouldn’t it be better to build connections? To create bridges between ourselves and “the other”? To create, in particular, those fundamental, life enhancing, health giving, connections we call “integrative” – and, just to remind you, integrative bonds are the ones which promote integration – they are the ones where highly differentiated parts relate to each other in mutually beneficial ways. 

Those are the kind of connections we see in every human being. Every single one of our organs, tissues and cells, exists within a vast web of mutually beneficial relationships with all the others. That’s what enables us to survive. That’s what enables us to grow and to thrive. 

There’s an old saying “As above, so below”, but I’ve often thought we also need to remember “As within, as without” – what we learn about our healthy insides is applicable outside of us…..in other words, for each of us to be healthy, we need to form “mutually beneficial relationships” with each other, with other forms of Life, with the rest of this small, beautiful, planet, where we all share the same air, the same water, the same earth. 

Richard Collett concludes his piece with –

“….if the aim of hard borders is to halt the flow of refugees, curb illegal economic migration or counter terrorism or instability, then surely a better solution is to tackle the conditions driving people from their homes, or towards extremism, in the first place.”

Interestingly, Pope Leo XIV, recently made a very similar point, when he asked what the rich nations were doing to improve the lives of those who live in poorer countries. The wall builders didn’t like it. 

I mentioned recently that I’d just read Daisy Fancourt’s “Art Cure”, about the impact of the arts on health, and how she wrote about the “five pillars of health”….diet, exercise, sleep, nature and art. 

I write a lot about nature, I take lots of nature photographs, and I am blessed to be living in rural France where I feel closer to nature than at any previous time in my life. I love to be amongst the trees, to be able to hear a chorus of bird song every day. I love to breathe the fresh air, to see the flowers and fruits appearing on the plants around me. All of that is about me being more connected with nature, more “engaged” with nature. I remember how important that was in my work as a doctor….to enable people to re-engage with the world, with the natural world, and with each other. Illness and suffering can be so terribly isolating, cutting us off from the world around us. It’s both a therapy and a sign of progress, when someone is, or becomes, engaged again….when someone makes better connections with both the natural world and with others. 

But Daisy Fancourt’s thesis is about art and how engagement with the arts has a positive impact on our health. I had a very special and powerful experience of that last week. 

Georgie Brown is a local, 23 year old, musician, who was born in England but brought up here in SW France. She gave a concert in Saint Jean d’Angely, in the beautiful, Art Deco, Eden Theatre, just over ten minutes from my house. The concert was billed as “Symphonic Jazz”. I confess I didn’t know what that might mean, but we’d seen Georgie perform a short set, in the middle of Saint Jean in the summer during the annual French festival of music, and really enjoyed her performance.

Symphonic jazz turned out to be Georgie Brown singing her own compositions, with her “jazz men” band of a pianist, double bassist, drummer and small brass section of trombone, trumpet, and two sax players. But, for this concert, she’d composed orchestral arrangements of her songs, and performed them with her band and a thirty piece local orchestra…..the “Orchestre Symphonique des Vals de Saintonge”. 

From the first notes of the string section I felt moved to tears. You could see that every single musician on that stage was loving what they were doing. The joy, passion, and delight in music was infectious. The clearly evident mutual respect between them all was moving. Look, I know we all like different kinds of music. Some people love opera, others country music, yet others the Blues, but whatever their tastes, the audience at this concert were treated to something unique, and very special. It was heart warming, life enhancing and a great example of why Daisy Fancourt describes live music in particular, as something which can have positive and profound effects on health. For that concert to be so successful, it required the creation of multiple “mutually beneficial bonds” between all the musicians. When human beings get together to make music, they aren’t only capable of producing beautiful harmonies, but they build better connections between themselves and others…..between other musicians on stage, and between themselves and the audience.

I’m not saying we should go to concerts for the good of our health. We should go because we love music. But what I am saying is that when we choose to participate in activities which build and strengthen connections, our lives can feel better……that building connections is the way to building a better world.  

One very obvious type of human construction is the bridge. I’m pretty sure we’ve built a heck of a lot more bridges than walls over the centuries. I pretty partial to bridges. They appeal to me. Part of the reason I love them so much is that they are a physical manifestation of our need to make connections. They also facilitate our basic desire to travel and explore the world we live in. My photos this week are some of my favourite bridges. I think they make it clear why I prefer bridges to walls. 

Here’s a video of one of Georgie Brown’s songs where she sings about being partly English and partly French – just to give you a flavour of her style –

https://youtu.be/QtklkcXdqkY

And I’m sure you’d like a song about bridges…..what songs do you know about bridges? For me, first up is surely Simon and Garfunkel…..Bridge Over Troubled Water. I think my friends all had their own copies of that album, and I still have mine, and it’s still a classic!

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Art engagement leading to health

June 9, 2026 by bobleckridge

I recently read Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure, and I highly recommend it. Daisy Fancourt is Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London, and in this book she tells us about the huge evidence base for the impact on health which can be made by participating in art. 

What do we mean by art? Well, someone was bound to ask that question. Daisy tackles it by defining it broadly, not by trying to give characteristics of features to qualify for art, but, by giving examples, from a wide range of creative disciplines. I think that’s the essence of it, actually….creativity. Engaging with creativity, your own, and that of others.

For example her definition of art encompasses singing, listening to music, dance, drawing, reading, crafting, visiting museums, galleries and going to the theatre (not a definitive list) And she shows how many studies have found astonishingly high levels of benefits of arts engagement on everything from depression, anxiety and pain, to blood pressure, mobility and cognitive function. There is even good evidence that it can produce useful changes in dementia, (both at the level of the pathological lesions in the brain, and, at the level of cognitive function) and that it increases longevity. 

I’m finding all this very exciting. I hope it convinces those who think the arts are a luxury. Some of the comments I’ve read from reviewers and other scientists are particularly encouraging, including those who admit they started the book as sceptics, and ended up convinced.

Mind you, I don’t listen to music, visit galleries, read, or write creatively for the good of my health. I do these things because I enjoy them and they give me more good days. I don’t think what Daisy is trying to do, though, is reduce art to a tool, or a new treatment modality to be applied to patients. She’s helping us to understand that engagement with the arts has very profound effects on everything from mental health, to reductions on the need for drugs and surgery in those with chronic conditions. This might seem a small point, but, I think it’s an important one.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to live a longer, better life quality life? No matter your current state of health. Not by applying a “treatment” but by making changes in everyday life which lead, naturally, to more good days….

Two chapters of the book especially struck me. In one she describes the impact of “Magic Camp” on children with cerebral palsy, where children were given the opportunities to learn how to do magic tricks, by professional magicians, working with a team of therapists. Learning these tricks enabled them to improve their motor skills, boost their confidence, and find access to whole new worlds of possibility. I love the holistic range of “outcomes” these camps achieved. What teaching these children how to do magic tricks can result in enormous breakthroughs which regular physio and psychology couldn’t achieve. She focuses on one particular case, and it’s a remarkable story in its own right, but goes on to describe how that one boy’s experience was not a one off.

In another she describes a music therapy where patients with fibromyalgia and other chronic painful conditions listened to music with their eyes closed for twenty minutes twice a day for two months. Their pain levels were halved. As was their level of depression and anxiety. The music was “U sequence”, using genres the patients preferred, starting with stimulating 90-120 beats per minutes, moving to slow 30-40 beats per minute pieces, and ending with moderate 60-80 beats per minute. I don’t know how to find music I like by beats per minute. Maybe you know ways to do that. Actually, for me, this particular intervention seemed over-focused on the measurables – the numbers of beats per minute and the numbers of minutes spent, but I am seriously impressed with the outcomes. Imagine if your doctor would recommend two twenty minute music listening sessions a day which could halve your pain levels? What impact might that have on your need for pain-relieving medication, for mood elevating medication? What impact might that have on your everyday experience of life?

Early in her book she mentions the “five pillars of health” – diet, exercise, sleep, nature and art – and, for me, this very simple point, turns out to be a crucial one. Most of us only hear about the first three, diet, exercise and sleep, so it’s incredibly refreshing and exciting to explore the fourth and fifth ones – nature and art, both of which are dear to my heart.

I’ve often written about the health benefits of nature, and you can find several such posts here on heroes not zombies, if you search in the search bar for words like “nature”, “NDD”, “forest bathing” and so on. Forest bathing is one of my favourites. Many studies have shown the positive effects on the immune and inflammatory systems of spending time amongst trees. But in fact engagement with the natural environment is available to all of us every day. There’s a wild area of my big, French, rural garden, which really has the feel of a mini-forest. Just stepping into that pattern is enough to feel different. The temperature is different in there, the light and smells are different. I love to slowly wander along the little winding paths I built, and just see, hear, smell, what I can notice.

I recently paid a visit with some of my family to Jupiter Artland which is just outside Edinburgh. It’s truly one of the world’s special places created around a forest walk sprinkled with sculptures and art installations. Do you know it? Here’s a link to their website – https://www.jupiterartland.org/ I highly recommend visiting, although it is just outside of the city, and it’s not that easy to get there by public transport. Still, it’s really worth it. I have a particular liking for art installations in natural environments, and the diversity and range of works in the forest there are really something special. In fact the visit inspired us to create our own installation. My wife, Hilary, is a very talented and prolific knitter. So she created a kind of giant web, or dream catcher and we attached it across a gap between a couple of the trees. Here are a couple of photos.

I’m SO delighted with it. Yesterday, in the afternoon, on a breezy day, as clouds flew across the face of the Sun, I watched how patches of light shone bright red on the dark red background, constantly changing shape and position. It was almost like watching a 3D kaleidoscope. Mesmerising!

Anyway, the opportunity to experience two of the five pillars of health at the same time – nature and art. I love that combination. 

OK, so maybe you’re wondering, why haven’t I said anything about the first three pillars – diet, exercise and sleep. Well, mainly because we are flooded with information about all three of these. There are so many variations, and, the truth is, no one size fits all, so you have to find the diet, the exercise regime and the sleep routine that works best for you, but essentially, it seems to me that a healthy diet includes diversity of foods, and is mainly, if not exclusively, one of non-ultrahigh processed foods. On top of that, most healthy diets recommend eating more plants than meat, and, if possible, eating food which hasn’t travelled all that far. I guess I’m lucky, living here in rural South West France, because there is an abundance of weekly markets within an hour from where I live. At any of these markets you can easily find seasonal foods, and locally grown ones. 

As far as exercise goes, the main rule isn’t about a certain number of steps every day, it’s about not spending too much time just sitting. Many of us have pretty sedentary jobs, or lifestyles, and there’s no doubt that the less we move each day, the more likely it is that we will develop severely limited mobility. Again, it’s a matter of finding what works best for you, but most specialists advice both strength training exercises, and some exercise which puts your heart rate up. 

Sleep? It comes down to finding the routine that works best for you, and sticking with it. That includes both determining when you want to go to sleep, and when you want to wake up ( 6 – 8 hours sleep is usually recommended ) and developing a wind down routine pre-bed time. It’s pretty much common sense, but, the underlying principle is to gradually reduce your exposure to stimulants, whether they be food and drink, or activities. 

Anyway, you really won’t find it difficult to find advice about those first three pillars of diet, exercise and sleep. What I will keep coming back to in my newsletters, posts and podcast episodes, is the value which nature and the arts can bring to our lives, to our health, and, to making more of our days, good days. 

So, here’s my quick summary advice for this week –

listen to music,

treat yourself to some art experiences and, if possible,

allow yourself some time in nature. 

Oh, and one more piece of advice, or, rather, an invitation. Come to bobleckridge.substack.com and sign up to follow me. 100% free. If you do that, you’ll get an email every time I publish a newsletter (I’m writing one every week just now) and every time I publish an episode of my new podcast, More Good Days.

By signing up, you’ll make sure you never miss an issue or an episode, and you’ll be able to catch up with any of the ones I’ve published so far.

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Life enhancing sculpture and music

May 20, 2026 by bobleckridge

I’ve visited Copenhagen a number of times. In the winter months there are no direct flights from my part of France to Scotland so when visiting family before Christmas, a few times we’ve taken the train up to Paris, flown from there to Copenhagen, then from there to Edinburgh, returning by the same route. We stop over for a couple of nights in Copenhagen and in Paris as part of the trip which makes the journey into a bit more of an adventure and takes away time pressures related to train and flight connections. 

One of my most favourite places to go in Copenhagen is the Glyptotek. It’s a beautiful museum in the heart of the city. It has a lovely internal garden courtyard with a cafe restaurant which serves delicious Danish food. But the main reason to go there is to see the exhibits of sculpture. Their permanent displays include a vast number of marble sculptures and, honestly, they are magnificent. 

I took this photo during my first visit there. It is the “Young Mozart” by Louis Ernst Barrias. I couldn’t quite believe this was carved out of a block of marble. Look at the detail! Here’s a section of his coat…..

….it looks like real cloth. This is the kind of art which stops me in my tracks and takes my breath away. The skill involved in carving this is astonishing. The whole piece is a real beauty, and, beauty, I contend is one of the most life enhancing phenomena we can encounter. I’d have been happy to have seen just this single work that day, but, in fact, there are many, many more just as impressive. 

The subject matter here interests me too. I’m not a classical music buff, but I know enough about Mozart to be astonished at his youthful creativity. There is a whole catalogue of his works written between the ages of eight and twelve years old. 

What can we make of such extraordinary talent? Where does it come from? I have no idea, but surely one of the most significant characteristics of our species, is our creativity, and how, we express it through the Arts, Sciences, Philosophy, and even in everyday problem solving. 

But there are always those whose talent, whose genius, appears first at a very young age, and develops throughout their adult lives. It’s a gift. It’s a gift they have received, and it’s a gift they give to us every time we encounter their works. 

I wrote about Saint-Exupery in the last newsletter, but I didn’t tell you about one of his inspirations for The Little Prince, which occurred during a train journey through Poland. Here’s what he wrote

“I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants….. This is a musician’s face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine…. This little Mozart is condemned.”

This was written in 1935 as dark clouds were gathering over Europe, so, maybe his rather gloomy conclusion should be read in that context. Isn’t it interesting that he thinks of the “child Mozart” when he sees this little boy? And, he was so right to point out that “a life full of beautiful promise” could either be nurtured to fruition, or crushed by the machine-like forces of industrial society. 

Just before Christmas last year I went to a concert in the Art Deco, “Eden Theatre”, in Saint Jean d’Angely, my local town. The concert was a performance by a young French violinist, Esther Abrami, who I’d read about in the French press. She is one of the most talented violinists I’ve ever heard. One of her albums is called “Women” and features compositions by female musicians. Esther told a little story about each composer before she played one of their works. I’d never heard any of these stories before. The concert was a real eye opener, and ear opener too? So, I was delighted to learn that she had written a book about women in music. It was published just last week and I got my pre-ordered copy delivered on Friday. I’ve been delighting in it every day since. 

Esther’s own story is fascinating. She is from Aix en Provence, and as a little girl, was gifted a violin from her grandmother, a particular instrument her grandmother had, herself, played as a girl. But her first lessons didn’t go well which she puts down to the fact that she found her teacher unkind and difficult. However, only a few years later, she was inspired by another violinist and persuaded her parents to let her try again. This time, things clicked, and she’s turned out to be the excellent professional musician she had dreamed of becoming. That story reminded me of how important it is to nurture and nourish little children. Not that they will all grow into musical prodigies but surely at least one purpose for us all is to become the fullest expression of our uniqueness, and we can’t do that alone. 

One of the female composers she described in her concert, and writes about in her book (“La Musique est (aussi) une affaire de femmes”) is Chiquinha Gonzaga, Brazil’s first female conductor, who was born in 1847. She was a remarkable woman who led a quite astonishing life, divorcing her husband to whom she had been forced into an arranged marriage, after he asked her to choose between him and her music. She chose her music, which meant she had to give up a life of riches and servants, to become a poor, single mum making her living teaching piano and selling music sheets of her own compositions. 

She eventually found success, love and happiness, and composed over 2000 works, living to the ripe old age of 87.

One of the most astounding parts of her story is that she composed her first musical work, the song “Canção dos Pastores”, at the age of 11. 

You can listen to it here – https://open.spotify.com/track/43AB805Bd0sKhCQ2FtWp0P?si=1fe230517e11432c

Go and have a listen. If you don’t use Spotify, search for it online. I’m sure you’ll find it elsewhere. But, seriously, she composed this at 11 years old?

You can find a playlist of over 500 videos of her compositions here – https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6nx2WTN7S1-NtIL3PY1Yf2QEhuHW223s&si=lFgmVQZcIIhlItmx

Esther Abrami’s book is just out in French, but I think she plans an English language translation. I’ll tell you about it when it gets published. Meanwhile, if you can read French, do get yourself a copy. It’s a real treat. 

Back to Esther and her own skills…..if you’d like to explore her work, I suggest you start with one of her own compositions, “Transmission” which she wrote for the grandmother who gifted her her first violin. It’s on her album, “Women”, and here’s the link to it on Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/track/0w8AtUiGnz0Khf5AZOPLu4?si=3cc4b13d9c714fff

At her concert, as well as featuring music from her album, “Women”, she played a number of pieces from another of her albums, “Cinema”, and my favourite from that album is probably “Yumeji’s Theme” from the movie, “In the Mood for Love”. 

Have you ever seen that movie? Oh, it’s on my list of all time favourites. One of the most beautifully filmed movies I’ve ever seen, and “Yumeji’s Theme” fills my mind with gorgeous scenes from it which I’ll never forget. 

I’ll leave you to go exploring Esther’s work wherever you listen to music. I know we all have different musical tastes, but I think you’ll be delighted by both the beauty of the music and the skill of this young violinist. 

Can I leave you with a question? 

Who are some of your own favourite sculptors and who are some of your own favourite composers/musicians? 

I’d really like to know. 

And if you’d like to receive my weekly newsletters and fortnightly podcast episodes please come and sign up here – https://bobleckridge.substack.com/

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Seeing with the heart

May 15, 2026 by bobleckridge

I’ve started a weekly newsletter about how to create More Good Days, to supplement my new podcast episodes.

You can subscribe to both the podcast and the newsletter for free at https://bobleckridge.substack.com/

I’ll publish an episode of the podcast every Full Moon and every New Moon, and I’ll publish a newsletter every week, keeping in sync with the phases of the Moon. Why have I chosen to link my publishing schedule to the phases of the Moon? Maybe the recent Artemis II adventure was one of my inspirations, but my main one was Peter Gabriel, who published his i/o album, releasing one track every Full Moon over the course of a year, and is now doing the same with his latest o/i album. 

Why publish a weekly newsletter in addition to the fortnightly podcast? 

Well two of my most favourite activities are taking photos, and writing, so I decided I could combine them to make a weekly newsletter to share with you. Each issue will have one of my own photographs attached, which you are free to download, print out, make into a screensaver, or just collect in your own photo album. There will also be a short piece of reflective writing inspired by whatever I see in the photo, and I hope, together, the photo and the text will inspire you with your own creativity, and contribute to making more good days. In addition, in each issue I’ll share with you some of what has brought me joy, some of what has stopped me and made me wonder, some of what I’ve found inspiring or moving this week, and I hope those joys, wonders and inspirations will also contribute to making more good days for you. 

You can expect to find my encounters with music, art, sculpture, and nature, and with stories, poems and articles I’ve read, because those are the places I find my greatest joys and inspirations. I look forward to sharing both of these with you – the fortnightly podcast episodes and the weekly newsletter. 

The photo I’m sharing with you today is of a front door. Many modern doors are glass and it’s easy to see who is outside, but, in the past most doors were solid and the only way to see who was calling was to use a hole cut into the door, and, often covered with a flap which could be raised. This was eventually superseded by the insertion of a small lens in the door, through which the home owner could look to get an often fisheye view of the street, the corridor or hallway. 

I hadn’t really stopped to think about this until I saw this particular door, but what does the world look like to whoever is looking out from within? 

In the traditional square hole covered by a flap, it would be like looking through a picture frame. The closer you put your face to the door, the more you would see of the outside world, but, usually, your view would still be restricted, limited by the four sides of the hole. The little lenses gave a more wide angle view, but, pretty much everything appeared distorted as a result. 

I wonder what the world looked like to whoever looked through this heart shaped hole? I like to think it enabled a more loving gaze, a kinder, more positive view of the world. 

Then I got to thinking, maybe a hole like this isn’t for peeking through, but for letting light in. And with that thought I had an image in my head of a heart shaped stream of light illuminating the whole house. Now, wouldn’t that be delightful? 

But, whether this heart shape, cut into this wooden door, enabled a view of the outside, or allowed light to stream into the interior, I couldn’t help but wonder if it inspired the owner to “see with the heart”, as the fox revealed to the Little Prince. 

Maybe seeing the heart every time they approached their doorway, inspired them to pay loving attention to whatever they were about to encounter. 

I don’t know, but I’ve returned to this photo many times because it does exactly that for me. It reminds me to pay loving attention to the world. 

Antoine de Saint Exupery, born in 1900, was a French writer and one of the first commercial airline pilots, flying routes between France, Africa and South America, for the postal service. He was shot down in 1944 somewhere over the Med while flying a reconnaissance flight over Corsica for the Free French Air Force. 

He wrote and illustrated “The Little Prince” in 1942, and it has since been translated into over 600 languages and sold over 140 million copies worldwide making it the best selling work of fiction in the world. 

The Little Prince is the story of an aviator whose plane crashes in the desert and who encounters a young boy, who he calls, The Little Prince. Whilst he is trying to repair his plane, the boy tells the narrator various stories. 

The book can be seen as a children’s book, but it is also a philosophical work which has inspired countless adults. Not least of the lessons in the book is that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It’s a phrase I have returned to again and again, throughout my life, and I became a firm believer in the fact that “what is essential is invisible to the eye”, something which inspired me to stay focused on each patient’s story of their unique experience. In other words, to keep their invisible experience of their illness to the fore, rather than only the physical measurements of their disease. 

This is the eightieth anniversary of the publication of The Little Prince, and I discovered, in my local newsagent, in Saint Jean d’Angely, a special issue of the rather unique “1” newspaper dedicated to Saint Expupery and his Little Prince. The “1” newspaper is like nothing else I’ve ever encountered. It is a single sheet of A1 sized paper, which is folded, first in half, to make an A2 size, then once more to create an A3 size, and finally again to make an A4 size publication which sits on the shelf with the other newspapers. Each issue takes a focus on a single issue, and it is richly illustrated with graphic art. One of the articles in this special edition, is by Riad Sattouf, whose illustrated edition of another Saint Exupery book, “Terre des Hommes“, coincidentally (if there is such a thing as coincidence) I stumbled across and bought in a “librairie” (in France, a “librairie” is a book shop, and a library is a “bibliotheque”) in Orleans, where my wife and I recently spent a few days to celebrate her birthday. 

In Riad Sattouf’s article he considers the fact that the Little Prince is a sort of Peter Pan character, a little boy who never ages, and reveals that he discovered that Saint Exupery had a younger brother who died at about the same age as his Little Prince appears to be. Saint Exupery never wrote or talked about that death, but it does seem highly likely that that experience of a brother who never aged (because he died) inspired him to imagine the Little Prince. 

I’m currently about half way through Riad Sattouf’s Terre des Hommes, or should I say Saint Exupery’s Terre des Hommes, in this special edition illustrated by Riad Sattouf and I’m savouring it. 

I can read French pretty well now, but I definitely read it more slowly than I read English, however I don’t find that is a handicap. I love to take my time with a French text, enjoying each phrase and image, one after the other. 

Riad Sattouf says he discovered Terre des Hommes in a bibliotheque in Rennes when he was an adolescent and has read it every year since. He’s 47 this year. His illustrations are a true work of art. I am so enjoying his book. 

When I read, in his introduction, that he had read this book every year since he was an adolescent, I thought again about a conversation I had at the beginning of the year, with the teenage grand-daughter of a friend, who told me Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” was her all time favourite book which she, at just 15, had read eight times. I’ve never read any book eight times. Have you? From time to time I come across an article where someone says they read the same book every single year. “Don Quixote” was one example. I’ve never read the same book every single year. Have you? 

It made me wonder if there are two different approaches to reading….those who always want to read something different (I’m in that camp), and those who find a work so special that they want to re-read it time and time again. I honestly don’t think one strategy is better than the other and I can see pros and cons of each. I’m not saying I never re-read a book. In fact, I have a shelf of “special books” on one of my bookshelves where I keep certain books which I turn to again and again….it’s just rare for me to actually read any of them all the way through more than a couple of times, and all of them are works of non-fiction. 

Are there any fiction books you have enjoyed so much that you’ve read them more than once? Do let me know. 

The Moon

Neil Armstrong said the famous words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” as he walked on the surface of the Moon on 20th July 1969 when I was 15 years old. I remember watching him on TV, mesmerised by the whole adventure, as were millions of others. 

Three years later, Harrison Schmitt, aboard Apollo 17, took the now famous “blue marble” photo of the Earth. 

It’s an image whose power has never diminished. You only have to look at it for a second to recognise the beauty, and the fragility of our little planet. 

I don’t know if it inspired Nanci Griffith’s “From a Distance”, but I always hear her song in my head when I look at this. I only saw Nanci perform live once, in Edinburgh, at the Usher Hall, but I still have six of her albums in my vinyl collection. And, although the “blue marble” is a picture of Earth, when I look at it, I also hear Nanci Griffith sing in my head, “Just once in a very blue moon”. 

Well, all this came back to me again this week as I looked at a couple of the astonishing photographs taken by the astronauts on Artemis II. Did you see them? This one, is very like the blue marble, but, in addition you can see the glow of the aurorae top right, and bottom left, which highlight just how thin a layer of life giving atmosphere we have. 

and this one, where a crescent of Earth can be seen just over the lunar horizon, a complete reversal of the image we are more used to, of a crescent moon appearing over a horizon after sunset. 

These are awesome images.

Awesome in the most significant way. They make me feel tiny, and they make me feel infinite. All at the same time. But more than anything they imprint on me the finite nature of our planet, and how we should all be working together to care for it, to nurture it and look after it for all of Life which exists here. 

Surely, an image like this can help us to reject the imaginary borders which artificially divide up the planet, and to see our inter-dependence on, not just others, but on all the elements of the biosphere, all the animals, like the fox, all the plants, like the rose, and all the other creatures which are, like us, way too small to see from this far out. 

Is it foolish to hope for a world which turns away from selfishness, greed, violence and destruction, towards selflessness, sustainability, peace and creativity? I hope not. I think we can make it happen by turning a loving attention to the world in which we live, and by creating true bonds of care with the plants, creatures and people with whom we share this planet, this life. 

I read a Mary Oliver poem this week which seems extraordinarily relevant. It’s called “I Worried”

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not, how shall

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

That line about worrying about getting rheumatism reminds me of a story about Jack Benny, who, on receiving an award, said “I really don’t deserve this, but I have arthritis, and I don’t deserve that either” 

Finally, a song which really touched me this week….well, it has to be Nanci Griffith, from her “Lone Star State of Mind” album…. “From a Distance”. 

I recommend it. 

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Heart to heart

April 28, 2026 by bobleckridge

I have a long, long love for the French language and culture. I’ve found books, articles, magazines over the years which do a couple of things which I didn’t come across in Scotland, reading English. It’s not just the way these texts are written, nor the way they use beautiful graphic art and images, it’s the subject matter they consider worth while spending time on. 

One particular book from 2009 opened up a whole way of seeing for me. The book is called “La Maladie cherche à me guérir”, and it’s by a doctor called Philippe Dransart. The book has never been translated into English as far as I’m aware, but the title in English would be something like “The Illness is searching for a way to heal me”. Dr Dransart starts from the idea of the embodied metaphor. Now, I have read about this idea elsewhere, not least in the books like “Metaphors we Live By”, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. But Dr Dransart draws from his own clinical experience to show us how often the actual words patients use, especially the body-focused metaphors they use, can be the key to understanding their suffering. Understanding not only their diseases, and why those diseases might have appeared in specific organs or tissues, but also understanding their psyche and life story, and how that connects so deeply to their unique patterns of illness. Put simply, he discovered, time and again, that when someone presented with a problem in a particular part of the body, then they’d often use metaphors about that very part when talking about themselves. 

In his book, he systematically considers metaphors and figures of speech used by patients presenting with problems in pretty much every system and organ of the body, but for my purposes here, I want to focus on only one – the heart. And, as an English speaker, I’m going to focus on the heart metaphor phrases which we use in the English language. 

I’ve already mentioned one at the very beginning….having a heart to heart. When we say that we imply that our conversation will be true, important, and intimate. You don’t have heart to heart conversations with just any stranger you might encounter in a coffee shop, do you? We have heart to hearts with loved ones, with family and friends, and with trusted professionals. In a heart to heart conversation we will talk about what’s important to us, and also, to what is shared between us. A heart to heart, does, after all, involve two people. It’s not something you do yourself, and it’s not something you’d normally try to do in a group. It’s personal. It’s specific. It’s an opening up to another. 

Let’s look at some other heart metaphors. Do you know someone who is “big hearted”? It means they are generous doesn’t it? Not at all the same as someone who is “big headed”! And notice we don’t say people are “big kidneyed” or “big livered” by the way. On the other hand, do you know anyone you think of as “heartless”? We might even apply temperature differences to these opposites. So maybe someone is “warm hearted” and another is “cold hearted”. A warm hearted person will often do, or say, something we’d describe as “heart warming” when we feel that comfortable, cosy feeling inside. 

What would you say if I were to ask you what was “dear to your heart”? You might say, not what, who, and tell me of loved ones. Or you might tell me about whatever it is that is most important to you, whatever you feel most passionate about. In fact, we tend to think of the heart when we think of passion, don’t we? Maybe we associate “will” with the head, but we associate “passion” with the heart. On the other hand, when we are de-motivated, we might say our “heart isn’t in it”. We are not really committed. It doesn’t move us, inspire us. 

We apply a weight to the heart too, don’t we? When did you last feel “light hearted”? Can you think of a time when you felt free of anxieties, content, even happy, where “light hearted” would be a good description? When I think of someone “light hearted” I think of them smiling, moving easily, maybe even skipping (if they are still young and fit enough to skip!) It’s a joyful image. But what gives you a “heavy heart”? When do you get sense of dread, a sinking feeling? We often move our metaphors down into our abdomens when we have these heavy feelings, don’t we, describing a “gut feeling” of something not quite right. Isn’t it interesting that we “feel” intuition in our hearts and in our guts? As if our bodies are telling us something, our brains haven’t quite figured out yet. 

The heart, of course, is the seat of love, isn’t it? We use a stylised image of a heart, usually a red one, as an emoji to say we love someone or something. We put red hearts on the Valentine cards. We make a heart symbol with our two hands when we want to communicate love at a distance. How often do you see athletes or performers do that when their fans are loudly applauding an achievement? 

When we fall in love, the very sight of our loved one can make our hearts “skip a beat”, and if they abandon us, we feel “heart broken”. In unresolved grief, we might even say someone died of a broken heart. 

The heart is also the seat of excitement. There’s a Dutch knitting podcaster who my wife listens to, who often talks about something being “heart jumping” – which, although not an expression I’ve heard much in English speakers, is a great one for conveying what is exciting, what stirs her or inspires her. 

Can you think of any others?

There are two more I’d like to consider. The first is how we oppose the head and the heart, saying someone lets their heart rule their head, or vice versa. Usually there, we are talking about the balance between rational thought, cognition, and feelings and emotions. 

And here’s my most favourite one, which comes from “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupery. The fox asks the Prince if he want to know his secret. 

“It is very simple. The important things in life you cannot see with your eyes, only with your heart”

Isn’t that wonderful?

But how do we do that? How do we find the important things in life by seeing with our heart? 

When I was at university I was taught about the heart, its structure of four chambers, with valves between the atria and the ventricles, its muscle cells with their astonishing ability to beat out a rhythm, its incredible system of production and distribution of electrical currents to co-ordinate the beating of those muscle cells, its blood supply and its nerve supply, and a lot about the diseases of the heart, how to diagnose and treat them. 

But it was only years after graduation, when I was working as a young doctor, that I came across the discovery that the system of nerves around the heart was much more complex and powerful than had previously been thought. 

There’s a special kind of nerve in the human body called the neurone. We have somewhere between 80 and 100 billion of these cells in our brains, and another billion spread throughout the body. These neurones either transmit information up to the brain from our sensory organs and from specialised sensors which are spread through the other tissues of the body. Or they are responsible for sending electro-chemical signals from the brain to all our muscles, co-ordinating which contract, and which relax. 

The 100 billion neurones in the body are each directly attached to as many as 5,000 other neurones forming an astonishingly complex web known as a neural network. I mean, these numbers are beyond our comprehension, aren’t they? They are just mind boggling! 

For a long time we’ve paid a lot more attention to the neural networks in the brain than we have to the ones in other parts of the body. But we now know that there are in fact important neural networks which surround especially the heart and the gut. That discovery is fascinating enough, but, what I find even more fascinating is that the nerves connecting the network around the heart to the one in the brain are mainly carrying information from the heart to the brain. Only a minority of them are carrying instructions from the brain to the heart. 

So, it turns out, the heart is more than a complex muscular pump responsible for distributing blood around our arteries and veins. It’s actually doing some of the processing we used to think was exclusive to the brain. 

What’s it doing? Well it’s now known as heart intelligence. It’s gathering information and processing it before passing it on to the brain. 

I mean, that’s fascinating enough, isn’t it? But there’s more. We’ve discovered something else. Everything in the world which beats a rhythm sends out electromagnetic waves. As the rhythm of the heart changes so does the pattern of these waves. 

You know how in medical dramas on tv there is often a heart monitor attached to some sick person lying in a bed? The monitor shows the beating rhythm of the heart, with a little line running across the screen. A flat line means the heart has stopped beating. A healthy pattern is of little spikes appearing in that line at regular intervals. 

Well, it turns out, those intervals shouldn’t be too regular. The actual gap between each beat of the heart should be varying, ever so slightly. We can measure that variation and we call it “heart rate variability”. 

Different degrees of variability send out different patterns and strengths of electromagnetic waves. We’ve discovered a particularly important pattern, which we call “coherence”. When the rhythm of the heart achieves coherence a number of powerful, important healthy changes occur throughout the body. This rhythm affects the release of certain hormones and other chemicals, it affects the tone of the other muscles, and it affects the activity of the brain. Not only that, but heart rate coherence is associated with very distinct emotional states. It’s a two way process if you like. We can focus on the heart and induce both coherence and particular emotions, and we can relive certain emotional experiences and induce heart rate coherence.

I first learned about all this when I came across the publications of a group of researchers in America who described this phenomenon, and were teaching people how to achieve it. They called it “Heartmath”. I took the training programme and taught the techniques to many of my patients over the years. 

I’d like to teach one of these techniques right now. It’s called “Quick Coherence”.

There are three steps to achieve “Quick Coherence” – a basic Heartmath technique, and by the way, you can find out a lot more about these techniques at the website of the Hearthmath Institute. 

Step 1. Heart focus. Bring your attention or your focus to the heart area of your body. Remember how important attention is? It activates and it magnifies. So we want to bring our attention now to the heart area of the body.

Step 2. Heart breathing. Take three, slow, deep, even breaths, filling the heart area of your body with oxygen, then emptying your lungs of all the carbon dioxide. Slowly in, slowly out, for three breaths. Just these three deep, diaphragmatic breaths resets a part of the nervous system we call the “autonomic nervous system”, calming us down, settling us.

Step 3. Heart feeling. Now recall an event where you experienced one of the positive, heart felt emotions. Here’s a couple of ones I use to give you an idea of the kind of event I mean. One is one of my grandchildren running up to me, shouting “grandpa!” and jumping up into my arms. That’s a great one! Another is looking out over Ben Ledi from my living room window when we have one of those gorgeous deep red sunsets – just amazing! Pick one of your own, and recollect it. Stay with that memory until you become aware that you are feeling that feeling again. This is about recreating a feeling. Once you have it, that’s it. You’re there.

Congratulations, you just managed “Quick coherence”.

Many of my patients would use that technique to escape from a panic attack, or to settle a state of agitated anxiety. It’s quick. It’s effective. And it gets more effective the more you practice it. 

I describe the exercise in a bit more detail here – https://heroesnotzombies.com/2012/02/07/heartmath-a-simple-guide/

But we can do something else with this state of “coherence”. We can use it to access our heart intelligence. Let me just suggest one way to do that. Start by following the steps to achieve coherence, then ask your heart what it wants you to know. Just sit quietly for a few minutes, maintaining this coherent state with slow, deep breaths, and notice what comes up for you. Alternatively, ask a specific question. Is there something you are trying to decide? Is there a problem you are trying to solve? In the state of coherence, ask your heart for its suggestions. Ask it to help you decide. 

All this is a very deliberate, very conscious way of accessing our heart intelligence. But, in reality, this is just the way we are. We are using heart intelligence all the time. It never goes away. It’s just that it is occurring in the background, below the level of consciousness. 

But heart coherence isn’t just an exercise. As the research has shown it is associated with certain emotional states, namely, love, awe, joy, excitement, and contentment, ease, calm and peace. So when we experience an everyday event which generates one of those emotions in us, it sets up the heart to enter into coherence. The same thing happens if we re-create in our minds a particularly vivid memory of an event where we experienced one of those emotions. That’s the step 2 in the quick coherence exercise. 

There’s a way to make all this happen more often. Practice. Both the practice of an exercise like the one I’ve just described, or setting an intention at the start of the day. When we set an intention, it doesn’t mean that the universe magically aligns itself to that intention, but it can feel like that. It means we heighten our ability to notice whatever might align with that intention. 

You can prove this for yourself with a simple exercise. Pick a colour. Any colour. Now during the course of the day take a photo of whatever you see that is that colour. It’s likely you’ll pretty quickly start to see that colour everywhere. 

Well you can do the same with the heart. How about you set an intention to notice the moments in the day when you feel warm hearted, or light hearted? Or how about moments when you experience what the Dutch vlogger calls “heart jumping”? 

It’s that old thing of attention magnifying whatever it is focused on. An intention like this is a kind of focus, and it increases the chances of you experiencing what aligns with it. 

You can also increase your experience of heart centred living and seeing by reflecting at the end of the day – what did I experience today that was “dear to my heart”? What did I do which made me feel “my heart is in this”? Did I have any “heart to heart” conversations? 

Because there is another aspect to this heart coherence thing that I haven’t talked about yet. Remember how I said anything which beats with a rhythm sends out waves into the world? Well, anything which CAN beat with a rhythm can pick up those waves, and align itself. 

You know there is a story about the clockmaker who had several old clocks in his workshop. The kinds of clocks which work with a pendulum. At the end of the day, he would set each clock pendulum swinging. Before he left the room he could see that each pendulum was swinging its own rhythm, left to right and back again. When he came back to the workshop the following day he noticed that every single pendulum was swinging in synchrony. They had aligned themselves. That’s a physical phenomenon called “entrainment”…..the rhythms coming into alignment with each other. Well, the Heartmath researchers discovered they could measure the electromagnetic waves coming from the human heart. In fact they could measure them outside of the body as they spread into the environment. And you know what? They found that if someone achieved heart coherence, then the person standing next to them was more likely to develop it too. The wave pattern travelled from one person to the next….entrainment. Or, maybe you could say, “attunement”. Now this happens, not only with coherence, but with other patterns too. Maybe that at least partly explains why we feel uncomfortable around certain people, or why we can “pick up an atmosphere” in a room. 

But here’s the exciting part. If we deliberately practice coherence, both through exercises and emotional experiences, the we can spread those healing waves to others. 

Do you find that surprising? Well, let me tell you one other finding….that the power of the transmission increases when two people touch. So, one person whose heart is in coherence, holding hands with another is likely to induce coherence in their heart too. 

Now, you’re probably thinking…isn’t this a two way process? Isn’t the disturbed or anxious pattern likely to be transferred too? Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s true. But signals have a power, and the more we practice coherence, the more powerfully we will transmit that to others. 

Intentions and reflections. They can both train our attention. So let’s put our heart into both of them. 

How about a Mary Oliver poem?

An Old Story

Sleep comes its little while. then I wake

in the valley of midnight or three a.m.

to the first fragrances of spring.

which is coming, all by itself, no matter what.

My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have.

My body says, will this pounding ever stop?

My heart says: there, there, be a good student.

My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle

those soft white flowers, open in the night. 

Her heart says, “there, there, be a good student”. Why not take that advice? Give it a go. Sit yourself down somewhere, take the three, deep breaths slowly, and ask “what does my heart have to say?” Maybe nothing will come to mind. Maybe something clear will appear. Maybe something will suddenly pop into your consciousness later, even at night, asleep, in a dream. 

In episode two of my podcast, “More Good Days”, I shared some music with you which I collected together into a “More Good Days” playlist. So, I thought, today, I’ll make a playlist for this episode, “Heart to heart”, gathering songs which mention the heart. 

I’m going to start with Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”. This goes all the way back to my first year at university, 1972, and even though, now, I’m really “growing old”, I think the “heart of gold” is still worth seeking out in life. I feel so blessed to have discovered so many of them! 

I am a life long Genesis fan, not just the Peter Gabriel years, and I’ve got many, many favourite Genesis tracks in my favourites list. “Hold on My Heart” still moves me every time I hear it. 

“Heartbeats” by Jose Gonzales, is a beautiful song, with the memorable line – “sharing different heartbeats in one night”. We are all different, but is there anything more beautiful than sharing our different heartbeats?

“Heart” by Sleeping at Last, only mentions the heart in the title, not in the lyrics, yet it is a gorgeous, heart felt song. 

“My Heart Will Go On”, Celine Dion. Oh my, this ballad has been played a bit too much at times, but, returning to it today, flipping heck, it still reduces me to tears! 

“Heart and Soul”, by Roseaux and Olle Nyman, might be completely new to me, but the line “You’ll remain like a song in my heart and soul” reeled me in. Isn’t that what Celine Dion sings about in “My Heart Will Go On”? And isn’t that a beautiful metaphor that illuminates the deepest truth – that we keep each other “like a song” in our “heart and soul”? 

“The Shape of My Heart”, by Sting. Sting is another of my favourite singers who has written so many beautiful songs. This song asks me, and asks you, what is the shape of your heart? 

Finally, I’m suggesting an instrumental track, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” which holds my heart and makes it soar. 

Until next time, bonne journée. Have a good day. 

Here’s a link to a Spotify playlist of these songs – 

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The view from on high

April 8, 2026 by bobleckridge

When NASA shared this photo taken from Artemis II I was entranced. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent looking at this. This is a view of planet Earth which few of us will see with our own eyes, but thanks to the astronauts, all of us can see it. Look how much water there is! I know, 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, but it still takes me aback to see these great expanses of oceans. And guess what? There are no divisions between one area of water on the planet and another. The great water cycle, from the oceans and seas, to the swirls of rain-soaked clouds which constantly change shape and size, to the streams, rivers and lakes….what goes into the water, flows from one part of the world to all the others.

The second thing I notice are the auroras, one top right of the image, and the other bottom left. In both cases a thin green glow, illuminating just how short is the distance from the surface of the Earth to the airless atmosphere above. There is this incredibly thin layer around our planet, which makes life possible. Compared to the planet herself, this life sustaining layer is astoundingly thin. It looks so delicate. So fragile. Staring at this slip of atmosphere I’m impressed by how, like the water cycle, all of the air we breathe is undivided. What goes into the air at one point on the Earth, quickly spreads around the entire globe.

Nanci Griffiths sings, in “From a Distance” –

From a distance there is harmony
And it echoes through the land
It’s the voice of hope
It’s the voice of peace
It’s the voice of every man

From a distance we all have enough
And no one is in need
There are no guns, no bombs, no diseases
No hungry mouths to feed

and, later, in the same song……

From a distance you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance I can’t comprehend
What all this war is for

“From a Distance” was written in 1985 by Julie Gold, and recorded by Nanci Griffith for her album, “Lone Star State of Mind”. I heard Nanci perform it in Edinburgh in the early 1990s, and it delights me still. Yet, there is, of course, a sadness there, because all these years on and there are still pathological narcissists flinging bombs, missiles and bullets at people, killing, destroying, and sowing fear and chaos.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Human history tells us that we humans excel at killing each other, destroying habitats, and wiping out whole species. But we are also capable of great art, from the cave drawings of Lascaux, to Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Picasso, Van Gogh, and so on. We are capable of creating the most exquisite music, of writing the most astonishing poems and stories. We are able to invent mind boggling technologies. And, most of all, we are one of the most social animals on the planet, deeply desirous of love, affection and caring relationships.

I look at this photo and I think of all of that. I think, with sadness, of the hate, the selfishness, greed and destruction. I think, with hope, of the kindness of strangers, of the infinite creativity of humans. And, most of all, I think, what a tiny, finite world we all share, spinning on this little planet as it flies, soundlessly, across the universe.

We are well capable of creating a better world, recognising what we share, caring for this planet, and all the marvelous diversity of life living here.

Maybe the view from on high will remind us of that, and inspire us to work to achieve it.

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Wonder and awe

April 8, 2026 by bobleckridge

Episode 2 of my More Good Days podcast is available now, come and subscribe to my substack to receive each episode, free, in your inbox.

Here’s the text, if you’d like to read it……

Are you having a good day? Was yesterday a good day? Whatever your answer, and, yes, I would really like to know about your good day, let’s make today a good day. I’d like to help you do that, and I think the best way for me to do that is to share with you what I’ve learned from my experience with thousands of patients who told me what makes a good day for them, as well as sharing what makes a day a good day for me. 

We are all different. We live according to our own values, tastes, desires, our own relationships and issues, so what goes towards making today a good day for me, may well be different from what makes a good day for you. However, we also have a lot in common, there’s a lot that we share. 

In this podcast, I’ll share with you lots of actions you can take to make today a good day. There are tried and tested principles underpinning these actions. Many of them have been taught through different cultures and traditions over centuries. Some we’ve only discovered more recently. 

You can take any of these principles, try any of these actions, for yourself. Make them your own. The way you apply these ideas in your everyday life will also be unique. That’s great. That’s how it should be. Your day is unique, because you are unique. Nobody else is living, will live or has lived the exact same life as you. We might all be made from the same star stuff, we might all share the same air, the same water, and food produced from the same ground, on this little blue marble of a planet, but there are no two of us who are, were, or ever will be, exactly the same.

When I ask if today is a good day, I know there aren’t just two kinds of days. Good ones and bad ones. Our experiences are much more nuanced than that. Our days are more multi-coloured than that. You may well have some good experiences today, but there might, as well, be some not so good ones, and only you can decide if you’d like to call today a good day. 

In the evening, maybe before you head off to bed, you might reflect on your day, ask yourself, how does it feel? Are you going to call this a good day? If so, why? What particular moments, which specific experiences or encounters made this a good day? 

And if you don’t feel you can call this a good day? Well, why not? What happened today, what experiences did you have that lead you to say that today wasn’t a good day? 

As you think back over the day, even if you conclude it was a pretty crappy one, were there any moments in it which felt good?

You might like to just spend a few minutes on this, this reflecting, this thinking back over the day. 

Why not get a notebook, a journal, and write your thoughts down? These days some people prefer to speak their thoughts, rather than write them and that’s so easy now. Our phones and computers all have easy to use dictation software on them now. So, you could record your thoughts by speaking them into a digital note. Paper, phone, computer, whatever works best for you. The important thing is to make it a habit. Do it every day. Spend a few minutes, reflecting and noting down what made today a good day (or not a good day!)

Remember what we pay attention to, grows. So, my suggestion is to become more aware of what, in your opinion, makes your days good ones, and to spend some time remembering, and so reinforcing, whatever made them so. 

L’émerveillement du quotidien

If there was just one thing I’d recommend to anyone wanting to increase the quality of their everyday life, it would be to nurture a capacity for wonder and awe. 

There’s a French phrase which has appealed to me a lot from the very first time I encountered it – “l’émerveillement du quotidien”. It’s not that easy to translate, because I don’t think any single English word substitutes for “émerveillement”, but the “du quotidien” bit is easy – it means everyday, as in “ordinary”, “typical” “daily” – but the key is the “émerveillement” which contains the meanings of “wonder”, “amazement”, even “awe”. 

I’m fairly happy to translate it as “the wonder of the everyday” as long as that phrase also conveys the idea of “the extraordinariness of the ordinary”. 

The thing is, every single experience we have, we are having for the first and last time ever. Every single experience is unique. Every encounter is unique, just as every person and every relationship is unique. We can get in touch with that uniqueness by stirring up a sense of wonder. 

Actually, the practice of becoming aware of first and last times, is an ancient “spiritual” or “philosophical” practice, which I’ll go into in more detail another time. But, for now, let’s spend a little time wondering about wonder….where can we find the inspirations that make us wonder?

Wonder in Nature

I find natural phenomena to be the greatest source of wonder. I can be amazed at the sight of a butterfly, the colours and patterns on its wings, (astonishingly, the colours in a butterfly wing are mainly produced by the microscopic scales which cover the wing. These scales reflect and absorb light to produce the appearance of colour. I’m not sure I can quite get my head around that). I watch in wonder at the way a butterfly flits from flower to flower, constantly changing and direction. I try to predict which flower they’ll fly to next, and I never get it right. I’m sure I once read that physicists haven’t managed to work out how on earth a butterfly manages to fly that way. As I watch the butterflies I think of how different they are from the caterpillars which they were when they were younger. How on earth does a creature like a caterpillar, create a cocoon for itself, and emerge some time later utterly transformed into a beautiful, butterfly with the ability to spread its brand new wings and fly? 

I can be entranced by the little lemon tree growing outside my front door, now full of buds, then flowers, amazed at the dark, unexpectedly reddish colour of the new growth leaves, delighted at the appearance of the lemons, first as small green globes, swelling and ripening over many weeks to beautiful yellow lemons.  I can lose myself gazing up at the shapes of clouds in the sky, watching them constantly morphing from one shape into another. I can be surprised and captured by the way the petals of a flower catch the sunlight making it seem like they are glowing, looking as if they are shining this energy from within themselves. You get the idea, I’m sure. 

I love to walk amongst the trees, to pause, take deep breaths and smell that cool, slightly damp, woody smell. I delight in the diversity of colours and shapes of their leaves, their blossoms, the sometimes immense girth of their trunks. I think of how some trees have been alive for centuries, and how, despite the fact they don’t have brains, and they can’t move from place to place, they’ve evolved the ability to live on this planet for much longer than we humans can. I think of the scientist, Richard Feynman who said that trees are created out of the air. They take in carbon dioxide and water from the air, and turn it into trunks, branches, twigs, leaves and blossoms. They capture the sunshine for energy and create the oxygen without which every single animal, including humans, would die. You might think that trees get their water from the ground, but, Feynman said, yes, but where does the water in the ground come from? It comes from the sky. Trees really do create themselves from sunshine and air. Isn’t that incredible?

By the way, there is a lot of evidence that spending time amongst trees is good for your health. I’ll tell you about that in another episode.

If you ever browse through the photos people post on social media you’re likely to find plenty of pictures of sunsets. We love sunsets, don’t we? Especially sunsets over the oceans. How often do people gather on beaches, or along promenades to watch the sun go down? One sunset that really made a great impression on me was in the movie, “Le Rayon Vert”, The Green Ray. The film is based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name, although his story is set in Scotland, whilst Eric Romer’s film is set in France. The green ray in question is a rare phenomenon which can occur just as the last of the sun sinks below the horizon of an uninterrupted view across an ocean. The legend, Jules Verne created, was that when someone observes the green ray, they can see into their own heart, and into the hearts of others. 

I don’t live on a coast, but any time I notice the clouds in the sky turning pink as the sun sets, I feel compelled to go outside into the garden, to look up, and just savour the glorious, fast changing colours, in those last few moments of the day.

Meanwhile, which natural phenomena caught your attention today?

Wonder in people

Also, I’m amazed by people. I looked forward to every Monday morning at work because there would be a new clinic, with new patients come to share their utterly unique and wonderful stories with me, and then there would be others coming to relate the changes they had experienced since their last visit. You couldn’t predict what they were going to say, and you never heard an identical story twice. Time and time again patients would tell me about their experiences of trauma, events which had wounded them sometimes which had happened decades ago. Events which shocked and upset me, but which they’d survived. They would demonstrate astonishing abilities to cope and to keep going. Many times I would think, wow, you are an amazing person. Many, many times patients would say to me “You’re the first person I’ve ever told that. I’ve never spoken about it to anybody else”. The fact that we could create such trusting relationships made me feel very, very privileged. I’d hear people say, “You know me better than anyone else ever has”, and I was convinced that meant they now understood themselves better than ever before. 

These comments were common in my place of work. Colleagues had the same experiences. Both during my years as a GP, and my years working at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, I was privileged to have colleagues who shared a holistic, non-judgemental approach to patients. It really was normal for me to hear my partners and co-workers describe their enthusiasm about such impressive, and even awe inspiring encounters. It wasn’t like that 100 percent of the time. We all had our share of misunderstandings, disappointments, and frustrations. But it happened enough of the time for those days to feel like good days, and for there to be enough of them for us to feel that this way of practicing Medicine was a life worth living. It felt like we were helping to make the world a better place, for one person at a time. 

Wonder in learning

When I was a child my parents subscribed to two part work magazines for me. One was called “Knowledge” and the other was “Look and Learn”. I loved them and looked forward, every fortnight, to each and every new issue . I collected them in especially designed folders, gradually creating my own encyclopaedia. In fact, I was so taken with the range of knowledge, discovery and wonder available in an encyclopaedia, that, at 24, when I graduated from medical school, and received my first month’s pay as a Junior Doctor, I bought a complete set of “Encyclopaedia Brittanica”. I still have it. I know the internet, what with wikipedia, and everything, have made something like that pretty redundant, but I still enjoy pulling out a volume at random and opening it to discover something new to me. It’s the serendipity of these discoveries which delights me. 

You’ll be familiar with the old saying “Every day’s a school day”. It’s often used when something goes wrong, but something we can learn from, or where we suddenly realise something. Insights and understandings are the kind of learning which can thrill me. Those, “aha” moments, where something becomes clear. By the way, learning, it appears, is good for you. People who learn a second language, for example, have been shown to have healthier brains. Maybe it’s the old “use it or lose it” phenomenon, but whether or not that benefit is real, I find that on the days I learn something, I’m more likely to experience that day as a good day. 

When I retired from medical practice in Scotland, I emigrated to France, partly because I was drawn to French culture and French weather, but, also to immerse myself in learning a second language. Twelve years here and I learn a little more French every single day, reading it, listening to it, and having everyday conversations with neighbours. It’s even inspired me to begin to learn more languages, which is a bit of a surprise, because I was never keen on language learning at school. So, if “every day is a school day”, I find that learning is actually a lot more fun now than it ever was back in the day when I was actually a school boy. Learning is a form of wonder for me. I’m delighted and amazed by what I discover. 

Wonder in the human body

When I studied Medicine at university, I was frequently amazed by what I learned about the human body. I remember especially the lectures in embryology, illustrated beautifully in coloured chalks by the Anatomy professor. I was utterly astonished by how two cells, at the very beginning of a human life, a sperm and an ovum, after merging, would double and double, again and again, organising themselves into a complete human being, with arms, legs, a face, and all the bodily organs and systems. All in exactly the right places. It still astonishes me to think of that. 

I was amazed at the healing powers of a human body. How it could knit together a broken bone, seal a cut in the skin, resolve a bruise, or reduce a swelling. I saw how the body did all those things and more, not because a drug had been prescribed, but because that’s what a body does. That still amazes me. 

At seventy years old I realise more than ever just how little we humans can know and understand about life, about this planet we live on, about the universe. I know that I understand much more now than I did when I started work aged 24, but I am humbled by the realisation of how little that is in the grand scheme of things. 

So wonder keeps me engaged with the present day world, and it keeps me humble and open minded. Moments of wonder delight me. They can stop me in my tracks. They bring me joy, a smile to my face, a deep sense of belonging in this incredible world which we all share. They stir a feeling of gratitude, and that’s such an important part of making a day a good day. They make me feel it’s good to be alive. 

I’ve got two poems for you today, both of which have something to say about this sense of wonder.

The first is “Lost” by David Wagoner….

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes behind you

are not lost. Wherever you are is called here,

and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying here,

no two trees are the same to the raven.

No two branches are the same to the wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

where you are. You must let it find you.

This is such a beautiful poem. It’s about presence and the power of Nature. It reminds us of the basic fact of uniqueness, how no two moments are the same. It’s entitled “Lost” and it tells us clearly that when we are feeling lost, we just need to turn our attention to the natural world around us, and feel that deep connectedness which arises when we open our hearts and minds to the living world. 

The second poem is by Gregory Orr…

Ask the tree or the house

ask the rose or the fire

hydrant – everything’s 

waiting for you to notice.

Everything’s waiting for you

to wrap your heart around it.

That music has been playing

since you were born.

You must be mad to resist it.

Always the beloved

surrounds us,

eager to dance.

All we have to do is ask.

Here the poet includes inanimate objects, a house, a fire hydrant. He reminds us that this world we live in is an abundant one. We only need to turn our attention to whatever is around us to become aware of that. And, I think, crucially, he says we need to pay a particular kind of attention….you need to “wrap your heart around it”. It’s Mary Oliver’s “loving attention”. It’s Saint Exupery’s Little Prince learning that what’s most important is what we see with the heart. “That music has been playing since you were born. You must be mad to resist it.”

So, there we have it. My main sources of everyday wonder spring from the natural world, from people, from learning and from the amazing human body. 

How about you? If you do start to note down what makes a day a good day for you, then over time you’ll start to become aware of your own personal sources of wonder, of awe, amazement, and, yes, joy. All of these experiences are likely to create good days for you, and as that becomes your norm, I’m convinced you’ll start to feel, more and more, that you are living a life worth living. As you experience that, as I experience that, as we, and our friends and family experience that, we’ll build the strength, the ideas and the will to make this world a better place. 

Last time I included a poem by Mary Oliver, and this time I’ve read you two poems, one by David Wagoner, and one by Gregory Orr. I think poems engage us in a unique way. I’ve learned that they stimulate and reinforce the part of our brain which is responsible for a particular kind of attention – a broad, appreciative, attention which reveals patterns, connections and the whole to us. I’ll tell you more about that part of the brain in a future episode. But, for now, I’d be really interested to hear from you if you have any favourite poems. Please, get in touch and tell me what they are. I’d like to include them in future episodes, so that we, you and I, can build our own poetry collections to dip into, to savour, relish and enjoy. 

I’ve read that poems were originally music, originally sung. I’ve also read there is a theory that music preceded speech in human evolution. Whether or not that’s the case, there is no doubt that both poetry and music go deep into our souls. I can’t imagine life without them. Well, I can, but it would be a diminished life, a poorer one. 

So, what about music? How much do you listen to music? What kind of music do you like? It’s a fair bet that our musical tastes and preferences are unique to us, but I’d like to share with you some of the music which means so much to me. Because I listen to music every day. I listen casually, playing music while I’m doing something else, but I also listen deliberately, sitting down and paying attention, just to the music. Music can affect my mood, and I’m willing to bet it can affect yours too. A particular song has the power to take right back to a day long ago, in the same way that Proust’s madeleine did for him. In fact, there’s good evidence that music has the power to affect our brain function, improving everything from memory to cognition. I’ll say more about that some other time. 

I have a vinyl record collection which I bought, one record at a time, mainly through my teens and twenties. But I suppose I mainly listen to music these days on streaming services, like Spotify and Youtube. I’ve created a More Good Days playlist on both Spotify and Youtube, where I’ve started to add songs that, I find, contribute to more of my days becoming good ones. Check them out, and let me know if there are any particular songs you’d like me to include. Or make your own playlist, for your own enjoyment. If you’d like to, send me a link to your own playlist and I’ll check it out. 

The easiest way to find my playlists is to use one of the links here – 

Here’s the link to the Spotify playlist – and here’s the link to my youtube one – 

Here are the first songs on my More Good Days playlist – 

First off, I like Days Like This, by Van Morrison. I’ve got quite a number of Van Morrison albums on vinyl and this song is one of my favourites. For those days where everything feels just right.

I was born in 1954 and the first records I bought were by The Beatles. I still play many of their songs, but one which actually mentions good days is “Good Day Sunshine”, a simple song about how sunshine and love can make the day a good one. Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys said this was one of his top 10 favourite Beatles songs.

One Day Like This by Elbow. I love Guy Garvey’s singing voice. Another song about sunshine and love, but with the great line “kiss me like we die tonight” which is spot on for the old “first and last” technique the ancients taught. I also like that Guy sings that one day a year like this would be good enough for him. I know not all days can be good ones, and I sure hope you have more than one every year, but, from time to time, we’ll all have really great days. Just like Van Morrison’s mama told him!

Next up is Lovely Day by Bill Withers. This goes back to the late 70s, and again, sunshine and love are credited for the creation of a good day, but the focus here is really the loving relationship. “Just one look at you and I know….”

I’d never heard of the band Luce until I searched for songs with “good day” in the title, but this is a good one. It also focuses on those themes of love and sunshine, but like Bill Withers song, the loving relationship is the key.

Another song that came up on my search was Good Days by Rodell Duff. I’d never heard this one before either…more sunshine and a loving relationship in play here, but the lines that really connected to me were “so let’s don’t let these Hours and minutes and seconds go to waste, hey ‘Cause these are the good days” which reminds me to reflect on the moments which made today a good one, not least to reinforce them in my life.

Going back to my single buying days, I had to include Thank you for the Days by the Kinks which reminds me of the power of gratitude. I’ll return to that subject, but expressing gratitude for what you’ve experienced today is a powerful psychological practice which contributes to mental health and wellbeing. 

Colin Vearncombe, who sang as “Black”, had a beautiful voice and I’ve long since been a fan of his bit hit with Wonderful Life, which reminds us “There’s magic everywhere”

And, finally, so far, a classic from Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World. I mean, this is just perfect, isn’t it? He sings of the natural world, of seeing friends shaking hands and of the miracle of witnessing a child growing up. 

That’s nine songs, and a playlist of 33 minutes. I hope you enjoy all of them, or, at least, some of them!

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Bluesky where I post pretty much daily. Just pop my name, bobleckridge, all as one word, into the Bluesky search box and you’ll find me. There’s only one Bob Leckridge! And if you do decide to follow me there, please say hello and introduce yourself. 

I’m just getting started on Substack but you can find this podcast there, you can find a transcript there, and, if you subscribe, you’ll start to receive regular emails from me. But you can also say hello, and introduce yourself there, and if you send me a message, I’ll always reply. 

So, until next time, au revoir et bonne journée, bye, and have a good day. 

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Belonging

April 1, 2026 by bobleckridge

I’m back in the town of my birth, Stirling, this week. My mother in law passed away at the weekend so this is a rather sad, unplanned visit.

Yesterday I decided to walk into town, following part of the route which I used to take to get to work each day for the best part of twenty years. My routine, weather permitting, was to walk from home to the railway station where I’d catch a Glasgow train. In the winter it’d be pitch black over Kings Park, but for most of the year I’d walk through it taking in the long views to the hills, and enjoying the big green space of the park. It was a good start to the day.

Stirling Castle has always been my favourite Scottish castle, but you could say I’m biased, seeing as I was born in Stirling. My gran used to tell me that made me a “son of the rock”.

Seeing the castle again yesterday as I walked through the park, I had a feeling of belonging, a feeling that this is where I came from, but I didn’t feel I’d come home. Stirling has changed a lot over my seventy years on this planet.

My wife’s mum is the last of our parents to go, few relatives still live here, and our old school friends have long since dispersed across the planet, so I don’t recognise anyone as I walk the streets, and no-one recognises me.

I realise it’s the castle, the Wallace monument, the Ochil Hills and the “bens” around Ben Ledi towards the Trossachs which make me feel like I belong.

But it takes people to create a sense of home. People, routine and day after day of everyday wonder.

It strikes me there’s a similar inner experience at work. When we look at photos of ourselves from school days we know “That’s me”. We don’t doubt it. But at exactly the same time we think “Goodness, is that really me?” Because although we have a sense of continuity of the Self, we’re just as aware of how much we’ve changed.

I suppose that’s the nature of change. There’s a continuity within it. The present emerges from the rapidly receding past and we’re already imagining all kinds of possible futures. The flow of time doesn’t break up into neat, separate seconds, minutes and hours, that mechanical view of time is a much more recent invention. For most of history we humans have lived with the rhythms of sunrises and sunsets, and of the cycles of moon phases and seasons.

The philosopher Bergson helpfully showed us the difference between the real lived experience of time which he called duration, and the artificial measured time. Strange that we now let our lives be dominated by the latter over the former.

The long timescales of the mountains and the castle have the power to create this feeling of belonging, despite all the other changes which have dissipated the feeling of this being home.

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More Good Days

March 26, 2026 by bobleckridge

I’ve created a podcast. If you’d like to listen to it come to my Substack page.

Here’s the transcript of the first episode.

“Hello”, that’s what we say when we answer the phone, isn’t it? 

Hello. 

A simple little word we most likely say automatically. It’s kind of a habit, isn’t it?

But we don’t say it only when answering a phone. We say it to acknowledge other people. To connect, even if only briefly. 

When I moved to France I quickly noticed how often people said “bonjour”. Pretty much everyone who passes when I’m out for a walk says “bonjour”. Even teenagers. That was a shock! In fact, teenagers will often say “bonjour, monsieur” which sounds even more polite than just “bonjour”.

I quickly noticed that every conversation starts with “hello”, or “bonjour”, I mean. So, when it’s your turn at the check-out, the check-out man or woman will always say “bonjour” before starting to process your purchases. And you will say “bonjour” in return. It would be impolite otherwise. In a smaller shop, say, a boulangerie, a cafe, or the local post office, people will say “bonjour” when entering the premises. They might say “bonjour, messieurs, dames”, “hello, ladies and gentlemen”, if there are other customers already in the shop awaiting their turn. But, even if there are no other customers, the first thing to say is always “bonjour”. 

I like that. I liked it from the first moment I encountered it. Saying “hello” is an acknowledgement. It’s a way of making a connection. It says, “I’m here and I see, or hear, you”. It establishes a “we”, even if only fleetingly. It makes the world instantly feel a more friendly place. 

When I was a teenager I used to listen to the DJ, John Peel, and I’ll always remember one autumn when he talked about all the leaves that fall on the ground. He said he liked to carry a pen with him. I guess, these days, it would be a “sharpie” or “marker pen”. And he’d stop from time to time and pick up a leaf, write the word “hello” on it and place it back on the ground. He liked to think it would brighten the day of some stranger who’d notice the leaf, pick it up, and read “hello”. 

It’s a small word, and little habit, but, in my experience, it makes the world a better place. 

Hey, that’s a big claim, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just “hello”, for heaven’s sake! 

I can only say, check it out for yourself. How often to people say “hello” to you? How often do you say “hello” to others? Does it seem to make a difference?

That’s a general principle I have – noticing. We’ve got a tendency to live a lot of our lives on autopilot. In fact, my blog, which I’ve been publishing for many years now, is entitled “Heroes not zombies” – you can find it easily by typing heroes not zombies into any browser. I called it that because to address exactly that issue – that we have this tendency to slip into autopilot, living an only semiconscious life, driven this way and that by others, pushed and pulled by circumstances, like zombies. That makes us vulnerable and biddable, with corporations, politicians, and others pushing our buttons to make us respond their will, rather than use our own. But if we wake up, become more aware, pay more attention, then we can increase our autonomy. We can make our own choices, create our own narratives, become the heroes of our own stories. I mean hero in this way. I don’t mean like a sort of super hero with special powers. I mean the main character, the hero, of the story….of your story. 

Over the years I’ve posted articles and shared photos on my blog, all with the hope that others will be inspired to wake up, pay more attention, and resist slipping into autopilot so much. 

So, about this saying “hello”. I’d say try becoming more aware of it. Notice when people say “hello” to you, and grasp the opportunities to say “hello” to others. Then, you decide. Does this help make a better day, a better life, a better world, even? 

In more recent years, here in France, I’ve noticed that there’s another word people are using every day. It’s “bonne journee” – ok, it’s two words, a phrase, not just a single word. But it’s everywhere now, it seems. When leaving the check-out, when leaving the cafe, or the shop, almost always now, you’ll hear, not just “au revoir”, which, by the way, is such a nice way of saying goodbye, because, literally, it’s “until seeing you again”, but, in addition now, you’ll hear “bonne journee” – the French equivalent of “have a good day”. Once I noticed it being used so frequently, I started to use it myself, and it’s my routine now. As I leave the check-out, the restaurant, the boulangerie, I say “au revoir, bonne journee”. 

Actually the French have rippled out this phrase into a whole range of context-specific forms. So, it’s not unusual now, on leaving a boulangerie on a Friday to hear “Bon weekend”, or if you’re there on a Sunday “Bonne dimanche” – “have a good weekend” or “have a good Sunday”. There are loads of others!. 

What I like about this is that it’s an expression of good will. It’s saying to someone else, you wish them to have a good day. 

Well, all that focus on good days got me thinking. What is a good day, anyway? What makes a good day, a good one? And that’s what led to this podcast. 

My hope is, that together, here, we will share what goes to making a day a good day. Because, as I used to say to my patients, you are only alive today, here and now. If you spend all your time in your head going over the past, regretting it, re-experiencing the pains of it, or if you spend all your time in your head in the future, wondering what if this, and what if that? Then your head is filled with hurts, sorrows, anxieties and fears. But what if you deliberately stop that and turn your attention to the here and now? What if you just slow down for a moment and notice what is around you? Not just notice, but pay some attention. Engage. 

Well, then, maybe you’ll start to find some relief. 

Maybe you’ll start to have more good days.

I’d like to help you to have a good day, and I think the best way for me to do that is to share with you what I’ve learned from my experience with thousands of patients who told me what makes a good day for them, as well as sharing what makes a day a good day for me. 

We are all different. We live according to our own values, tastes, desires, our own relationships and issues, so what goes towards making today a good day for me, may well be different from what makes a good day for you. On the other hand, we are all human, and so we have a lot in common. 

I worked as a doctor for four decades, and I’ve often said how I’d look forward to Monday because it was the start of another week. A week where people I’d never met before would come to me and tell me their unique, individual stories. 

I never lost that sense of awe which I’d experience when people told me about their lives. In fact, it wasn’t just the “new” patients I looked forward to seeing. I was just as keen to meet again with those who’d come to me before, maybe many times before. 

We prioritised continuity of care at my place of work. As a patient you could expect to see the same doctor at every visit. It would be unusual if you didn’t. 

This meant we developed long term relationships with our patients, stretching over many months, many years. In some cases, even over different generations. What a delight it was to help a young parent, who’d I’d originally helped when she was just a toddler. Human beings amaze me. Always have done. Still do.

Everyone I met had a unique story to tell. Everyone I met was different. And, yet, everyone I met also had many similar experiences, suffered from the same common symptoms, and manifested very typical patterns of behaviour, and of illness. 

I first expressed the desire to be a doctor when I was three years old. I don’t know where that came from. Nobody in my family had ever worked in health care. I had no relatives who were doctors or nurses. 

I reckon it’s always been a kind of “calling” for me, even though I know that’s not a common word to use about work these days. 

Why did I want to be a doctor? To help people. In fact, I’ve often thought that there’s a purpose to my life….that I’m here to contribute to the creation of a better world. That I’ve a responsibility to try to leave the world a little better place than it was when I entered into it. 

I guess the main way I’ve tried to do that has been one person at a time. If I can help reduce this particular patient’s suffering, if I can help them to heal, to cope better….if I can help them to grow even, then I’m making a contribution to making the world a better place.

We all live our lives a day at a time, and the only place we have power to make a change is right here, right now. So, in this podcast I want to share with you the ways I’ve discovered to help make today a better day. 

As I started to think about what made a day a good day, it seemed pretty clear to me that if we experience more good days, then we might begin to feel that our lives are more worth living. But I don’t think having good days is just about having more happy days. I think it’s about having more days which feel meaningful, valuable, more days where we enrich our relationships and where we grow. 

If more of us have more good days like that, more of us will have the experience of living lives worth living. Then, maybe, we will be able to contribute to making this a better world. 

I have this picture in my head of three concentric circles. Each circle representing a zone of time and space. The innermost circle is where we experience and create the present. 

It’s where we can have our good days. 

The more good days grow in both frequency and intensity, the more they contribute to the creation of the next circle….lives worth living. This is the zone of a lifetime. 

Our lives can feel more worth living, the more good days we have, and the more our lives feel worth living, the more good days we are likely to experience, because in a life well lived there are more opportunities for good days to happen. 

Good days contribute to lives worth living, lives worth living create more opportunities for good days. 

But there is more to a life worth living than is contained within good days, which is partly why this second circle is bigger than the first one. 

We need more than good days. We need more than happy times, enjoyable and rewarding moments. We need to grow, to develop, mature. There’s a French word I love – epanouissement – which means to flourish or to blossom. It’s used to describe what flowers and trees do, but it’s also used in psychology to describe what Jung would call “individuation” – a growing, developing psyche. 

In future episodes we can explore some of the things which help us to grow, to flourish. 

It seems to me that when more of us experience lives worth living, then we will be on track to make the world a better place. That’s the third, outer circle. The zone of the world. 

Nothing exists in isolation. Our lives and our days all occur within particular contexts, specific environments. If we improve these environments, we’re making a better world, and, in turn, we are creating the conditions for more of to live lives worth living. We live in the shared physical, social, and cultural environments, we find in this third, outer circle. We influence these environments through our choices and our behaviours, and these environments, in turn, profoundly influence us. 

A better world will, I believe, be one where we take care to improve these environments. That’s how we will increase the chances of more and more of us experiencing better lives and having more good days. 

One more thing before I begin. I don’t see the world through a binary lens. What do I mean by that? Well there aren’t two kinds of days. Good days and bad ones. It’s not so “black and white”. In every day there will be experiences we appreciate and others we’d rather have avoided. Life is nuanced, and its mixed. 

What we pay attention to gets magnified, so let’s start by paying attention to what makes for a good day. And see where that leads us. 

Here’s to more good days. 

Whatever we pay attention to gets magnified. The more attention we pay to something, the larger it will feature in our minds. Any gardener will tell you the less attention you pay to your plants, the less likely they are to survive, and, in fact, we can say the same about our children. The attention we pay to babies isn’t only crucial for their survival. It literally shapes their brains, influencing both the number of connections created between brain cells, and also the strength of those connections. 

There’s a whole field of developmental psychology devoted to attachment styles….how the kinds of attention paid by main carers shape a child’s personality and behaviour. Patterns which persist right through adult life. 

Paying attention, especially a loving, and caring attention, profoundly affects both survival and thriving. It shapes how we see the world. It lays the foundations for both how we experience and how we interact with the world.

Philosopher and psychologist, William James, described the natural behaviour of attention as “wandering”. That’s what attention does. It keeps wandering. We all have that experience, don’t we?

It’s pretty difficult to keep our attention focused on anything specific. We have to work at it, because attention doesn’t only keep wandering, it’s always on the lookout for whatever is new – a movement, a sound, a characteristic. 

Have you ever noticed how quickly you can spot the movement of an animal, a bird, or a person, when gazing out over even vast landscapes? When something changes in our field of vision, we notice it straight away and turn our attention to it. The same thing happens with sound. It’s not just that we jump, or get startled by sudden loud noises. If we are in an environment where there is a constant background, perhaps machine noise, the moment it stops, we notice it has stopped. We are wired to detect change. To pay attention to what’s new.

The social media giants, mainstream media, and especially the advertising industry all work hard to try to grab and keep our attention. 

One way they do that is by continuously feeding us new things – images, sounds, or information. The invention of “infinite scrolling” where you can never reach the end of a “feed” is one of the most effective, addictive tools they use to keep our attention – to keep our attention on their website, their platform. I read an interview with a software engineer who invented this “infinite scrolling” and he said it was one of his biggest regrets because it has such enormous addictive power.

Apart from noticing what’s new, there’s another way to grab our attention. Stir up strong emotions. 

Just as attention magnifies whatever it is focused on, so can attention change our world by making us angry or fearful. The more we fill our inner experience with anger and fear, the more we pay attention to whatever that anger or fear is attached to. In fact, not only what they are attached to, but the anger and fear themselves, which become all-consuming, setting up our whole being into “fight or flight” mode, with surges of adrenaline, and cortisone, which creates a state of chronic inflammation in the body. What does on in our minds doesn’t stay in our minds. It cascades throughout our entire body, changing it as goes. 

Sensationalist headlines do exactly the same. They aim to catch our attention and keep a hold of it, turning us into anger and fear zombies in the process. 

But we don’t need to live our lives on autopilot. We can make some conscious choices about what we want to pay attention to. We can choose to notice, and to focus in on, beauty, for example. Or we can look out for whatever inspires wonder and awe. 

We can deliberately pay attention to positive emotions, to whatever stirs our souls and makes us feel gratitude for being alive. We can choose to use what the poet, Mary Oliver, called “loving attention”, the kind of attention which generates care, compassion and gratitude. 

Because if we choose to use attention consciously, to choose, in particular, to use loving attention consciously, then our lives and our minds become ever more full of love, wonder, delight, care, compassion and gratitude. 

We just have to practice it, and to practice it every single day. 

In my medical career, I frequently met patients whose suffering was magnified by their attention being trapped in the past, going over and over old wounds and hurts, or by their attention being trapped in the future, imagining all the worst possible outcomes and fearing them. Part of the work of releasing them from their suffering involved helping them to turn their attention to the here and now, where, around us, every day, there are phenomena which can delight and engage us. 

I think we all can begin to experience better lives by, first, becoming aware of where our attention wanders to, and where it gets caught. Only then are we able to make more conscious, personal choices about where to direct it. 

Remember, attention is a great magnifier. It grows whatever it is focused on. So, let’s choose what we want to focus it on. 

How about we focus it on awe, on wonder. My favourite French phrase “L’émerveillement du quotidien” captures exactly that – the wonder, or amazement, of the every day”. What have you noticed today that caught your attention? Did anything stop you in your tracks, or slow you down, to focus on it? Maybe you paused to get your phone out and took a photo. I do that a lot. It’s a great way to slow yourself down, to pay better attention to the here and now, and to give you more chances later to re-visit that moment, to see it again, but with fresh eyes in a different context. And it gives us a chance to share with others what has amazed us. 

Do you use any social media? Maybe you’d like to share some of your photos on Instagram, Facebook, or, in my case, on Bluesky. If you’d like to see my every day photos come and follow me on Bluesky. You’ll find me at this address – @bobleckridge.bsky.social If you do come to Bluesky, send me a message and say hello, so we can connect there. I’d love to see what amazes you every day. 

But my good days aren’t just about what generates awe and wonder. I find that if I decide to focus on whatever delights me, what touches and moves me, then that too helps to create more good days. For me, that includes poetry. I have a little notebook where I copy out by hand my favourite poems, the ones which I come across and which draw me in, move me, inspire me. 

And it includes music, too. I’ll tell you more about that in another episode, and I’d love to hear from you what songs, what compositions, really delight or touch you. Come and find me, either on Bluesky, at @bobleckridge.bsky.social or at heroesnotzombies.com where I’ll post the transcripts of each of these podcast episodes. 

Another of my great passions, which is a huge source of joy, delight, wonder and awe for me, is art. I enjoy seeing what others have created. I love sculpture, especially sculpture outside, in natural environments. But I love a wide range of visual art and always seek out a good gallery or museum if I’m on a city break, or staying somewhere on a trip. Art has incredible power to communicate what we find difficult to put into words. 

I do love words, too, however, and most good days involve some kind of encounter with stories….either the stories of patients, family or friends, of the stories I find in books. I’m an avid reader. 

I don’t know how many of these activities you identify with, but I’d love to hear about your own examples. In the podcast episodes to come, I’ll share with you examples of all of these, and more. 

When it comes right down to it, I recommend we focus on whatever it is that stirs our souls, whatever it is that generates feelings of gratitude and love. That way, I’m pretty sure, we’ll have more good days, more of us will experience our lives as worth living, and together we can create a better world. 

Let me finish today with a Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day”. 

The music I play as an intro and an outro is “What a Wonderful Day” by Shane Ivers. Here’s the credit – Music: What A Wonderful Day by Shane Ivers – https://www.silvermansound.com

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