Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, perception, photography on January 31, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Just after the sun set I got up close to the moss growing on the wall of the well in my garden.
Once I looked at the photo on my iPad and cropped the photo to show just the moss, I thought, in this light, these little plants with drops of water hanging from the ends of them, look like street lights!
Small world…..
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on January 30, 2015| 4 Comments »
Red sky in the morning, shepherds’ warning.
Know that old saying? The rest of it is “red sky at night, shepherds’ delight”.
What the shepherds were saying was that when the sky was red in the morning there would be bad weather on the way.
That might turn out to be true, but I must say, when I opened my shutters this morning and saw this, it delighted me. I didn’t look out, see this, and think “Oh no!” (But, then I don’t have sheep to look after!)
So, turns out red sky both in the morning and at night is “Bob’s delight”. I hope it’s yours too.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on January 29, 2015| 5 Comments »
From the plane window I saw the brightening sky before the dawn. Those deep contours in the clouds create such a strong impression of solidity, even though they are simply water particles hanging in the air.
Now, as dawn breaks, it looks so familiar, and yet so different from the usual dawn, because it’s the sun breaking through between the levels of the clouds, not between the clouds and the surface of the Earth.
Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on January 27, 2015| 2 Comments »
I often take photos of the light, of sunsets, sunrises, of shafts of sunlight and of moonlight, but I don’t often take photos of artificial light.
However, last night, in Edinburgh, I turned round and saw this……..I couldn’t resist.
See how good an iphone shot can be? All I have done to the original image is to crop it.
Yet again, photography is a vehicle for meditation and contemplation for me. The more I look at this photo, the more I see, and the happier I feel.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on January 25, 2015| 2 Comments »
In the A to Z of Becoming, C can stand for Choose.
We choose all the time. Unconsciously. We choose what to eat, where to eat it, what path to follow to any particular regular destination (like the workplace), and so on, and on.
Every day is filled with choices about what we want to put energy into, what we want to focus on, and what we want to do in the next minute.
A lot of these unconscious (or minimally conscious) choices are created through habit. If you have ever attended a course or conference which runs over a number of days or weeks, you’ll have noticed how quickly people find a particular seat to occupy every day they attend. Most of our eating choices are largely unconscious. There will be certain meals you eat frequently, certain drinks you ask for in cafés, certain shops you shop in, even particular brands you stay “loyal” to.
As I’ve written about other unconscious actions, there is nothing wrong, per se, in their being unconscious, but I find life changes when you make conscious choices. Making a conscious choice does not require you to actually make a different choice. You might still choose a particular beverage, a particular routine or whatever, but the deliberate act of bringing your choice to awareness and saying “I choose to do this” can be incredibly empowering, affirming, and heighten your experience of whatever you have chosen.
Give it a go.
Bring some of your routines and habitual choices up into your consciousness this week, and either actively choose to stick with them, or choose an alternative.
See how it feels.
Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on January 22, 2015| Leave a Comment »
I think it is often difference which catches my eye.
i think difference is beautiful.
Sameness quickly becomes, well, sameness.
This simple photo is beautiful, not just because the blue sky is beautiful, and the yellow lichen on the tree is beautiful, but also because of the contrast between the blue and the yellow, and the contrast between the smoothness of the sky and the roughness of the branches.
Mass production and mass control seems to have a different ethic from this – uniformity and the “elimination of variation”.
Here’s to a celebration of difference, of uniqueness and of diversity.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on January 19, 2015| Leave a Comment »
One of the keys of my approach to life is a phrase I encountered in a French book – “l’émerveillement du quotidien” – meaning, the amazing wonder of the every day.
Here’s an example.
This one is texture.
Look at the incredible texture of the bark of the tree, and the way it plays in relation to the dry stone wall behind it.
Found an amazing textures today?
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography on January 18, 2015| Leave a Comment »
We have two ways of functioning as human beings. Automatic, unconsciousness ways where everything seems to happen without our having anything to do with it, and aware, conscious ways where we become active. It’s not that one of these ways is good and one is bad, but I think we’re missing out if we aren’t active enough.
The A to Z of Becoming verb series here is about considering the ways in which we can become active and exploring what that then feels like to us. This week let’s explore breathing.
Breathing is an automatic function for us. We don’t have to stop and choose to breathe in or breathe out. But when we turn our active attention to our breathing, watching to see the rhythm of our in breaths and our out breaths, we find that the pattern changes. Even without trying to alter it, just paying attention to it alters it. Try that for yourself and see.
Breathing can also, to a certain extent, be an active choice for us. We can choose to hold our breath and dive under the water to see what lies on the sea bed. We can choose the speed and depth of our breathing and in a way impose our active choice onto our default automatic function.
When we become actively engaged with our breathing at least two things happen. One is that whilst we are carrying out that activity (be it an activity of awareness, just noticing our breath, or be it a chosen pattern of speed and depth of breaths) then we are altered for the duration of that activity. Changing our pattern of breath alters our heart rate for example. It alters the chemical balance in our blood and in our cells as we change how much carbon dioxide we breathe out and how much oxygen we breathe in. It changes our brain cell activity and rhythm. It can alter our mood, our thoughts, our feelings. But, secondly, repeated sessions of active breathing change the underlying default patterns.
Let me put my doctor hat on again for a minute, and tell you about one scenario which I encountered a lot as a doctor and where I showed patients how this phenomenon of active breathing could change an underlying chronic problem.
Many people chronically over-breathe. It’s called hyperventilation. The pattern is of fairly shallow, fairly fast breaths. When this pattern occurs during sleep, the person wakes up feeling not so great……maybe headachey, tired, vaguely unwell, maybe with tingly or numb hands or fingers, or with crampy, achey limbs. You don’t know that your body is in the hyperventilation pattern overnight, but a clue it might be can be found in noticing the breathing pattern from time to time during the day. Most times when you look, you see your breathing is fairly shallow and fairly fast.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say, or in this case, in the breathing. If you get someone to take a few minutes to do some diaphragmatic breaths (click through here to read the detail if you need it). And get them to do this three or four times a day. What will happen is that the underlying unconsciousness pattern will become disrupted and that disruption continues right through the night whilst the person is asleep.
I thought it was an odd thing when I first read about the sleep studies which showed this phenomenon, but time and again I found it made a big difference for many patients. Making an active choice to breathe differently a few times each day, alters the default, automatic pattern right through the 24 hour period.
Active breathing. You certainly don’t need to be doing it all the time, but taking a few moments, or minutes to do it a few times each day sort of resets your whole system.
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, science on January 16, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Sometimes I read something that both inspires and concerns me. This recent article about the scientists working to “solve ageing” and a $1M prize for scientists to “hack the code of life”, is just one such article. The prize relates to a challenge to teams to restore “vitality and extend lifespan in mice by 50%”. Several wealthy individuals and coporations seem to be actively engaged in these pursuits.
There is an increasing number of people realising that the concept of anti-ageing medicine that actually works is going to be the biggest industry that ever existed by some huge margin and that it just might be foreseeable
It hasn’t taken long for people to ask the question about quality of life if we do manage to enable people to live 120 years or more. What I like within that discussion is the concept of “healthspan” instead of “lifespan” – how many years of quality healthy life can we have? And I was very glad to read this –
The standard medical approach – curing one disease at a time – only makes that worse, says Jay Olshansky, a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Public Health who runs a project called the Longevity Dividend Initiative, which makes the case for funding ageing research to increase healthspan on health and economic grounds. “I would like to see a cure for heart disease or cancer,” he says. “But it would lead to a dramatic escalation in the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease.”
This kind of thinking seems still far to uncommon. We cannot create healthy lives by “curing one disease at a time”. And even if we were able to cure a number of chronic diseases, we have to think through what it means for people. We are all going to die from something. Can we reasonably choose to avoid dying from one disease without increasing our chances of dying from others?
Instead this kind of approach is needed, and is beginning to be explored –
By tackling ageing at the root they could be dealt with as one, reducing frailty and disability by lowering all age-related disease risks simultaneously, says Olshansky.
I don’t know about ageing, but it does seem to me that we could do with researching how we maintain health, how we develop resilience and vitality, and how we support growth and development. In other words, how do we stay healthy exactly? And how do we become healthy again when we are ill?
But apart from the scary ideas of genetic engineering and other “bioscience” technologies held by the richest individuals and companies, what would it mean if we could enable the average person to live 120 years?
What would it mean for education? What would it mean for work? What would it mean for living together?
What do you think?
How might living to 120 change the way you are living your life now? How might it change your plans?
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on January 15, 2015| Leave a Comment »
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language (William Osler)
The “art of observation” – interesting phrase. It’s not just a matter of looking then? Or of gazing whilst your mind is elsewhere? I think we often forget that observation is both an active and a creative process. It’s not the same as measuring. But it always involves some level of “abstraction” ie we focus on certain elements or characteristics. We simply can’t “take in” all the sensory stimuli and information which is streaming our way at any particular moment. We sift, we categorise, we discard, we focus.
Telling someone else what we observe often reveals these processes which alter what there is to be observed. Recording too little, hides too much. Recording too much, overwhelms with detail and we run the risk of not being able to see the wood for the trees.
A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading (Florence Nightingale)
Florence Nightingale adds another two aspects to the issue of observation – two common faults she said – one of failing to “observe conditions” which I take to be either a failure to observe the context, or a failure to observe the phenomena of the illness. And secondly, the “inveterate habit of taking averages”. When it comes to the individual, averages are of little use. They can blind the observer to the unique present situation.
Heroes Not Zombies 