Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for January, 2021

Entangled

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on January 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

It’s not hard to find a pile of nets and ropes on the dockside at any little fishing village or port. I often find them quite fascinating and sometimes, like this one, quite beautiful. Look at the gorgeous palette of colours in this photo!

Without fail these images make me hear the word “entangled” in my head, and that’s one of my favourite words. It captures both the idea that everything is connected, and the fact that you can’t touch, or interact, with any single “element” without affecting everything else. It’s like the “butterfly effect”, where a small change in a complex system cascades throughout the entire network and has unpredictable significant over all changes – in the case of the butterfly effect linking the changes in air pressure and movement in one part of the world to storm and hurricane systems in other parts.

Well, that’s sure something we’ve had proven to us during the last year isn’t it? Even now, we hear of a “mutation” in the coronavirus, in one country and within a few days we’re hearing of it turning up around the entire planet. We sure are all “entangled” with each other, aren’t we?

There’s an aspect of this entanglement which has bothered me during this pandemic, and it comes up in the way that politicians and, also, many experts, are dealing with it.

It seems pretty clear that the present emerges out of the past. In other words we find ourselves in this current predicament because we’ve been living in a certain way. Yet, repeatedly, governments don’t want to admit “mistakes” or to look back and understand how our societies became so vulnerable. Probably because they don’t want to admit responsibility, but sometimes because it doesn’t fit with their favourite set of beliefs.

Would the health services in Western Europe be under such stress if they had been better resourced and organised over the last couple of decades? Of course, we can’t know for certain, but if the present really is entangled with the past, then can’t we try to understand how we became so vulnerable?

And if the present is also entangled with the future, which surely it is, then if we are to become more resilient then we need to create healthier societies. This virus has made it absolutely clear that those who will be hit hardest are those who are already the most frail and vulnerable.

I’d like to see politicians begin to lay out plans for our “exit strategy” from this pandemic which don’t rely entirely on technological fixes, but which, instead, firstly, develop and deploy better health and social care, to be better able to help and heal when help and healing is needed, but, secondly, to reduce poverty, poor housing, poor education, poor nutrition, inequality and environmental damage.

That would seem like a good place to start.

Read Full Post »

The bread of life

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on January 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

One of the most striking things about life in France is the importance of the “boulangerie” – the bakery. Really only the tiniest villages don’t have one, and if a small village is about to lose its boulangerie then the entire village feels like it is in serious decline.

It’s tempting to think that the hub of French culture is the cafe, the bistro, and the restaurant, and I don’t want to downplay that because that sector really does bring life to many towns and communities. The fact that all of those have been closed here in France since the middle of October and at the moment there is no definite prospective date for re-opening them has utterly changed what it feels like to live in France. When I walk through the main centre of my local town, Cognac, it feels very, very empty……particularly because all the cafes, bars and restaurants are closed.

But throughout the whole pandemic, the boulangeries have stayed open and although they might restrict the number of customers in the shop at any one time, there are queues outside them pretty much every day. Bread retains a key place in French culture and the French diet. It would be strange to sit down for a meal in a French restaurant and not be served a basket of fresh bread. The price of a “baguette” is set by the government and all boulangeries offer baguettes at that price – a price related to a fraction of the average hourly income (I think – it might be something a bit different from that, but the principle is that bread should be affordable to everyone).

A typical boulangerie looks just like that one in the photo above. There is always a range of different breads on offer, and always a range of pastries and cakes. I know a lot of people now have gluten sensitivities but it doesn’t seem impossible to find a particular bread that even they can eat. One of my local boulangeries makes a bread they call “All Black” and not only is it one of the most delicious breads I’ve ever tasted, it seems to cause no problem at all for people who are gluten sensitive, even if the baker doesn’t advertise it on that basis. The thing is there remains both a huge diversity of grains and recipes in French boulangeries and different parts of the country also have their own particular local breads.

The typical boulangerie in France is owned and run by a single baker, and he or she (mostly he) has often chosen baking as a way of life. In fact, in many cases this remains one of the crafts and lifestyles handed down through the generations…..something which you can still find in a number of areas of trade and work in this country. I really admire that. It enables someone to choose work which feels meaningful, purposeful, important and satisfying. There’s far too much work in the world which is not like that.

On thing you won’t find in a boulangerie is industrial, plastic-wrapped, sliced, white bread. You can find it in supermarkets but even there the greatest amount of the bread for sale is baked on site and looks sort of like what you see in that photo above.

I know that both from the perspective of carbohydrates and gluten that in some cultures now bread is not held in such high esteem. But, here, in France, it remains a key part of life – freshly baked, locally produced, bread from a baker who has dedicated his life to making it.

Vive les artisans!

Read Full Post »

The importance of context

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on January 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I reckon one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is the importance of context. There’s a huge tendency to “abstract” elements from reality – to take things to pieces and examine the pieces; to reduce the whole to a selection of parts; to consider only a single episode or moment in a life story; to pull a single thread from the entire matrix and try to follow just that; to measure what can be measured and disregard the rest. This tendency to “abstraction” is coupled with a tendency to “generalise”, so all is labelled, categorised and filed away; to give precedence to the “average”, the “norm” and the “typical”, over the “individual”, the “specific” and the “unique”.

Our left hemisphere is the champion of all that. Abstraction, labelling, categorisation and generalisation are at the heart of the way it engages with the world. All that can be useful. It can help us to “get a grip”, to “grasp” things, to make predictions and exert some control over the future (at least in small ways for short periods of time).

But it isn’t enough.

Throughout my decades of work as a doctor I interacted with people one-to-one, one after the other, always encountering a unique human being in a specific situation with a particular life story. I never saw two identical people in two identical situations with two identical life stories.

To make a diagnosis, to achieve a better level of understanding, and to establish a personal bond with each patient demanded that I brought my right hemisphere into play. I had to seek the connections, make connections, discern the meaning from the contexts, the contingencies and the uncover the unique, singular story. Only by doing that could I understand this person, in this situation, at this point in their life.

I got thinking about all that again this morning as a I looked at this photo. I mean, at first glance it’s a photo of someone in traditional Japanese dress. At second glance they are standing in front of a statue of Hume, the Scottish philosopher, dressed as a classical Greek scholar. Well, there’s a combination you don’t see every day! I have seen lots of people in traditional Japanese dress, but mainly when I’ve been visiting Kyoto. Not in Scotland. I’ve walked down the High Street in Edinburgh countless times past this statue of Hume

Only once did I see someone wearing a kimono, standing having their photo taken next to it.

So it’s the context of these two figures which makes this photo what it is. Either character by him or herself might tell a different story. But seeing them together here is a sort of “satori” – a “kick in the eye” – it makes me stop, take note, and reflect.

It inspires me to reflect about the importance of contexts and connections, of juxtapositions and synchronicities. And it inspires me to reflect on the two great traditions of philosophy and thought – the Eastern, Taoist/Confucian/Shinto/Buddhist with the Western, Enlightenment/Rationalist/Greek and Roman.

That’s an incredibly rich source of inspiration!

Follow your own special way through the thought chains and connections which unfurl, unravel, and open up before you when you look at this.

Read Full Post »

The end of the office?

Posted in education, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on January 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This pandemic has been going on for months now, and in many countries office workers have been working from home. I had to deal with a government agency recently and I could tell from the background sounds that the person I was speaking to wasn’t working in an office, so I asked him if he was at home. He replied that he was and he thought it was great. He no longer had to commute for about an hour and half in each direction between home and work every day, and when he wanted a coffee, he said, he could just reach behind him and switch on the coffee machine – no queue to join! He sounded relaxed and happy.

In surveys I’ve read it seems a lot of office workers are hoping they will never have to return to an actual office. Maybe this will be one of the big bonuses to come out of the pandemic……a shift away from commuting, from impersonal workspaces, and an increase in both quality of life, and time spent locally with friends, family and in local businesses and communities.

I took that photo above many years ago, one evening as I walked through Aix-en-Provence. I guess these two folk found a way to access free wifi! But that image comes back to me now as I think about how we are breaking out of the old ways and habits of office working.

On another evening in Aix I came across this man sitting high up in a tree, reading a book. I don’t know why he picked that particular spot but I remembered him just as I was writing about the unusual places a lot of us now work from, or study in.

I do think one of the main lessons we are going to get from this pandemic is to challenge our orthodoxies, and our habits. You can even make a case for saying that we got to where we are today by doing things the way we’ve been doing them, so if we want to get out of this and not fall back into it, perhaps we are going to have to get creative and come up with new ways of living, new ways of working, studying and sharing our time and space.

Maybe this isn’t the end of the office as we’ve come to know it, but it surely challenges the dominance of the current model. If that leads to more flexibility and more diversity then I think that can contribute to a better, healthier way of living.

Apply this same thinking to education and you can already see that the way we’ve been delivering education to children and young people is also going through a potential revolution. I’m a bit of an optimist at heart, and I can’t help thinking that, although these changes bring lots of challenges and difficulties, they can also bring us the opportunities to learn and to teach differently.

Read Full Post »

Webs of connection

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography, science on January 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Webs fascinate me. They are such beautiful structures woven each by a single spider. How do they do that? Spiders have far more rudimentary neurological structures than mammals, but they certainly have brains which enable them to create these webs. Exactly how they know how to spin a web is a mystery. I also think it’s pretty incredible that the actual material from which the web is made is created in the spider’s body.

I wrote yesterday about the underlying structure of reality which is built upon the concept of a network – nodes with connections. In a spider web, the nodes are where the threads meet and the threads are the connections. The fact that the entire web is inter-connected is what enables the spider to detect the movement of a fly when it is caught on the web, and to know exactly where to find it.

But as that example hints, webs exist, not as separate entities, but in complex dynamic relationship with other creatures and with the environment in which they are created.

This photo is of a complex of wind-borne seeds stretched between several stalks of a plant. I don’t know if there is a spider web hidden in the middle of these seeds. I couldn’t see one. But it is reminiscent of the web I’ve shared at the top of this post. But there needn’t be a web inside this seed group. Perhaps they just all attached onto each other as they were released by the plant, and have formed a structure that looks just like a web, because each seed is connected to several other seeds through those fine filaments which are designed to carry the seed on the wind.

However this structure came about it shows how nothing exists in isolation. Not only are these seeds connected to each other, but they are connected, both physically and historically, to the plants which produced them, and so on back in time to the seeds from which these particular plants grew, connecting back over decades, centuries, aeons. They are also connected to the visible and invisible surrounding environment in which they exist. They interact with the wind, with passing creatures, and with other plants.

When you pause to consider anything from the perspective of its connections, you find yourself following trails which extend both back and forward in time, as well as connections to other objects, creatures, energies, physical and environmental phenomena. Really, if you were to attempt to tell the story of a single seed from the moment you encounter it back beyond its origins, and forward into the rest of its life story, then you’d find yourself lost pretty quickly. There seem to be no limits to the chains of connections and relationships we can uncover for any single object, creature or person.

So, really, nothing is completely knowable. There is always more to discover. There are always paths, connections and relationships which change our understanding of what we see in this present moment.

I think that fact keeps us humble, and stokes the fires of our wonder.

Read Full Post »

The structure of reality

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Did you ever come across an ancient Chinese philosophical concept, “Li”? I’m no scholar of Chinese philosophy but the sense I make of this idea is that there are invisible patterns, structures and forces throughout the universe which shape the forms that we see. (If you understand this better than me, and you think I’m mis-representing “li” please explain in the comments section)

It does seem to me that there are certain patterns in Nature which seem pretty widespread. This one which is a “honeycomb” pattern in rock in the West of Scotland is one of these, and, for me, it’s one of the most fundamental.

It’s a bit like a web, or a net, and really it’s simply connections and points of connections. The connections are the thin almost thread like pieces and the points of connection are where two or more of these pieces meet. This is the basis of all networks – we call the points of connection, “nodes”, and the lines represent the ways in which nodes influence each other.

Simple nodes receive information, energy or materials from other nodes, and pass them on. More complex nodes do some processing, so that the exact information, energy or materials which it receives, leave it in somewhat different form.

One of the places we see this structure is in our brains – we have billions (yes, billions) of special cells in our brain. We call them “neurones” and their main purpose is to transfer information from one place to another. The neurones all meet up with other neurones at specialised junction points called “synapses”. Every single neurone is connected this way to several thousand (yes, several thousand) other neurones. You can imagine pretty easily that the permutations of firing, communicating neurones, neuronal pathways and neural networks in the brain might not be infinite, but it’s so gobsmackingly (is that a word?) large that we literally can’t actually envision it in its totality. I’m sure I once read someone say that the number of whole brain states, determined by which neurones are firing is greater than the number of visible stars in the universe. Well, don’t know if that’s quite right, but it sure gives you a way of imagining the immensity of it.

Another place we see this structure is in the human body. Think of each of your several billion cells as a node, and once you realise that every single one of those cells lives in constant relationship with all the others (either directly or indirectly, cos that’s the way a network works) then you get a good understanding of why we need to think of our health and wellbeing holistically. None of our parts live in isolation. In fact all our cells, all our tissues and all our organs, are continuously, dynamically relating to others by establishing and maintaining “integrative” relationships – that is “Mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts”. There’s a key point to see here – the most fundamental kind of relationship in the universe is collaborative, integrative and co-operative.

Yes, competition exists. Of course it does. But we have been duped into believing that competition is THE key relationship in the universe…….THE driver of evolution. It’s important and it’s real, but by itself competition could not produce evolution, could not produce Life, cannot describe reality. We need relationships which are essentially integrative, fundamentally well-meaning, mutually supportive, collaborative, to do that.

I don’t know about you, but I think we could all benefit from this simple shift of understanding – we need to put “collaborative, integrative, co-operative” relationships at the heart of our decision making.

Read Full Post »

Shared and unique viewpoints

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I’m pretty keen on taking photos of webs, especially on a misty morning or after it’s been raining.

This is one of my most favourite photos of a web. Actually you can hardly see the strands of the web itself, which makes it even more interesting……it’s like the underlying structure which gives shape to the whole image is invisible, or almost so. And I think life is like that. There are underlying structures, forms and shaping forces to everything, but mostly that’s all invisible!

What we see most in this photo is a myriad of water droplets – each one of them acting as a prism or a lens. Look closely at any of them and you can see that they are showing you an upside down image of the surrounding world. Isn’t that fascinating as well as beautiful?

Because what that makes me think is how each of us is like one of these droplets. Each of us has our own unique perspective upon the world. Every single one of us sees and experiences the world from our individual and different subjective point of view.

But we are all connected. And we are all living in the same world. So most of what we see in any of these little lenses is the same. We live shared lives. We experience shared phenomena.

That takes me back to my favourite – “and not or” – we are at the one and the same time having unique, individual experiences, AND shared, common, connected ones.

It’s not a matter of choice.

If we forget either one of these apparent polarities then we fail to grasp reality. Reality is a vast, inter-connected, largely invisible web of unique, individual events and experiences, constantly changing, constantly interacting, always astonishing and, utterly beautiful.

Read Full Post »

Protection

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on January 4, 2021| 3 Comments »

I took this photo because I liked the look of the boat with the distant hills on the horizon but ever since I uploaded it to my photo library every time I look at it I think “What’s that boat doing on that side of the wall?” Because the sea is on the other side of the wall!

But actually this is no accident. The boat has been placed here, high up above the water line and behind this wall, for protection.

As I look at it again today I’m seeing it in the context of the new variant Covid, the exponentially rising rates of infection in many countries and a new round of restrictions and lockdowns coming into effect around the world. All of which gets me thinking about protection.

Really, as best I understand it at this point, there is only one way to catch this virus – you get it from somebody else. The more people you share space and time with each day, the greater your risk of getting infected. The more you share space and time with others indoors and with poor ventilation, the greater your risk. All that isn’t really rocket science. So, at a personal level, protection involves avoiding contact with other people as much as you can.

OK, so that’s just not possible for many, many people who have to work to keep us all alive and/or to keep themselves alive, which is why many people ask our governments to financially support those whose places of work are being closed down, and why the authorities have to work hard to make workplaces as safe as possible for those who do have to work. Of course, we can all help protect those who have to work by driving down the community infection rates just by restricting our own personal contacts.

I’m not going to get into the details of other measures in this post, but, more than ever, isn’t it clear now that our societies need to change? We are too vulnerable. Or to put it another way, we are not protecting populations well enough. We need to do better – that, not any technical fix, is our only “way out”, our only real lasting “protection”.

So, I just want to say again – lets massively improve our health care services – we do not have enough facilities, enough nurse, enough doctors. Let’s start training the next generation of staff now – it’s going to take at least five years to get them ready. Let’s recruit and train the teachers and trainers to train the doctors, nurses and other health care professionals we desperately need. Because we have all been living with inadequate health services. Every country could do better.

And, secondly, let’s start NOW to address the underlying vulnerabilities – lets deal with poverty, poor housing, inequality, prejudice, and the environment – including our agriculture, our food supply chain and the issue of clean air.

That would all be a START. What would you add?

Read Full Post »

January

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on January 3, 2021| Leave a Comment »

There’s a tradition around Kyoto of climbing the hill to the Fushimi Inari temple in January. There are the most amazing Tori gates there….thousands of them winding through a forest on top of a hill. It’s one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever visited. The tradition related to the start of the year is about wishing for a “good harvest” or, in more modern times, wishing for good luck and well being I suppose.

The reason I return to these photos and think of Fushimi Inari every January is because of the gates – because January is the month of the threshold, of the gate, of the place where we step forwards into the New Year looking ahead with some hope and good wishes, and looking back at the old year just gone, remembering some of our main experiences. In fact “January” gets its name for the God “Janus”, the one with two faces, one looking forwards and the other looking back.

But there’s an additional reason I return to these particular photos in January – because the Inari shrine with its long winding passageways of Tori gates isn’t just about look forward and back. It is utterly, wonderfully, beautiful just as it is. In other words, as you walk through these gorgeous bright orange tunnels of gates, with glimpses of bamboo and forest all around you, you become completely entranced by the present – by the here and the now.

So there you have it – January – really a wonderful month to take the time to reflect on the year just ended, to look ahead with hope and wonder to the year ahead, and to remind yourself of the “émerveillement du quotidien” – the every day wonder of this one, unique, and special day which is unfurling before you right here, right now.

Read Full Post »

Distances and connections

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on January 2, 2021| 2 Comments »

One of my most favourite sculptors is Anthony Gormley. Many years ago he created one of his works in London, placing his distinct iron casts of a man standing on various roof tops around the city. It caused quite a stir as several people thought they could see real men who looked like they were about to jump from the heights. I never saw it that, thinking more of Wim Wenders’ angels in Wings of Desire (or the City of Angels, American remake of that classic) where you could see the angels sitting or standing high up above the city watching down on the people below. At the same time as Gormley placed these figures around London he had an exhibition in the South Bank Gallery and that’s where I took this photo.

One of his works in the exhibit was a large glass box, the size of a whole room. The glass box was filled with mist, so dense that you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. You could walk around inside the box, dimly making out other visitors who appeared and disappeared continuously in the thick mist. As you walked around the box on the outside you could make out the occasional figure temporarily appearing in the midst of the mist as they walked around inside the box. As I passed someone reached their hand up to place it on the glass, and as I snapped the photo, I noticed the glass wall was reflecting one of the figures high up on a roof outside the gallery.

That lucky moment gave me this image which has kind of haunted me ever since. As I look at it again today, in the context of this surging wave of the pandemic and trying to cope with yet another month of sundays in lockdown, this image seems to have a new meaning and a new poignancy.

It makes me think of this world we are all living in now, hidden behind invisible barriers, or, sometimes, all too visible ones! How we are connecting by email, texts, zoom calls and so on, but how we can’t quite reach out and touch anyone else.

I know that this will pass. Everything does. Nothing remains the same. And maybe this experience of “distancing” which we are experiencing is giving us the opportunity to become more aware of what’s really important to us. Maybe, like me, you’re finding that you are deepening relationships with even more communication that you “normally” do. Maybe you’re making new friends, encountering the kindness of strangers in other lands. I guess I’m saying, it’s not all bad. But I don’t mean in a way which would dismiss the challenge and the struggle.

What better can we do today, tomorrow, and the next day, but reach out and tell our loved ones how much we love them, and extend the hand of kindness to strangers?

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »