Heroes Not Zombies

Many years ago I did a road trip to Skye, and as I travelled up through the Highlands, around the island for a few days, then back down to the Central Belt again, I was stunned again and again by the beauty of the country. There’s no doubt that Scotland is a beautiful land. It isn’t best known for blue skies, sunshine and beaches, but, actually, on the right day, all of that is there. However, it’s always seemed to me it’s easier to find the darker, moodier, and I might even say, richer, atmosphere in Scotland. On that particular road trip I think it rained every day, and I got some of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever taken.

This image captures so much that delights and inspires me. The first thing I notice is the bridge. It’s a traditional, old, stone, single arch bridge. There are dozens like it in the Highlands, and no two the same. I think it’s beautiful and I’m a big fan of bridges because I think they are the technology we humans invented to allow us to do two of the things closest to our natures – explore and connect.

We are insatiably curious creatures, we humans. Some of us more than other I’ll grant, but I still think the desire to explore and discover is as core to us as the Life Force. In fact, Jaak Paksepp, who is so important to an understanding the fairly new discipline of affective neuroscience – the neurological science of our emotions, identified seven core or “prototype” emotions, of which SEEKING is perhaps THE most basic and important. SEEKING is connected to the basic motivational arousal state of all forms of life, and we humans probably access it, and use it, more than any other other creatures on the planet.

Bridges speak to me of that SEEKING, that desire to discover what lies on the other bank of the river, what lies on the slopes of the opposite hillside.

They also inspire me to think of that equally strong drive which is central to our being – connecting. Iain McGilchrist, with his brilliant and detailed analysis of the human brain, shows us how the two halves of the cerebral hemisphere engage with the world in distinctly different ways. The right hemisphere is especially interested in making and exploring connections. Just stop to ponder for a moment – absolutely everything we encounter, everything we experience, everything we think, we connect to whatever else we know and imagine. It’s impossible for us to really consider anything at all as utterly and completely isolated from everything else. We are connection-driven creatures.

But there’s more than a bridge in this photo. There is a river too, which runs under the bridge, and this particular river has very stony banks. Stony banks with small shrubs and bushes growing in it. Rivers never stay the same. The water which flows down from the mountains doesn’t follow the exact same path every day. Some times the river will swell and all those stones will be hidden. Other times it will reduce to a trickling stream revealing vast stony banks. I love the river as a symbol of constant flow and constant change.

There are the mountains too. Tall peaks, so tall here, that the cloud base is hiding their higher regions. I love mountains. They inspire me to remember times I’ve climbed such hills in the past, struggling to get to the top, then finding myself utterly filled with delight at the views laid out before me once I get there (being careful not to go hill climbing on a day like that shown in this photo!) They inspire me too to think of the old philosophical practice of “the view from on high” – how helpful it is to stand back from the busy cluttered flow of the everyday, ascend to a height, and contemplate the bigger picture, change your perspective, and see how life changes as a result.

And then there are the clouds – clouds which hide tall mountains, clouds which dissolve into rain which then trickles down the hillsides to form the rivers which all run off to the sea again. Clouds which merge seemlessly with mists here – hiding trees, rocks and bushes, soaking them all as they pass on by. Mists which drift across the face of the glen like ghosts of clans from the distant past. Yes, I find that mists stimulate my imagination. They lead me to contemplate the invisible, and the traces of the past which still soak the present, the lives from the past which are still with us, carried by us in our genes, our memories and our stories.

Really, I can get a lot of enjoyment out of a scene like this. This is what I mean by “rich” experience, multi-layered, entangled, connected, inspiring……