Heroes Not Zombies

We change all the time. The world changes all the time. Nothing is fixed or, so called, “permanent”. I thought about that when I received my residency card here in France recently. I’ve been given what is called a “Carte de Sejour Permanente” – a permanent residency card. That’s me sorted, you might think. Then I notice that it expires in ten years time. Do they know something I don’t? Well, no, thank goodness, it’s just that permanent seems to last ten years in this instance.

That did get me thinking about the whole concept of permanent. Which isn’t something I’ve explored all that much. I have wondered for a long time about the concept of “now” – which is a period of time when we instantly recognise but is devilishly difficult to pin down or define. I mean the moment you think “this is now”, that moment has slipped away into the past and been replaced by an entirely new “now”! But back to “permanent” – I guess we just use this wonder to mean a fairly longish piece of time – in relation to geology we might be talking thousands of years, and in relation to the universe perhaps billions, but, in every single case, we discover that nothing is fixed, nothing really does retain the same, exact features and characteristics (cripes, even the same molecules!) for ever. It’s just the speed of change which alters.

Yet, in our own lives, things happen, and after they’ve happened nothing ever seems the same again. Like you can see in this image of a tree that I’ve shared above. This tree has the most dramatic change of direction which has completely changed its shape forever….ok, for the rest of its life then. And when I see a “lesion” like this I immediately wonder “What happened?” I used to have the same approach with patients in the consulting room. They might come with a problem which had gone on for decades and I always asked them to think back to the time when they felt completely well, then to tell me about the appearance of the first symptoms. That naturally led on to a discussion about what was happening in their life around the time of the big change. I don’t think there’s any way to prove cause and effect in such a scenario but I found it helpful to take the position of “Let’s imagine that what was happening then was significant in bringing about what happened next” That seemed to open the way to a new understanding of illness, it’s significance and possible meaning, which gave a patient the opportunity to change their way of dealing with it to something more helpful, something which might even open the doors to growth and development.

In that sense I think that the events of our lives change us. The most significant events change us dramatically and for the rest of our lives. Death of a loved one, giving birth, serious trauma……you know the kind of thing. All of that, for the individual concerned leaves a permanent change – it can’t be erased. But the way forward with that is learning to create different responses from the ones which have trapped us in suffering. In other words, we can’t change the past, but we can change the way the past impacts on us by choosing to respond differently.

This pandemic is going to change us all……has already changed us all. There won’t be any “return to normal” even if many people desire that…..and nor should there be. Because this event is an opportunity for us, individually and collectively, to reflect, ask ourselves what we were doing that might have contributed to the particular experiences of the pandemic and what we might do differently now to not end up in the same place again.

We have a chance now to reassess our values, our beliefs and our behaviours. To change our priorities, to demand change in our economic, political and social systems. I hope we do that. We’ll all remember 2020. I hope we remember it as the year which led the world to take a different direction.