Heroes Not Zombies

Here are three jars of honey that I bought at a market stall here in France.

From left to right they are acacia, chestnut and lavender.

What’s the first thing you notice?

They are SO different, huh? Just looking at these jars should make you pause and think about this issue which I reckon we encounter multiple times every day – how uniqueness is always present even when we obscure it by abstraction and categorisation.

What?

Well you see I understand why we call the contents of all three of these jars by the same name – honey – because it’s true. They are all honey. But I’ve heard some people say they love honey and others say they hate honey. And here’s where the problem starts. Believe me acacia, chestnut and lavender honey taste incredibly different. They don’t have the same consistency and they don’t even smell the same.

I adore the chestnut honey but I’m the only one in my house who does. Others can’t even stand the smell. I find the acacia kind of bland but it’s probably one of the most popular ones in the shop. And the lavender honey spreads utterly differently from the other two. You can pour the others, but you’ll wait a long time to see the lavender one pour!

I know this skill of analysis and categorisation which is carried out by the left hemisphere is a kind of super power that allows us to think quickly but abstracting just a small number of features or characteristics and classifying the entire “object” according to only those features distances us from reality.

Reality, it turns out is a vast interconnected web of uniqueness with every element, encounter and relationship constantly influencing and being influenced by the others.

Generalising, labelling, runs the risk of blinding us to uniqueness which doesn’t only mean we separate ourselves from reality but it threatens our humanity.

Just last year when visiting my mum in hospital I overheard one nurse say to another “Have you taken blood from bed 16 yet?”

Yeah, right, try getting blood out of a bed!

That’s a common way of thinking and speaking in Medicine. I can remember the excitement of our group in Medical School when we heard “there’s a really unusual heart murmur in ward 6”! Well, we were just learning how to use that iconic instrument, the stethoscope and there’s only one way to detect unusual sounds in someone’s heart – to listen to them and learn each distinct pattern.

Thing is it’s too easy for the actual people whose blood needs to be examined or whose heart is making an unusual sound to just disappear.

Are we going the right way with this issue?

I don’t think so.

By shifting our attention from stories to data we are de-humanising not just our health care but our societies.

Is it any wonder that public and political discourse has become so polarised? If we see someone as “one of them” and “not one of us” it’s going to be pretty difficult to build a mutually beneficial relationship with them.

How do we counter that? Well I guess it’s takes curiosity and a desire to discover what makes someone unique. Because here’s the interesting thing I’ve found in life – when you discover someone’s uniqueness you find what you share with them and at exactly the same time you find you appreciate them as whole people.

It turns out that what we all share is the fact that we are all different.

And seeing both differences and similarities in uniqueness enables us to humanise our daily encounters, to build bridges and to care for each other.

Turns out that makes for a tastier, richer, more delightful life.