Heroes Not Zombies

What’s so remarkable about a single purple flower?

Why did I even notice it, and why bother to photograph it?

Well first of all it is very beautiful. The colours are so vivid. But although the splash of colour caught my attention what makes this flower so remarkable is time and place.

It’s flowering in late October. There are no other Morning Glory plants flowering in my garden at this time of year. More than that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Morning Glory flower in late October.

And it’s flowering in the middle of vegetable plot. Yes, I know, the vegetable plot doesn’t look up to much in this photo but that’s because we’ve harvested all the tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce from this patch and the whole patch looks bare and brown.

What’s more, I didn’t plant any Morning Glory flowers in the vegetable patch. They grow in quite another part of the garden, far from here.

So it’s the context of this flower’s appearance which makes it unique and remarkable.

I am used to noticing the unique, the singular, unusual, peculiar. I did it all the time in consultations. It was never enough to just name a disease, to reduce diagnosis to the application of a particular label. I wanted to hear the whole story. What were the circumstances of this illness? When did it appear? How has it developed since then? What’s the life context of this illness? What place does it have here and now at this place in this patient’s unique and singular story?

I’ve always found that exploring the contexts and connections in someone’s life brings out what is remarkable, what is unique and what is most personal.

It’s not enough to apply a label, to reduce a diagnosis to a particular example of a known disease. I was taught it’s much better to understand the patient who has the disease than the disease the patient has.

So I find that all those years of seeking out the contexts, of exploring the timings and the places, makes noticing the unusual easier and more meaningful.

Beautiful and remarkable.