Heroes Not Zombies

There’s always many ways.

When I first looked out over these vines and saw this glimmering road winding it’s way up the gentle hill, I thought that was the only route through the vines. But I quickly learned that there is a vast web of paths through the vines. They are gravel, crushed stones, or time worn paths across the grasses which grow between the “wires” and between the individual vineyards. There are no fences or hedges. There are no walls.

Everyone knows which vines are theirs but everyone is free to navigate their own way between them.

When I look at this photo it always sets off my thinking about how there are always other ways in life.

Recently I’ve become more aware of two contexts where we, collectively, tend to forget that lesson.

During this pandemic, time and again, I’m amazed at how little governments and authorities look outside of their own patch, both to highlight problems and to find potential solutions. I live in France but all my relatives live in the U.K. and I have friends as far away as South Africa, Australia and Canada. So I’m often aware of how each of those countries are experiencing and handling the pandemic. But you rarely hear the authorities in any one of them make any reference to the others. As if everyone has nothing to learn from anyone else. Virtually the only attempts at comparison I see is the U.K. government’s consistent claims to be “world leading” without actually showing how they’ve arrived at this position.

This narrowness of view is amplified by the media and there is virtually no sign of mainstream analysis of different policies or practices.

Surely we could all learn by exploring and reflecting on different ways.

The second, and related context, is health care. The dominant model is pharmacology and the pursuit of technological fixes. But healing, true healing, occurs within a person living within their particular circumstances and environments. This pandemic has shown us that the most vulnerable are usually exposed by their poverty, their precarious jobs, their marginalised position in society and by inadequate care.

Healing is stimulated and supported by relationships, by caring, non judgemental, attentive, long term relationships. But that’s not how we’ve built our systems of drug delivery and surgical procedures.

Healing is stimulated and supported by good nutrition, by time spent in Nature, by practices such as meditation, massage, rehabilitation and convalescent care.

Maybe we need to be exploring other ways? After all how are we caring for those who get infected by coronavirus but don’t need hospital care? And how are we caring for those with “long Covid”? Because those two groups alone make up the majority of people who experience the illness called “Covid”.