As one year ends and another is born we find ourselves on another threshold, stepping forward into an unknown and unknowable future, pausing for a few moments to look back on the path we’ve taken to get here.
Take time to say thank you for the year gone by, all those moments and experiences we’ve labelled “good” or “bad”. They’ve led us to where we are now, alive and living this one, unique, unrepeatable day.
Tomorrow might be “just another day”, but the truth is tomorrow is never “just another day”. Rather it will be filled with new experiences, new encounters, new opportunities to wonder, to savour and to immerse yourself in.
This year ahead…..I hope it’s filled with love, care, kindness, wonder and delight.
I’d love to see the machine model of reality become much less used than it is. I understand how it came about. The rise of the machines which occurred during, or led to, the Industrial Revolution, transformed our societies and how we live together.
But we’ve learned a lot since those days. We looked inside the atom, that so called indivisible building block or reality and found that inside there’s nothing but waves and interactions. We mapped the human genome which was presented like a piece of computer code which determined our health and fate, and discovered that genes are turned in or off by environmental, personal factors. We’ve learned that the more interactions there are within a system, the more it functions as a whole, acquiring characteristics such as adaptability, and creative, emergent growth. We’ve discovered that the entire planet exists as a complex, living organism.
All of those discoveries have taught us that Life, and individual lives, are not machine like. We are not like machines. We are not like computers. We are embedded, massively interactive beings, each of us unique and particular, and unpredictable at any detailed level.
I hope, as we go forward, we start to live according to that reality, not the wrong headed machine model, but the flowing, interacting, complex adaptive system one.
This is one of my favourite photos. It isn’t a snowflake but a single water droplet which has frozen into this leaf-like pattern.
Isn’t it beautiful?
Doesn’t it make you want to pause and wonder, to be amazed at the pattern and form?
It always reminds me how the universe creates uniqueness everywhere. No other icicle will look exactly like this one. It will have appeared over a few hours, then it’ll be gone again as the ice turns back to water, and the water evaporates into the air. It’s like a kind of magic…..from the invisible, to the visible and back again.
One of my all time favourite books I’d recommend to anyone is David Wade’s Crystal and Dragon: the Cosmic Dance of Symmetry and Chaos in Nature, Art and Consciousness. Wow, that’s quite a title, huh? It’s a brilliant exploration of how the opposite forces of order and disorder, of discipline and wildness, play together to create all the beauty which surrounds us.
I’m convinced that both what we see/notice and what we experience are heavily influenced by the circumstances, the environments and contexts in which they occur. In other words, what frames our view or experience influences not just what we see, but what we “make of it”.
Two extreme points are the pessimistic one where everything seems bleak, life seems to be against them, and they notice all the negatives, and the ultra optimistic one, where they always see the silver lining, are permanently hopeful and notice all the positives.
You might argue these dispositions are innate, even genetic, but whatever their origins, there’s no doubt they create very particular frames through which to view the world.
Even if the origin is genetic, it’s my experience that the frames can be changed. We can choose a frame of beauty, goodness and truth. We can choose a frame of kindness, love and care. We can agree with Einstein that the universe is a friendly place.
What frames do you use most frequently? And what frames would you like to use next year?
Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul.
John O’Donohue
How can you ever get to know another person? It’s not easy, and it takes time, but more than anything it takes love.
I’m not going to write a big essay on love here, love takes many forms, and whole books have been written about it, but it’s something everyone understands. We know when we feel love, care or compassion for another. We know when we feel loved and cared about. It doesn’t need a lot of dissection.
There seems to be ever more division, hatred, fear and judgement these days, but the counter to all that is, and always will be, love.
When we suspend judgement, refuse to generalise and categorise, then we can open our hearts and minds, and with good intent, listen to “the other”, who will always have a unique story to tell us.
Here’s a wee recommendation for the holiday season. On YouTube you can find a remarkable series of films called “Human”, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. He filmed people from all walks of life, in a wide variety of countries and cultures, getting them to speak directly to camera, and to say a little about their lives.
I’ve never seen anything quite like this, and have watched it all the way through, as well as returning to particular interviews again and again. Each person looks directly at you, which carries a very particular power. It’s moving, engaging and frequently challenging.
It’s a huge project, but I recommend you check out “Volume 1”. Treat yourself to some time spent in the light of love.
Was that a kind thought, a kind word, or a kind action?
I think kindness is a good standard for us to measure our thoughts, words and actions against.
I’m more impressed with a reflection on how kind something was than how it fits in a batch of statistics. I know kindness is not measurable, but then neither is love, care or respect, but that doesn’t matter. We don’t need to attribute a number to it to know just how kind, loving or caring a thought, word or action was.
And let me be absolutely clear here – “you have to be cruel to be kind” is utter nonsense. You have to be kind to be kind.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the stories of cruelty, violence and neglect in the world, but we are surrounded every day by ordinary people acting kindly towards others.
And hey, even if we don’t seem to be, you can still choose to be, yourself.
So when you’re thinking of starting a new journal in the new year, maybe you’ll include a gratitude section to note what you’re thankful for, but I think it’s also good to note what kind thoughts you had today, what kind words and kind actions you experienced today – both those carried out by you, and by others.
Here’s the mirror I want to look in each day next year – the one that inspires me to reflect on kindness, love, care and respect.
This photo takes a little bit of working out. It’s the “source”, or natural spring which lies just a few steps from our house. The water in the source is the clearest water I’ve ever seen. This is a photo of some of the leaves which have fallen into the water, the ones on the right still lying on the surface, and the rest lying on the bottom of the pond.
The leaves on the surface are still brown, but those which have been submerged for some time have turned a pale green colour.
I find this effect quite mesmerising. It feels as if I’ve been given the chance to glimpse what is usually hidden. It’s like a moment of enlightenment, where suddenly I have the chance to see more of the whole, to peek into the collective unconscious, to look directly into the soul of the world.
This experience reminds me that what we see, hear and sense on a daily basis is only a tiny portion of reality. Out in the universe dark energy and dark matter, invisible to us and our instruments is thought to make up the vast majority of all that exists.
And within each of us, only a tiny fraction of what goes on, moment by moment, reaches the conscious mind. All those billions of neurones firing, all those trillions of cells constantly metabolising, all those immune cells busy defending the whole being, all those muscles tensing and relaxing, the smooth muscles beating out their own rhythm……all that lies below the surface.
With the recent COP on diversity there are clearer calls for we humans to change our attitudes towards “Nature”. You know, I never used to think of “Nature” as a controversial concept, but I’ve come to understand it is…..primarily because we humans separate ourselves from the rest of the planet by calling everything around us “Nature”, and seeing “it” (reducing nature to a thing or object) as “a resource”, or “a place to visit”, or, worse, and enemy to be fought or controlled.
When the leaves all fall in the autumn I can understand this perspective of trying to control “nature” as I try to make my garden tidier. So I set about sweeping up the leaves. Again. Though this time the leaves are soaking wet from rain and melted frost, so I gather a lot of them and put them in a sack, leaving a stuck wet carpet of them on the ground.
I tell myself I’ll return to sweep up the large remainder once they’ve dried a bit.
This morning I decide the time has come and step outside to get the big brush.
But look!!
They’ve all gone. After a couple of days of strong west winds, there are none left for me to sweep up! And in the moment I stop, and I smile, and I think, there’s no “controlling” or “tidying” “nature”……instead we have to find a different way of living, within Nature, not apart from “it”. We have to learn that WE are nature too, and that this vast complex web of relationships between the human and the not human needs to be understood, to be admired, to be beheld in wonder and awe and joy and delight and acceptance.
“Nature” will always surprise us. And if it doesn’t, we need to reconsider the way we live, because we’re living a delusion.
If you look carefully (you might have to zoom in) you can see that white light in the top right hand corner of my photo is a crescent moon. It’s the almost gone waning sliver of the moon.
This view really struck me this morning. In this one moment I could see close to the end of a moon cycle and the first traces of dawn as the sun turned the sky pink before it climbed over the horizon to begin a new day.
I love this concurrence of an ending and a beginning. It reminds me of the “as one door closes, another opens” saying. But it especially makes the reality of change more vivid.
Maybe it’s because I worked as a doctor, spending my time, one to one, with individuals every working today. Every single one of those people came to me hoping for change. One of the ways I understood what my work was, was to see myself as an agent of change.
I know that too much change is uncomfortable. I know that sometimes it’s brutally painful. But, ultimately, change is the one constant, so to speak, and the silver lining of painful change was always the fact that “this too shall pass”….that the potential for change for the better, that some relief, some comfort, was always there.
Whatever the reasons I have become very aware of, and very sensitive towards, natural change – the dawns and the sunsets, the phases of the moon, the cycle of the seasons.
I find all of that, and more, fills me with awe and wonder.
The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.
These are the last two lines in Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper. (I’ve developed a habit which I recommend – reading a poem every day. Poetry activates the right cerebral hemisphere, the half of the brain which has been neglected, and so left underdeveloped, in our very materialistic, mechanistic and utilitarian societies. I reckon it’s a better idea to have both halves of our brain equally well developed so I’m practicing the common activities which stimulate and activate the rather neglected right hemisphere – poetry, music, relationships and wonder).
Music has the power to touch us, to move us, to reach right into the depths of the soul. How many of your memories have a piece of music attached? So much so that just a few bars of a particular song or tune opens the floodgates to images, and, more importantly, intense feelings which a specific memory evokes?
When those notes begin to play we don’t just remember in the way we’d remember a fact, we remember by re-living the event, feeling again exactly whatever it was we felt before.
It works both ways, doesn’t it? A particular song can evoke particular memories, but so also can particular memories evoke specific phrases of music.
So it’s true that the music lingers in our hearts long after the song is over.
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
Heroes Not Zombies 