Heroes Not Zombies

When I opened the wooden shutters this morning this is what I saw….a frost covered grass and a dawn pink blush in the sky.

I do two things at this point. First quickly take a photo, and second, stand still and watch the colours change before my eyes.

It’s good to pause. It’s good to stop and savour the moment, to allow yourself to sink into it, to feast your eyes, and simply lift your awareness out of the semiconscious time which lingers between sleeping and waking.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, like me, in this second half of December, as 2022 recedes and 2023 begins to colour the morning sky pink, you start to move into that blended mode of memory and imagination….with reflections on the year gone by, and wondering about possibilities about to emerge in the year to come.

I’ve been writing this blog for over a decade, and gone through several phases of focus and publication frequency, but on the first day of lockdown, or “confinement”, as we say here in France, on 17th March 2020, I committed myself to publishing a positively focused post each and every day. I had the idea that in the midst of a pandemic with all the uncertainties and fears it would be good to start each day with a positive thought and to send that out into the world in the hope that some of those ripples might wash up and touch the lives of others near and far.

Well this week I realised I’ve been doing that for just over 1000 days.

I don’t think I ever had a particular end point in mind but I feel there is a change coming and it’s time to embrace that, so, shortly, I’ll stop posting every single day.

There are thousands of posts here and they don’t follow each other in any strict chronological sequence – at least, not usually. I think everyone reads these posts in their own way. Maybe you read one every day as it is published, maybe you dip in once a week, once a month, or just occasionally. All of those are fine.

So you can still read them with the frequency which works best for you, but what I recommend you do now is scroll down till you see the list titled “archives”, and pick a month, any month, and read whatever catches your eye there.

I intend to continue creating new posts but with a much reduced frequency in 2023, as I explore other possibilities….a podcast, a newsletter, videos perhaps…..I don’t have a definite plan yet, but that’s ok, this is the time around the turn of a year when change comes calling, and I’m gazing out of the window at the pink sky and frosted grass and wondering just what changes I can embrace……

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The more we understand about the nature of reality the clearer it becomes that an atomistic, reductionist viewpoint is an illusion.

Of course we can distinguish one individual from another….one island from another, one tree from another, one person from another…but no island, tree or person exists in isolation.

There’s a Hugh Grant film which lots of people watch at this time of year, “Love Actually”, but perhaps my favourite Hugh Grant film is “About a Boy”, which starts with his character delivering a soliloquy, responding to a question on a tv quiz show about “who said No Man is an Island”. He answers correctly. It was John Donne. But he dismisses the phrase as rubbish, claiming he, himself, is not just an island, but in fact he’s like Ibiza! It’s a very funny movie with some intensely moving scenes and it delivers a clear message – “No man is an island”.

A lot of the problems in the world stem from a failure to understand that everything and everyone is connected. Our lives are intimately very entangled. The individual threads of our lives weave together ever more complex, creative and beautiful tapestries of shared existence.

Hyper individualism, egoism and narcissism are the scourges of the world, and I lose nothing of my uniqueness, or my agency, by embracing my connectedness. In fact, how can I be fully me without seeing myself as an inseparable part of the whole?

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We aren’t separate, even if it seems that way. We never leave the environment into which we have been born. We are the continuation of the flows of reality which preceded us, which surge through us, and stretch forwards into a future where we become the memories held by others.

Einstein and James are making this point in these two quotations and it’s something I’ve been very aware of for a long time. We are much more deeply entangled in all that is than we realise. The reductionist mechanistic and atomistic models of the universe present us with a very distorted view of reality.

But there’s something else important in these quotes – we select out, or we “abstract” a limited portion of the whole to give ourselves the illusion of separateness.

This is a fascinating insight – it suggests our brains create our everyday experience by filtering, by sifting, and by selecting from the whole, and, in association with this, focused on that selection in a particular way.

In other words consciousness exists everywhere and our own unique experience of it is partial and temporary.

We are never disconnected from the Whole. We are never alone. We are never cut off or separated. It just appears that way in certain circumstances and at certain times. I think that’s why we should practice being connected, we should call to mind the reality that we belong.

What can you do today to experience some connectedness?

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I read two quotations yesterday about the nature of the universe. Both are by men who were physicists, astronomers and mathematicians (yes, both were active in all three domains).

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you’ll know how allergic I am to the machine model of human beings, living creatures and the universe. We are NOT machine like and we shouldn’t treat others as if they can be reduced to an assembly of parts. Every single person is a unique irreducible whole. Nor should we treat “Nature”, the planet or the universe as machine like.

Understanding the universe as more like the phenomena of the mind than of a machine brings with it a whole other set of values. It encourages wonder, humility, curiosity, a delight in uniqueness and diversity.

In Medicine it leads us to remember that the subjective experience of reality of any human being can only be partially known, partially revealed through story and behaviour, never understood solely in terms of measurements, investigations and data.

Where does a thought begin and where does it come from? Seeing the universe as more like a thought undermines the common attempt to seek simple cause and effect. There are no clear beginnings. There are no simple causes and predictable outcomes.

Life and the universe are more complex, more nuanced, more creative, more multifactorial, more interactive and inter-relational.

Well, anyway, that’s how I see it…..just a thought…..

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Think of the places on this Earth which mean the most to you….the places where you feel at home, the places which feel as if they are your origin places, where your roots lie, the places which feel special because what happened there was so important to you, or had such an impact, the places where you feel in awe of the beauty there, the places you love, and those which your loved ones love.

Stirling, in central Scotland, was where I was born, where I grew up, and where I learned, post university, to become a doctor. It’s a city steeped in history with the castle and the monument, two of its most prominent features on its skyline. But it’s also a city with a great river snaking through it. The River Forth winds and bends and loops its way through Stirling, heading towards Edinburgh and the North Sea. The Old Stirling Bridge was the only crossing point linking the Scottish Highlands to the Lowlands.

Stirling has been a meeting place, a market town, a Royal town, a town where people met from East and West, and from North and South.

My gran told me that boys born in Stirling were known as “sons of the Rock”, after the ancient rock on which the castle was built. I think that was a pretty powerful message to give to a child, conveying a deep sense of roots, of stability and consistency in the face of flow and change, a kind of constancy.

Those are qualities I own, and which others have remarked upon.

I wonder how much my environments shaped me, and how much I continue to contribute and influence in turn as we shape our world together.

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I read a study today comparing children in pre-schools with different types of playground. The researchers looked at the state of their “biomes” – in other words, the health and diversity of their gut “flora” which, we know, plays an important part in the immune system.

The children whose school playgrounds were concrete and tarmac had poorer “biomes” than those whose playgrounds had grass and woodland ground cover eg heathers and blueberries.

This is yet another study, taking a slightly different angle on things time, which shows there is an immune benefit from time spent in natural environments.

Recently another study indicated that urban air quality is so poor in European cities that it’s probably responsible for many thousands of deaths every year.

We also know that Covid and other airborne diseases spread much more intensively in indoor environments where the air quality is poor – yet little seems to be happening to rectify that!

These are just some of the examples which show that if we want to get a handle on these waves after waves of viral and bacterial infections then we should address the condition of the environments we are living in.

Can we envisage a two pronged programme to improve indoor and outdoor air quality, hand in hand with increasing natural diversity in our urban environments and habitats.

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Whitehead, pointing out that inanimate objects last much longer in the world than living organisms, asks, “how did complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolve”…..”They certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them”.

Trees can live for hundreds of years, some bacteria for millions, so if survival is a key driving force behind evolution, how come a human life is still only 70 – 80 years, yet we presume ourselves to be THE most fully evolved creatures on the planet.

There’s definitely more to evolution than survival and reproduction. What do you think that is?

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Humble dazzle
of autumn:
these leaves
on the ground - 
each one a page
in the book. 
A poem that says:
I lived. 
I was
a small part
of the whole
story - this 
is my song,
this is my glory. 

Gregory Orr

Isn’t that a beautiful poem? Autumn can be such a colourful season, and although there are still many golden, yellow, red and brown leaves falling to the ground, we’ve had our first frost here and really I think we should be calling this winter….maybe the seasons are becoming more interwoven?

But what this poem reminds me to do is see the individual in the crowd, pay attention to the particular which can be hidden by the general.

Each single leaf has lived its own life, fallen at this particular moment and landed on this specific piece of ground. Each leaf, like each and every living creature, sings a unique song, tells a singular story.

Every one of us lives this “one precious life”….it’s our glory.

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You can see lots of mistletoe around here throughout the year, but it’s significance is at a height at this time of year….Christmas.

The Romans associated mistletoe with peace, love and understanding, which seems especially relevant to me here where I live a few metres from a Roman aqueduct.

It has long been associated with male fertility in a variety of cultures and has been used as a medicine for a number of different complaints. It’s highly toxic….a feature which seems to be characteristic of so many different “medicinal” substances. I wonder why that is….why do we humans use poisonous plants to bring about healing? It seems a dangerous game and I often wonder how the first humans discovered that certain plants had both harmful AND beneficial powers.

We humans create a whole extra dimension of reality through our use of symbols and stories, seeing not just a cluster of leaves and white berries attached to a tree, but empowering those plants to turn our minds to love, to peace, to kisses and to protection from evil.

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