Heroes Not Zombies

Was this photo taken a few minutes after the sun had disappeared below the horizon? Or was it taken a few minutes before the sun appeared over the horizon?

Sunset and sunrise can look remarkably similar. Imagine you’ve been in a coma, and you just come round and look out of the window. You see this scene. How do you know whether it’s dawn or dusk?

The answer, of course, is just to keep watching for a few minutes. You’ll notice how the sky is changing….either getting darker as the sun sinks still further, or getting brighter as the sun is about to appear over the horizon.

You could say that what helps us to make sense of what we experience in life is context…the circumstances of the event. It’s not the event, frozen in time, separated out from all the moments which precede it, and those which will follow. It’s the flow of change. We understand by taking our time and not limiting ourselves to a snap conclusion.

Physical context helps too, of course. If someone screams “Murder!” while you sit in your seat in the theatre watching the actors on the stage, then you understand there’s no need to call the police (probably!), but if they scream “Murder!” when you are outside in the alley leading to the stage door, then you know to get help a soon as you can.

Context makes all the difference – whether that’s the time context, the space context, or the cultural/social one. We have to be careful with our tendency to separate things out in our perception. We have to be careful with reductionism.

Our left hemisphere is great at separating elements out from each other. Our right hemisphere enables us to place all we see and hear in context. We need both.

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I like images of ripples, especially concentric ones. They remind me of how we send out vibrations, signals, and information all the time. We can’t exist without changing the world in which we live, and we can’t exist without the world in which we live changing us.

But I like this type of photo too. I took this one from the stern of a boat sailing around Lake Annecy, but you can see a phenomenon like this behind any boat moving over any body of water. The line of waves is unusual. It doesn’t look like the waves you see breaking on the shore when you’re at the beach. You can trace the route you’ve taken because, on your boat trip, you’ve “disturbed” the surface of the water. Those “wakes” affect whatever they touch….birds or men fishing, other boats sailing across, or near, the path your boat has taken, and they can even change the shoreline….which is partly why some waterways set a speed limit……the faster you travel, the greater the disturbance.

It’s been said that life can only be lived forwards, and understood backwards. I think of that when I look at an image like this. You don’t know what the wake is going to look like until you’ve created it, and, as you look back, you can review the path you’ve taken and try to make some sense of it.

I also think about how we can’t move across the surface of this planet without changing it. It’s more obvious over water, but it’s just as true when we cross the earth, when we make our way over hills, through forests, across deserts. Some people call this era the Anthropocene because we are at a time in the history of the Earth where the human species is shaping and changing everything from the landscapes, to the oceans, to the ecosystems…..and, sadly, not in a good way. We’re well into a major change in the climate of the planet, and well down the road of massive loss of species (what we refer to as loss of biodiversity).

As we look back at the changes we’ve made on our world, isn’t it clear that if we don’t change course, our grandchildren, and their grandchildren are going to face (are already facing?) huge threats to their quality of life, even their very survival? Can’t we do better than this?

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As the water flows over this weir, it seems to develop a distinct pattern of many parts. It’s almost as if there are suddenly dozens of almost parallel channels appearing as the water flows from right to left in this photo. Upstream the water seems to be of a whole. Downstream, after foaming and seething in a temporary chaos, it becomes whole again. But between the two phases of wholeness, and before the zone of chaos there is an area of organisation, where some of the water separates out enough from the surrounding water to appear almost like ropes, or pipes, or channels.

I look at this and I see how Life is. Life contains many paradoxes. It’s not “this or that”. All of Life is One, is Whole, and every moment produces distinct differences, so that every single path followed is unique. We are all separate, yet we are all of the same whole.

This separateness we live, this difference we experience, is temporary, and brief. Before we appear as individuals at birth, and until we breathe our last and slip away, there is no separateness. Isn’t that our challenge in life? To fully appreciate our uniqueness, our individuality, while never losing touch with the fact that we are a small, and transient, part of the whole. While never losing touch with the fact that we are intimately connected with every other uniqueness which is, which was, and which ever will be.

Life is flow. Life is change. Life is movement. Life is connection. And every life is unique.

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I read this yesterday (in a book by the Swiss author, Oliver Clerc) – if you take the seven colours of light in a rainbow (or in a prism) and blend them together, you get white.

But if you take the seven colours of the rainbow in paints and blend them together on a canvas, you get black.

Interesting, huh?

He says, the laws of the Spiritual realm (light) applied in the Material realm (paint), won’t necessarily produce the same outcome.

The context for this observation is one of his essays, where he explores one of the great paradoxes of reality – that in the Spiritual realm, All is One, but in our Material realm, we humans break up the flow of reality into separate sensations, elements and parts. Both are True. Our challenge is to hold both truths at the same time – to know that I am different from everyone else, but that I am also part of the same Unity as everyone, and everything, else.

By the way, in this essay, he also observes that with our sensory organs and our brains, we name seven colours as white light makes its way through a prism, and we name seven notes from all the sound we hear (to create a musical octave). We then learn how to discern and play with thousands of shades of colour, and thousands of musical notes. We need both – the distinct, “main” colours and notes, and the thousands of shades and nuances.

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I’m irresistibly drawn to spider webs…..good job I’m not a fly!

They are frequently beautiful and frankly stunning. I never cease to be amazed by how a tiny creature can make something like this with only their own body. They have the knowledge, the skills and the resources to weave these webs. How did that come about? Isn’t it simply wonder-full?

What this photo inspires me to think about today is how I am “irresistibly drawn” to such creations. There is so much in our every day lives and surroundings which can capture our attention. In fact, don’t people talk now about an “attention economy”? Especially in social media with its dependence on advertising income at the core of its business model? They have to make “content” (I’m getting to hate that word!) which shocks, appalls, enrages, thrills or scares people, so they will stop, click the photo or the link and Kaching! more dollars to the companies involved. Meanwhile the people whose attention has been caught are left feeling shocked, appalled, enraged, thrilled or scared.

Is that how you want to be?

We can choose. We can choose where to direct our attention, and where to give our time and space. This web in the garden caught my attention, and created, for me, a moment of delight and wonder, leaving me curious, amazed and happy. I don’t click through on the most obvious “click baits” when I’m on social media, but I still get hooked in too much. It’s pretty pernicious. It’s the same with the “news cycle” of our mainstream media. How do you feel after watching today’s news programme? I feel more and more dissatisfied with what passes as journalism on mainstream media. When it isn’t superficial and repetitive, it seems too often to be full of conjecture and speculation rather than reports and analysis.

But we can choose.

Once we are aware of where our attention is going, and what’s being provoked, or evoked by whatever it is we are looking at, or listening to, we can take a more active, more conscious approach. That’s the basis of this entire blog – heroes not zombies – to move from being passive and reactive consumers, to creating the life stories we want to fashion. And here, in these posts, (if I’ve still got your attention, ha, ha), I hope you find inspiration, delight, joy, and wonder. That’s what I want to share with you.

Choose what you share, and become more aware of what you are paying attention to.

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I took this photo earlier this year in a forest. What caught my eye was how the tree stump looked like a face, or the head of a wild animal.

Our brains have evolved a brilliant ability to notice patterns around us, and one of the patterns the brain is most attuned to is that of a face. We can see what looks like a face in a tree, a cliff, a rock, a bush….you name it. We also develop a great skill in recognising faces….even when we often completely forget the name of the person whose face we recognise. How many times are you watching a movie and you say “I recognise that actor. Who are they again?” And how often do you meet someone who you know you know, but because they are in a different context at this moment, you can’t for the life of you, remember their name? I used to find that a lot when I met nurses, or patients, who I only knew from the hospital, in the street, or in a shop. We recognise the face before we figure out who this person is.

But, back to the woods again……what patterns do you spot in a forest? Faces? Hearts? Something else? Whatever it is, I bet your experience is enhanced by your pattern recognition. It’s pleasing. It sparks wonder, delight and curiosity. We humans are great at creating layers of meaning over what we encounter in our every day. It makes life richer and deeper.

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