How much do you think love motivates you to do what you do, to say what you say, to think what you think?
Are there serious arguments against making love our priority, our touchstone, our foundation, our core?
What couldn’t be improved by bringing a loving attitude to bear?
I think good health care requires love….love in the form of caring about, caring for, and wanting the best for, every patient. Love in the form of non-judgemental listening and attending. Love in the form of respect for the unique individual. Love which values personal relationships above techniques, tools and processes.
I think good education requires love…..love for children, love for knowledge, love for wisdom, love for growth, development and maturity. Actually, education isn’t something we should restrict to children, we could all do with learning all our lives. We could all benefit from life long education based on loving each person and wanting to try to help them realise their potentials.
I think good work requires love….love for craft, for skill, for quality, for service to our fellow workers, our families and our communities.
So how about a politics of love and an economics of love ….. love of Nature, of Planet Earth, of our fellow creatures, and of other people? What would that look like?
Maybe it’s time for us to be less shy about love. Maybe it’s time for us to speak up and say it’s important. More than important….essential.
Can we learn from this pandemic and move towards a society based more on creativity and care, than the present model which is based on consumption and competition? Can we move towards a society based more on qualities than on quantities, challenging the current dominance of figures, statistics and “data”, and insisting instead on loving, caring relationships, on experiences, on individual uniqueness, and on diversity?
One day in Paris I came across this electric scooter sitting just beside this rather imposing statue of Condorcet. I had the notion that the serious thinker was looking down rather disdainfully at the scooter.
Even as I framed the shot I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition. Condorcet was a leading thinker of the Enlightenment, a champion of rational thought. That’s one large, heavy tome he has in his hand there and he has the air of someone who goes through life, eyes downcast, as he thinks seriously about everything.
For the Enlightenment thinkers rational thought was the way to liberate mankind, to free them up from the chains of superstition and enslavement by autocratic powers.
The electric scooter, on the other hand, is our right up to the moment symbol of autonomous freedom. In a city like Paris you can pick one up wherever it’s been left, pay your hire price using your smartphone, step on, and away you go whizzing along streets and passageways faster than pedestrians, weaving between static traffic jams of cars, pretty much as free as you’d like to be.
Yet a scooter, for many of us, is a sort of toy, isn’t it? I had a scooter as a child, as did my sister. In fact, just the other day there she found an old black and white photo of us both on our scooters, and sent it to me. Scooters back in the 1960s of course weren’t electric, but, apart from that is the modern version really that different?
I have a notion that one of the appeals of the electric scooter is something to do with play. Think back to childhood, or observe a child in your own family. From the very earliest of years children learn and develop through play. They explore, they discover, the try things out, pressing, pushing, bending, tasting, touching, looking and listening. They are like little sponges aren’t they? Absorbing every possible experience they can have minute by minute through the entirety of their waking hours.
Curiosity, then, that fundamental building block of learning, is expressed, first of all, through play. But there are three other qualities to play which come to my mind as I write this.
Play develops the imagination. Children create whole worlds to inhabit. Worlds of creatures, monsters, fairies, heroes. They dress up and assume roles. We even retain the phrase “role play” as an adult activity, don’t we?
Play encourages creativity. Children express themselves through drawing, singing, and making. Play is the medium through which creativity is released and nurtured.
Finally, play is social. Although a lot of play can be solitary, children adore games – games played with others. They are always asking to play games. Come and play this with me! Let’s play…..! They learn to connect, to interact and form relationships through play.
So, yes, the Enlightenment thinkers promoted liberation through rational thought, but are we missing a trick by reducing play to something less important, something somewhat trivial, even “childish”, to be left behind as we grow and mature into rational, thinking human beings?
Hey, you know me, and my “and not or” mantra – don’t we need BOTH? Don’t we need to inhabit, live, develop and grow both our “play” skills and our “rational” ones?
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”
There’s such a push now, during this pandemic, for people to work from home, and already it’s easy to find a host of articles about the dangers this poses to work-life balance. Yet, “home-working” could be liberating. I had a telephone conversation with a government worker recently and I could tell from the background noise that he was at home, not in an office, so I asked him if that was the case. He replied yes and said how much he loved it. He no longer had to commute for 90 minutes to work and another 90 minutes back home every day – so he felt he had gained 3 hours. And, he said, when he wanted a coffee he didn’t have to stand in line and pay a hefty sum for a cup any more, he could just reach behind himself to where he’d placed his coffee machine.
I’m exploring a new way of organising my time, and I’ll share it with you once I’m happy with it, but today I realise I need to factor in something else, something a bit more liberated, something a bit more imaginative, something a bit more fun – play!
Why don’t you join me, and spend at least a little bit more of today in play?
Reflecting – I’ve long since thought this is a vital tool in life. There are two main modes of being – reactive and responsive. When some information, some energy or a substance evokes something within us our default is to react.
For example, when we see something threatening our “fight or flight” system kicks in fast and prepares us to do one of those two things…..fight or flee! It’s a complex system involving nerve pathways like the “autonomic nervous system”, certain nodes within the brain, like the “amygdala”, and a release of chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol. Accompanying all that are the organising influences of the emotions. It happens fast.
The energy of heat makes us react too. When we get too hot our body re-routes the blood flow towards the surface of our skin, and we start to sweat, to try to maintain a steady body temperature in the face of the environmental change. There are many such reactive feedback systems in our bodies to enable us to react to environmental changes. All without requiring any conscious, active role, ourselves.
When we inhale an allergen, such as pollen, then, if we have the potential to be “allergic” to it, we react instantly with sneezing, runny nose, itchy eyes, or whatever, all provoked by an automatic activation of part of our defence system.
All of these are reactions.
But we humans can also respond. We don’t need to be 100% on auto-pilot. We respond, rather than react, by creating what the psychiatrist and author, Iain McGilchrist refers to as “the necessary distance”. We have this remarkable super-power to create a pause, a bardo, or a gap, between the stimulus and the response. We can stand back, stand apart, and change our perspective. This gives us our chance to reflect and it is a major factor in enabling us to move beyond an auto-pilot way of living.
Meditation practices of all types help us to step out of auto-pilot mode too. They strengthen our ability to become more aware in the present moment, and so open up the opportunity for us to play a more active role in our own lives. But reflection, I think, brings an additional benefit.
If a major benefit of meditation is heightened awareness and a breaking of the automatic stimulus-reaction loops, then reflection allows us to bring both our analytic functions of reasoning and our ability to imagine to bear. We can look back, unpick and unpack an experience and use the benefit of hindsight. We can “figure out” what happened and why and choose to act differently on any similar future occasion. We can think through a series of “what if”s to become aware of different potential outcomes.
As a doctor, I was encouraged to do this all the time. It is a common practice for doctors to reflect on their clinical work. That’s how we learn. That’s how we improve. But it’s the same in all walks of life. Stopping regularly to reflect frees us up – you could say it turns us from “zombies” into “heroes” (hero in the narrative sense – the main character of our own story).
There are many ways to build habits of reflection into your everyday. I think the top three are “Morning Pages” – where you write continuously to fill three pages of a notebook, preferably before you do anything else in the day; “Gratitude Journals” – where you end the day by thinking back and noting anything today for which you feel grateful; “Journaling” – whether in diary form, sketching, painting, whatever you prefer, but some regular time spent reflecting and then turning that reflection into something creative – a short essay, a poem, a letter to an imaginary friend, a letter to your older, or younger self, a cartoon, a drawing…..it’s up to you.
Oh, I should add, that it’s essential that all reflection is as non-judgemental as possible. It’s not about beating yourself up, or finding people to blame. It’s about learning and growing and a judgemental attitude isn’t going to help that.
What works best for you? How do you encourage yourself to reflect?
What influences how we experience the everyday? What shapes reality?
One of the ways our minds work is by creating frames and schema. We learn from our own experiences, from the stories of others, and from the messages we are given. All of these combine to create frames, or lenses, through which we filter the present moment. They also combine to create schema which are like pre-formed sets of perception, values, attitudes and behaviours.
There are lots of examples from psychology research – although, beware, because a lot of psychology research has been called into question and other researchers have failed to repeat the results of very famous experiments. But here’s an example of a type – volunteers are told they are being tested on a cognitive skill, say, perhaps, the ability to undertake certain mathematical tasks. But before they take the test, some are interviewed by a researcher who asks them to talk about the lives of the most elderly members of their family. Others don’t have that chat. After the test is complete, the researchers measure the time it takes the volunteer to walk to the exit. Those who had spent time talking about elderly family members before the test take longer to walk to the exit after the test. Bizarre, huh? This kind of experiment suggests that we can be “primed”. That pre-fashioned patterns of thought and action can be set in train unconsciously.
There are lots of different experiments which seem to demonstrate the same idea. These “schema” or “pre-fashioned” patterns of thought and action can be activated and influence how we experience and perform in the light of them.
We shouldn’t be too surprised by this. We know we are influenced by the messages which bombard us. Why else would advertisers spend billions to catch our attention? There’s a whole discipline now of “neuro-marketing” where companies can learn how to use how the brain works to catch our attention and to “prime” us to do what they want us to do – click “buy”, or vote “yes”, or whatever…..
This is one of the things underlying my choice of the title “Heroes not zombies” for this blog. I think that it’s easy to spend life on autopilot, allowing others to press our buttons, to convince us of their frames, to implant their schema in our minds. If we want to become the “heroes” of our own narratives, then we need to wake up, become aware of things like this, and then, perhaps, even consciously choose to create our own frames and our own schema.
So here’s my question today – for me, and for you – what are the frames, the schema, and the messages which are creating my experience of today?
Once we become aware of them, then we are able to make some choices – choose to accept them, or choose to make our own ones.
Let me finish with a simple example. If you spend the first part of your day “doom-scrolling” (you know that new term? Where you read story after story on your newsfeed, your twitter feed, your facebook feed, each one horrifying you, irritating you, outraging you, frightening you….but you can’t stop…you keep on scrolling)….so, if you spend the first part of your day doom-scrolling then what kind of day follows? What are you set up, or primed to notice, to pay attention to, to give your energy to? What if you chose to start the day some other way? With affirmations, reflection, gratitude…….you get the idea?
I guess none of us really paint scenes onto our actual windows these days but isn’t this beautiful? It gets me wondering what kind of scene or image would I like if I were to get, or make, a window like this? I wonder if I’d want a natural image of a beautiful tree, flower or bird, perhaps? Or would I want something highly symbolic, something resonant of myth and memory? Or would I want something visionary to inspire my thoughts of the future?
I suppose that in some ways a painted window like this could be a sort of vision board…..one of those walls where you collect images which inspire you in an attempt to inspire and focus your attention, desire and will to achieve what you want in life……or to attract it, “manifest” it…..or, at very least to colour your thoughts and your days.
I’m not a hugely goal-orientated person. I don’t set myself targets and “SMART” goals. But I know those things work for a lot of people. I suppose I prefer to set my values, my attitudes and my intentions, then open myself up to “emergence”…..to the realisation of experiences which I couldn’t have predicted. Maybe I prefer that to any attempt to force the world to deliver what I’ve already decided I want. After all, it turns out this universe has way more potential than any of us humans can imagine. So, I don’t really try to alive by organising my life around pre-determined end points.
What I do like to do is to repeatedly reflect and re-orientate my life around curiosity, wonder, joy, love, kindness and positive intention. So, that’s what I should represent on my painted window (or my “vision board”) – the images, symbols, stories and myths which stimulate and inspire my curiosity, my sense of wonder…..which bring me joy…….which stoke my feelings of love and kindness…..and which strengthen my intention to act, speak and think positively.
All of this constitutes a kind of “conscious creation” I think. A deliberate choosing to make and maintain reinforcing loops of the attitudes, values and behaviours which I want to experience in the world….which I want to manifest in the world.
Ok, folks, here’s my list (for me to return to as I move this idea forward, but also, if you wish, for you, if this inspires you or resonates with you).
Curiosity
Wonder
Joy
Love
Kindness
Positive intention
I’m going to use this list to consciously create the world I want to live in.
We are creatures of light. All the energy we need to live comes from the Sun. Plants capture the Sun’s energy and turn it into substances. Then the food chain sends that energy around the vast webs of Life, each creature nourishing itself on the energy captured by others. That includes us.
Without the light we wouldn’t exist.
But we humans need more than physical energy from light. We need what emerges when light shines on our world. We need it to see more clearly, think more clearly. We need it to make more sense of our lives and to live freely together.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories spreading around these days. There is a lot of suspicion and distrust. What’s the answer? More light. More transparency. More open sharing.
I think whatever you say, whatever you do, even whatever you think, sends waves of energy, information and materials out around the world in which we live. It influences others. It evokes emotions. It can spread understanding.
I think we need to use that consciously and deliberately. What positive, potentially nourishing light can I share today? That’s my question. I want to say, do and think whatever is creative, whatever spreads and encourages love and understanding.
Maybe that should be my new “mission statement”, my new “life goal”, my new “principles for living”?
Think, say and do today – with an intention to encourage and spread love and understanding.
I saw this door panel in the Chateau Chenonceau. Isn’t it wonderful? What an incredible piece of craftsmanship carving this scene. I love the waves below the characters and the clouds above them, and I especially like how the clouds break out of the frame.
The scene is Poseidon and Amphitrite (I think!), the God of the Sea and his wife. They are being blessed with a wreath and a flower (a lily perhaps?) by two creatures with human bodies, fish tails and wings……nymphs I presume…from Amphitrite’s ancestry.
Apart from the beauty of this image in it’s own right, it is laden with symbolism, as are many of the carvings and tapestries of that period. Exactly what the significance is of each symbol and, indeed, of the myths of which they are integral part can be uncovered to a certain extent with study and research.
I invite you explore this for yourself. What can you find out about the characters represented and what stories are there about them? What can you find out about the nymphs, about the cupid figure, the trident, the bow, the wreath and the flower?
Some historians say that in their time the people who had these works of art created were well versed in the answers to all those questions. They could “read” a scene in the light of the knowledge they’d gained. They had been told these stories, taught these symbols, and they wouldn’t just look at an image like this and think “how beautiful” – the work would evoke whole sets of emotions, memories and fantasies for them. When I think of that I feel we’ve lost something because most of us haven’t had the education which allows us to have a similar experience.
Symbols and myths are an integral part of human life. Creating works of art is fundamental to our nature. I was listening to a BBC podcast the other day about cave art and the experts said the wall drawings of bulls, aurochs, deer and so on date way back to the times of not just the earliest humans, but to neanderthals too. Some of the cave art was created in caves so deep that not only were they in perpetual darkness but there could be no real reason for human beings to go there….other than through sheer curiosity, or to hide and protect their art works.
Who were those images created for, and what part did they play in their lives….of both the artists and the spectators? We don’t really know. But whatever the answers to those questions there is no denying that we are a species which does more than hunt, gather and farm. We create and live with art. It’s in our bones!
Every living organism has the capacity to stay healthy and to repair any damage it incurs. In other words, they all share the ability to survive. Plants, micro-organisms, animals, humans…..every creature which lives has the ability to survive. Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
We’ve discovered a fair number of the processes which enable us to survive and to repair when we are damaged. A whole bunch of these are called “homeostatic” processes – they are complexes of cells, chemicals and feedback loops which maintain a certain stability of the “internal environment”. They keep the working relationships between all the cells, tissues and organs in balance. Things tip too much one way or another, the homeostatic system kicks in and returns the organism to a more balanced state. When we are damaged, for instance, when we break the surface of our skin, or break a bone, then the body mobilises “inflammatory” processes to pour cells and chemicals into the damaged area, seal off any breaches in the defences, and start to lay down repair tissue.
Isn’t it amazing how the body does this?
There’s a huge tree just behind my neighbour’s house. One day about three years ago, in a storm, a large cluster of branches were broken off at the top of the tree, turning it from a pretty symmetrical plant into something that looked like a giant had taken a big bite out of it. Now that gap has gone. The tree has repaired the damage and has, almost, become symmetrical again.
Survival and repair. These are the fundamentals of life aren’t they? But they aren’t enough to fully describe Life. There’s a third element in every living creature – growth.
This rose in the image above is unfolding the petals from one of its buds. The unfolding is like a spiral, like one of those paper windmills you used to play with as a child. It’s utterly beautiful. This unfolding is an expansion, an opening up, a revealing and a stretching out to manifest itself. This rose is declaring “Here I am!” This rose is showing the world she exists by performing the third element of Life – growth.
Not just growth which is about becoming bigger, taller, thicker. Not just growth which expands the reach of the plant into the surrounding territory. But growth which reveals a whole new aspect of the rose. Before the flowers open up like this, the rose looks quite different. Green, leafy, thorny. But without flowers.
My littlest grandson is just seven months old now and seeing him start to “flourish”, start to “unfold” and “reveal” himself is like watching a miracle. Those first new behaviours and sounds are such a thrill, that emergence of interaction, of recognition and connection…..it’s breath-taking.
I used to find a similar awe and wonder when witnessing the unfolding and revealing of a patient as they moved beyond survival and repair into the fullness of health……seeing in that process the revelation of their uniqueness.
I think we tend to take these things for granted, because they happen all the time….these processes of survival, of repair and of growth.
But it’s worthwhile pausing from time to time and becoming aware of them….in the flowers, the trees, the birds, the other animals which share your world……in people you meet, people you love and in yourself.
It’s ten months now since the wall fell down. I’m sure that the pandemic has slowed up almost everything this year, but it sure takes a long, long time to get things done in this neck of the woods!
I strolled through the garden the other day and took this photo at the lowest part of the gap in the wall. As it’s autumn now, the vine which used to cover the entire wall has now started to turn from green to red and gold. The stones have lain where they fell for months now and the vine just grew over them. You can see in this image the remnants of the wall, the living vine, the fruit it produces (It’s “Boston Ivy” by the way, or “False Vine”) and the gorgeous autumn colours of the leaves as we move towards winter.
I think this image is just beautiful. I love it. I love how much there is to see in it and I adore the overall combination of elements. It reminds me of the four stages of the cycle of reality – growth, maintenance, falling to pieces, emergence.
Using the lenses of “systems science”, “complexity science”, and, in particular “CAST” – “Complex Adaptive Systems Theory” (which is my MAIN lens for understanding reality) I can see that this image represents the stage where things are falling to pieces. All systems undergo this. After a stage of fairly stable fulfilment, as we see in summer and early autumn, there is a stage of letting go, of order crumbling to be replaced by something more chaotic, more wild, more “disordered”. Well, this is it.
What comes next? Emergence, novelty, a new phase, a stage of “reorganisation” building on the path followed so far. Almost always this new phase is unpredictable. Always it is unpredictable at a detailed level, but almost always it is unpredictable at a macro level.
This pandemic feels like a phase where the old order dies. It feels like a time of change. And we are all wondering “what comes next”? Can we play an active role in creating the new phase, you and I? I hope so. Because the old order got us to where we are and we want to move on from there now, don’t we?
I love a view like this. These cliffs are shaped like water. The layers and folds look like currents and waves. This isn’t a coincidence is it? We see these echoes and resonances everywhere we look. I’m not a geologist so I can’t tell you exactly how these rock forms are created, but it’s pretty obvious that when land meets the sea, they co-create their shapes…..the shape of the land is fashioned partly by the sea, and the shape of the sea is fashioned by the land.
They also change the content and nature of each other, with the minerals and micro-organisms in the rock washing into the sea, and those in the sea soaking into the rock.
Nothing exists in isolation in this world. Everything exists within its own environments an contexts. The apparent boundaries and barriers are more fluid and more porous than we realise. Everything is influencing everything else through a vast, complex network of connections and relationships.
We humans are like that too. We are constantly exchanging materials, energy and information with everyone and everything else. That’s why I find it more helpful to think of the flows of reality and to focus on the connections more than on the so-called “parts” or “entities”.
The truth is that the way I live, the way I behave, communicate, and connect with others influences and changes them, and vice versa…..everyone else influences me.
We are nothing less than the co-creators of reality.
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 