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Archive for the ‘from the living room’ Category

Glow

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on October 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »

When I looked towards the Western horizon late in the evening I saw this glow.

Isn’t that interesting? I didn’t notice the vineyards, the village of Salles d’Angles on the hill. I didn’t see the Sun, because it had already slipped below the horizon. What I noticed, and what I’m struck by again, is the glow.

First of all, it is just stunningly beautiful. It reminds me that our attention can be caught by beauty, by wonder, awe and amazement……even if a lot of the time these days we find our attention caught by threats. Have you come across the term “doom scrolling”? Where you keep scrolling down through your social media, be it Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a newsfeed, and you glance at story after story, image after image, which unsettles you. You find yourself becoming more anxious, angry, despairing, and fearful.

That’s not by chance. It’s by design. Whether it’s advertisers trying to seduce us, or scare us, into buying somebody’s products or services, or it’s power-mongers trying to manipulate you into supporting them, or pressing your buttons to try to control your behaviours. There are a lot of people trying to get into your headspace – in their interests, not in yours.

But we can still choose to invest our attention in beauty, wonder, awe and amazement. We can still choose to invest our attention in whatever nurtures us, integrates us (remember that integration is the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well-differentiated parts), whatever promotes our growth and well-being.

Second, this glow that I see on the horizon is a radiance of light from the Sun. But we all radiate. We all glow. We give out vibes. We send out signals. We create waves which influence, or impact on, others. So, that makes me wonder……

……what kind of glow am I radiating today? A glow of beauty, joy, delight, love? Or a glow of fear and hatred? Huh! It’s not binary, is it? Chances are we send out waves from the entire spectrum every single day!

So, maybe the question is, what colours am I going to consciously include in my glow today?

The colours of love, beauty and wonder? The colours of delight and joy? The colours of “Bienveillance” and “Emerveillement”? (My two French words of the year – roughly, and inadequately, translated as “well wishing” and “wonder”)

Yes. Those are the colours I want to choose from my palette today.

How about you? What colours are in your glow? What are you radiating out into the world today?

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Speed of change

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on October 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

There are three elements in this image which inspire me to explore an underlying theme. The elements are the leaf, the stone, and the sand. The underlying theme is change.

The leaf changes quite fast. Over the course of a single year it grows from a tiny bud, to a full sized green leaf powering the tree, capturing the energy from the sun and the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen from the air, to create the solid substance of the tree. Then as autumn comes the metabolism changes. We can’t see that directly but we can see the effects….a change in colour from green to yellows, browns and golds. Then the leaf falls from it’s stalk to the ground. Once on the ground, the change continues as it biodegrades into the soil. Nature wastes nothing. The leaf nurtures the soil.

The stone changes more slowly. If you look carefully you can see several different seams of colour, each a different combination of minerals. These minerals came together over many, many years, and it has taken a long, long time for the stone to split from a much larger mass, and centuries and centuries of wind, rain, and sun to shape it.

The sand that both leaf and stone are sitting on has taken even longer to form. It always astonishes me when I come across fragments of shells and fossils of sea creatures high up in mountains, far away from the sea. It reminds me that the history of the planet is immense and that change in the surface shape of the Earth occurs so slowly it can seem unchanging.

Three rates of change. The more complex the structure, the faster the rate of change. Which brings me to the fourth element in this photo….the photographer. That’s me in this case! Well, my life changes faster than the sand, the stone or even the leaf. Every cell in my body changes minute by minute. All my tissues and organs are renewing themselves daily. It’s quite mind boggling, and it’s why I like to think in terms of “flow” instead of in terms of “objects” or “parts”.

We are all transient manifestations of being in the One great Flow.

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Human beings are basically good

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »

When you look at a sky like this you know a storm is coming. When it’s as dramatic as this it can be quite intimidating. At very least I know to prepare a little, unplugging my router and other equipment in case it gets fried by lightning (and, yes, it’s happened once since I came to live here). We also have an issue with heavy rain overwhelming the drains and then pouring down the driveway so another preparation is sandbags along the bottom of the garage door (and, yes, it’s happened more than once since I came to live here).

But sometimes, even a dramatic sky like this just passes over with hardly any rain, and no significant thunder and lightning. It seems impossible to predict at a local level. Even when the storm does come, it doesn’t last. Maybe just half an hour or so, or sometimes an hour or two, but usually it’s pretty brief.

I know that it’ll be different in different parts of the world, and I’m also aware of the absolutely catastrophic effects that dramatic, severe weather can have….most recently here down in the Valley of Roya just north of Nice where whole roads and parts of villages were washed away. Tragic.

I’ve also seen news coverage of the after effects of that storm, and as in other parts of the world when such calamities occur, what you see is dozens, if not hundreds, of people immediately appearing to do what they can to help….helping people to safety, cleaning up, making food, donating food, water and clothes. It is impressive. It is very impressive. You see it every time, no matter which country it happens in. You know some people don’t have a very good opinion of human beings and I know we can be an aggressive, exploitative species, but what impresses me so much more is this ordinary straightforward instinct to help and to work together to relieve the suffering of others.

Fundamentally, I believe that people are good. That’s my starting point. If things don’t turn out that way with an individual or a group then I adjust my attitude and behaviour to stay safe, to protect myself. But I start by believing in human goodness. In fact, I don’t know how I could have worked as a doctor for forty years without believing that. Everybody seems to be “worth saving”. Everybody who needs help “deserves” it. I know it’s complex and I’m not trying to be simplistic or naive here, but I really do believe that your experience of life changes when you start from a belief that people are fundamentally good.

I recently came across Rutger Bergman’s latest book, Human Kind, and he takes exactly this idea as his starting point….what if we believed that humans were basically good, instead of believing they are basically evil, or bad? I recommend it. It’s worth a read.

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Networks

Posted in art, books, education, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, photography, science on October 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I saw this framed poster a couple of years ago in a shop in Copenhagen. I kinda wish I’d bought it! It’s a simple but elegant representation of something which has become my core model when I consider reality – networks.

When people say everything is connected to everything else they are right and the easiest way to both visualise and explore that is the network.

A picture of a network is simply some nodes connected by lines. The nodes might be people in your life, including you, with each line representing relationships. The nodes might be cells in your body, some more directly interconnected than others but all living in each other’s influences. The nodes might be neurones in your brain, each of which is connected to up to 50,000 other neurones! Can you imagine that? It’s literally mind boggling.

Networks can map thoughts, feelings and actions. They can help us trace the influences on any single moment cast by the past and the future if each node is an experience, real or imagined.

We have two halves to our cerebral cortex and it seems the left half is particularly good at noticing and exploring the nodes – the parts, the elements, the items, components or data. The right half, on the other hand, is particularly good at noticing the links, the bonds, connections and relationships.

Think of the constellations in the night sky, each twinkling star a node. When I look out now I see Orion has reappeared and makes his way each night across the winter sky from east to west. He’s been gone all summer and now he’s back I know winter is coming. But how do I see Orion? By tracing the invisible lines which connect the individual dots (stars).

When I first read about complexity science it was this model of networks which made it all clear to me, and, in particular, learning about the non-linear nature of the relationships between the nodes in living creatures helped me grasp the concept of the “complex adaptive system”…..which shone a bright light of understanding on everything from self-healing, to uniqueness.

If you’d like to explore this subject a bit more, here are some of the best books I’ve read about this concept of networks, connections and links.

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Uniqueness and identity

Posted in art, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

A couple of years ago I saw this image on the front of a shop in Copenhagen. Uniqueness is an important quality for me. Every single patient I ever treated was unique. Every single one had a unique story to tell me. I feel unique. I see you as unique.

So, what makes someone unique?

Is it your DNA? That’s part of it. There are no two human beings with identical genomes. Is it your face, your eyes, or your fingertips? That’s part of it too. There is scarily effective face recognition equipment already deployed everywhere from airports to security cameras. You can even get access to your phone by having it recognise your face. Iris recognition technologies have been around for some time allowing restricted access to closed spaces, and fingerprinting has a long history in detection work.

So, each of these characteristics can be said to be unique to you, but none of them captures your uniqueness, because YOU can’t be reduced to your fingertips, your eyes, your face, or your DNA. Maybe these features can help to name you….to tell others how to identify you from within a crowd, or a group.

But is this the same as “identity”?

I don’t think so. The reason why I don’t think so is that identification has spilled over from the capture of these physical features to encompass a whole person.

You are not reducible to any of these features, just as you are not reducible to any other “characteristics” such as country of birth, ethnicity, gender, religious belief, height and weight, or hair colour.

You are a person, and a person has a subjective reality, a life of memories, experiences, imaginings. A life of emotions, thoughts and beliefs. A unique, and singular story to tell, which is not, and never can be, the exact same as anyone else’s story, past, present or future.

Our uniqueness isn’t found in our characteristics or our features. It’s found in our connections….the connections which connect the past to the present, the present to future, our selves to other people, our unique set of experiences and life events, the contexts and environments of our existence. It’s found in the invisible nature of our subjective reality, with our own consciousness, our own unconscious being, and our ever changing, ever developing sense of self and person.

I abhor the reduction of a human being to a data set.

Because every human being is unique.

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Into the unknown

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, science on October 9, 2020| 1 Comment »

If I drive about an hour west from here I come to the edge of France. This particular stretch of coastline is called “La Cote Sauvage” (the wild coast) and it’s where you can stand and look out across the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something life expanding about gazing out over this immense expanse of water. It makes you take a deep, deep breath and fill your lungs, which is one way of making yourself a little bigger! The air is filled with that scent of saltwater, of clean air, and of distant, invisible places.

Many of us are drawn to the sea. We talk of “the pull of the sea” or the “call of the sea”. My ancestors, on one side of my family, came from the Orkney Isles, off the north coast of Scotland. I don’t know if that connects to a Viking thread or not, but I do know that the Vikings were great sea travellers. There are even some suggestions that they sailed as far as the continent we call North America. But, wherever they went, what induces a sense of awe and almost incredulity for me, was that they set out across expanses of sea like this one. They had no idea where they were going. There were no maps, and they didn’t even know if the ocean had an edge that you might fall off when you got there. They just set off.

What were they thinking, these ancient mariners? Did they just think, oh I can see the edge of the water over there in the distance, I think I’ll go and have a closer look? In much the same way that we drawn to go to the edge of a cliff, or a high building, so we can peer over and see what we can see. Did they think there might be new land there? New territories to conquer or treasures to grab?

I don’t know but I think the same questions can be applied to any of the sailors who set off across unknown seas like these. Given that I am a bit of a fan of the “and not or” idea I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a bit of both….with other motivations blended in as well.

It’s a bit of a metaphor for life, isn’t it? On any day we stand at the edge of an ocean, an expanse of possibilities stretching from here to eternity. What lies out there? The future. Is the future just waiting to be discovered? Probably not, is the answer. How many routes can we take to cross that sea? An infinite number, is the answer.

The bit that doesn’t work in this metaphor is in the answer to that first question….”what lies out there?” The future is not a distant place. It’s not just lying there, passively and patiently waiting to be discovered. Why not? Because the future is “emergent”…..that is, as in all complex systems, the future cannot be predicted from even a complete knowledge of the present, because complex systems come up towards “bifurcation points” where they might go one of two ways….towards greater complexity or towards collapse and chaos. When they pass through these points they show this quality of “emergence” which is defined as a state which could not have been predicted from the previous knowledge. When that emergence is of a certain degree of significance everything is different….the system has undergone a “phase change”.

So the future isn’t out there waiting because we are still busy making it. It will arrive when we get there. A sentiment we know well from the advice to “cross the bridge when you get there” (knowing that when you get there, there might not be any bridge, or even a gap to cross).

It’s our imagination and our curiosity which propel us onwards on this voyage of creation. Every day, every moment, even, co-creating with the rest of Existence, the next moments, the next days, the near and distant futures, which are still a gleam in their parents’ eyes.

Pretty exciting, huh? Are you up for it?

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Letting go

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, humour, life, personal growth, photography, science on October 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

There’s a way of looking at history where you can trace the development of a theme over decades, or even centuries. One of the themes I’m aware of is control.

Maybe the control issue has become particularly apparent because of this pandemic……in two ways.

Firstly, there’s our inability to control the spread of the coronavirus. Yes, I know, governments around the world and thousands of scientists are trying to exactly that – control the spread of the virus. But they can’t really. They can bring in measures which enforce changes in personal and collective behaviour to try to reduce the opportunities for the virus to jump from one person to another, and some countries are managing that better than others. But we can’t get rid of the pesky thing from the whole planet and as we live in a hyperconnected age reducing the incidence to zero in one country doesn’t guarantee it won’t make its way back.

Secondly, we are now subject to more controls, more restrictions than most of us have ever known. We are being monitored, surveilled, documented and followed to unprecedented degrees.

This second kind of control is not specific to infections of course. In many walks of life we are now subjected to increased levels of control. I retired from clinical practice as a doctor almost six years ago now, but in the last few years of work the level of monitoring and control of my daily “performance” increased many fold. A combination of “annual appraisal”, “revalidation” and “job plans” with an emphasis on what can be measured eg patient numbers and consultation length, diminished professional autonomy and steady forced everyone to somebody’s declared “norms”.

A lot of the desire for control is extremely well intended, but a lot of it isn’t. I’m not sure where the balance lies these days, but I suspect most money and resources go into enabling those with power and influence to keep and increase what they have through the control of the rest of us. A lack of transparency creates the suspicion that extra controls “in your interest” aren’t really in our interest!

But all this goes a long way back doesn’t it? And I’ve been thinking this morning how one of the origins is the idea that Man is separate from Nature and that we are either chosen to, or that we are choosing to, dominate and control Nature. Nature is seen as something separate from us, something to be exploited, a resource to be tapped, and potentially damaging phenomena are to be fought and controlled.

But that’s not right is it?

We are not separate from Nature. We emerge within all that is. We exist within the existence of the whole world. We are unfathomably hyperconnected with the whole of Planet Earth.

When you look around, you see that other forms of life thrive without having such an emphasis on control. Look at this photo I’ve shared today. It’s one plant which uses a particular form of seed dispersal – wind. It gambles the whole of the future existence of its species by letting go. It creates the forms and methods which give it the best chance of working well with the rest of the planet, from the wind, to the sun, to the soil, and holds its sons and daughters up to the heavens, then waits. Waits for the wind to blow, and to carry them to fertile lands.

OK, so we aren’t plants. And I’m not saying we can live the same way that they do, but there’s a lesson here, don’t you think? Something to reflect on. It’s in that action of “letting go”. Letting go in a way which maximises your ability to survive and to thrive.

How are we going to do that? How are we going to shift away from obsessive desires to control to learning to work with, to collaborate, to share, to learn with humility that we can’t control nearly as much as we’d like to?

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Beauty

Posted in art, from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, psychology on October 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo in a Japanese Garden in Scotland in October two years ago. I’m steadily working my way through my digital photo library (from oldest to newest) and I’ve just reached October 2018…..which is pretty appropriate given its now October 2020.

This photo leapt out at me. I just LOVE it! Those gorgeous reds and greens together are quite stunning!

The next two photos also really transfixed me…..

I just think they are breathtakingly beautiful.

And, hey, isn’t a great idea to share some beauty today?

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Attractors – how we get stuck

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on October 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

From the perspective of complexity science an “attractor” is an area of organisation within what otherwise appears as a chaotic system. Think of the phenomenon of a “Black Hole”. It’s like a sink hole where everything, even light, disappears into it. It’s like a point in the universe which pulls everything within its reach into its centre. A “Black Hole” is a sort of attractor.

An attractor appears around a focus, and once it is there it exerts this kind of “gravitational” or “magnetic” pull on anything which comes close to it. But the simplest way to think about it is the emergence of a consistent pattern in the midst of chaos. If there weren’t these points of organisational focus in the universe then space would be even, smooth and featureless. But space isn’t like that. It’s full of features, full of phenomena, of areas and points of organisation.

You can see something similar happen in the brain where distinct networks of neurones which “fire together”, “wire together”. There are examples of brain imaging which show the thickening of neural pathways when something is repeated…for example, when practising the piano (where you can see a thickening of the brain nerves used to control the fingers). It’s sort of a neural equivalent to what happens to muscles when someone practices body building.

The same thing happens with our habits of thought and emotion. The loops which start to fire in relation to particular thoughts or emotions have a pulling power. Many years ago I read a book by the psychologist Edward de Bono, “Water Logic”, where he described this tendency for thought patterns to become embedded in our brains by likening them to the way water makes its way down towards the sea from the heights of a mountain. The rain falls pretty evenly over the high lands, but starts to run together to form streams, rivulets, rivers and finally estuaries into the oceans. The next rain which falls tends to follow the paths already carved out by the previous rain.

I thought that was a pretty powerful image and I shared it with many patients over the years. It helped explain phenomena like flash-backs, compulsions and addictions to some extent. But I always thought it was only part of the story, and it wasn’t until I discovered “attractors” that I realised what the other part was.

So, it seems to me, that events which are accompanied by strong emotions can make new attractors in our minds. They can be traumatic events, accompanied by fear, anger, shame, or pain. Or they can be life-enhancing events like joy, wonder, tranquility, or a sense of one-ness with the world.

When we recall one of those events we are drawn back into the same original pathways and loops. Or when something new happens which is pretty similar to one of those attractors, then the whole thing kicks off quickly and powerfully once more.

Once I understood this I realised we can actively create our own new attractors, by having, and/or re-creating, the kinds of experience which we want….the ones of love, joy, belonging, tranquillity, awe or transcendence.

Attractors, it seems, are not fixed entities. They need to be fed to keep them growing, and neglect makes them likely to wither away. The more attention we give them, the more powerful they become.

I was thinking about this today when I looked at this photo of mine, taken in a zen garden in Japan. What I like about this image is not just the spiral, which is indeed very attractive, but the wider scene – how there are different flows, paths, bends, loops and spirals across the whole expanse of the stones. Can’t we do this with our minds? Create our own unique inner landscapes of pattern by becoming aware of existing attractors, and actively creating new ones?

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Creating reality together

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I’m pretty keen on biology….as you might imagine for a doctor! I’m interested in how the body works, the way the different cells, organs and tissues all function so beautifully together. I’m interested in discovering the connections within us with all the incredible feedback loops and cascades. I find it all fascinating.

But it was very clear to me from very early on in my work as a family doctor that human beings can’t be reduced to biology. There’s more to us than biology can explain. I often refer to the three flows which pulse through our very beings every moment of every day – the flows of materials, energy and information. Biology is pretty good at shining a light on the first two flows, but its the third one where things start to get so uniquely interesting when thinking about human beings.

One of the aspects of information flow is art. Now, I don’t mean to reduce art to information, or at least, not in the sense that information is “data”. I mean information as signals, not simply data. Information as meanings. So language, music and visual art all connect with us, and our whole being responds. You can blush because someone says something to you. Your heart can race because you hear a certain song. You can catch your breath, or feel a range of emotions, from disgust to delight, when you see a work of visual art.

Our lived environment is not just physical. We imbue it with meaning. We react to particular colours, designs, patterns, sounds, scents and physical touch. A particular taste can set off a cascade of memories….one of the most famous examples being Proust’s “madeleines”.

I think both street art, and advertising, affect us deeply. The images trigger certain responses within us…..maybe certain emotions, certain thoughts, or particular memories. But whatever they do, they change us. And because we are not compartmentalised, those changes ripple through our entire being. We don’t keep them in our heads.

I think we’re often quite unaware of the images and art around us. They often exert their influence in sub-conscious ways. But I like to be aware of them. I like to notice them, stop, and reflect.

In this photo I’ve captured both street art and advertising. What do you feel when you see them? What do you think when you see them? What effect do they have on you? (If any….because of course we are all affected differently by different images)

We co-create our lived reality, we humans. We do it collectively and we do it as individuals, creating and publishing, or “showing” our creations. We do that whether we are artists, or writers, or whether we simply talking to each other. We change the lived environment by constantly changing our behaviour, our language and by using our creative powers.

What kind of reality are you going to co-create today?

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