Posted in from the viewing room, humour, life, video on January 25, 2008| 5 Comments »
Dr Tom Bibey’s blog is worth reading. He’s the kind of family doctor I like. He recently posted about laughter and I thought I’d post this just for him and his good wife. Hope you enjoy it!
While you’re here, and if you feel you need something to cheer yourself up try
Posted in from the viewing room on January 1, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Posted in from the viewing room, life on December 5, 2007| 5 Comments »
Catching up on some episodes of Heroes last night, and was watching Chapter 18, “Parasite”. This is the one where Nathan confronts Lindeman and Lindeman says to Nathan that he has to choose between a life of happiness and a life of meaning. He explains that to live a happy life you have to live in the present, but to have a life of meaning you have to focus on both the past and the future.
Well, I don’t know about you, but that analysis doesn’t work for me. Happiness, as Jean Kazez explains in her review of three interesting books about the subject, has not only been studied by a wide range of thinkers over the years, but there are a huge number of different opinions about it. Certainly the view that happiness is experienced by being “present” is one of them, but surely happiness can be experienced in reminiscence and recall, and certainly in sweet dreams and fantasies.
Jonathon Haidt, for one is quite clear that happiness is part of the experience of the creation of a meaningful life, and I agree with that. Happiness, meaning, mutually exclusive options? I don’t think so.
Lindeman’s point about a life of meaning spreading out beyond the present was a good one though. I really do think the way we create a sense of self is through the narratives we create about our lives. And all narratives are dynamic, they come from somewhere, to inform what is, and set the trajectories of what might lie ahead. One of my favourite books on the power of narrative in life is “On Stories” by Irish philosopher, Richard Kearney. He says –
When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations
and
Telling stories as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living
In fact, he makes it clear that as meaning-seeking and meaning-creating animals we use story telling to not only make sense of our life experiences but to make life itself meaningful.
So, Lindeman was right about a life of meaning involving an ability to sew together the past, the present and the future, and I suspect it was this, most seductive of options that helped Nathan make his choice.
Like all heroes, we become who we are by the stories we fashion out of our unique and individual ways of experiencing life.
Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the music room, from the viewing room, movies, music, video on November 22, 2007| 2 Comments »
A big part of the debate about homeopathy centres on the issue of ultra-high dilutions of medicines. One of the explanations wheeled out is something called ‘the memory of water’ – it’s a catchy phrase but very problematic. Does water have a memory and if so, how does that work? The anti-homeopathy campaigners say it can’t be explained. In short, they say it’s implausible. More than that, they say that the difference between a starting substance and a highly diluted remedy is the difference between ‘something and nothing’. But still, I think it’s more reasonable to say it’s the difference between something and something else. One of the commenters here, Andy, asked ‘does the water retain a memory of everything else it has had in solution since the dawn of time? Or just the things that the homeopath wants it to remember?’ I rather liked that question. It got me thinking…..and I’m still thinking! But amongst the things it got me thinking about were how memory isn’t physical but water is, about how human beings are meaning-seeking/meaning-creating creatures and how we enrich our physical world with meaning, how we use language, symbolism, memory and imagination, to create an incredibly powerful presence in the world, and how experience is more than physical, more than can be measured.
So here’s the non-science bit – first off, some photos of my own. I love water and water imagery and it amazes me how diverse and complex it is. Have a browse through this slide show. I wonder how these images of water will feel to you? I wonder what they’ll mean to you?
Here’s the slide show
And then, here are some of my favourite water songs. Let’s start with Rain
I can show you that when it starts to rain, everything’s still the same
When it rains and shines it’s just a state of mind
Patty Griffin next…..
Sometimes a hurt is so deep deep deep
You think that you’re gonna drown
Sometimes all I can do is weep weep weep
With all this rain falling downStrange how hard it rains now
Rows and rows of big dark clouds
When I’m holding on underneath this shroud
Rain
And, the fabulous Eurythmics –
Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you
It’s amazing how much the rain can change our emotions, our state of mind, and our mood, isn’t it?
Let’s spend a little time by the river! Rivers are so important to us. How many towns and cities grow up around rivers? Think how we use metaphors like “river of life”. Here’s Alison Krauss set to a lovely montage of BBC nature videos.
A complete change of musical genre, but keeping a religious theme, with Good Charlotte,
Baptized in the river,
I’ve seen a vision of my life,
My favourite river song about the importance of place – really, a song that gives us a real understanding of psychogeography! (the way place fashions a sense of self)
And, finally, with Christmas coming, here’s Sarah McLachlan’s version of Joni Mitchell’s The River
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
Which paintings, photos, songs, films, poems or stories come to your mind on the theme of water, and what do they mean to you?
Posted in from the viewing room, life, video on November 7, 2007| 2 Comments »
It’s Amy‘s birthday today. Happy Birthday Amy
I’m gonna watch you shine
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign
So you’ll always know
As long as one and one is two
There could never be a father
Who loved his daughter more than I love you
Posted in from the viewing room, life, video on October 16, 2007| 8 Comments »
My daughter, Amy, sent me a link to this video (I think she “stumbled” upon it – I DO recommend “stumbling“!)
I think it is WONDERFUL.
I think this is a fabulous representation of how everything is connected. Whatever we do has consequences and impacts in unpredictable ways. This is actually a great example of why a complex system is so impossible to control – the characteristics of complex systems include networks of connections between things which means that a change in any part of the system changes the whole system; that outcomes are highly dependent on the starting conditions; that emergence occurs – new phenomena; and that every situation is unpredictable in the details.
Thank you Amy!
Posted in from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies on October 5, 2007| 2 Comments »
This series is about using the movies to help us understand how we are all different, how we experience the world differently and how we all try to cope with challenges and change in our own ways. One of the commonest responses to challenge, is to withdraw – to hide, retreat, shut down. It’s an especially common way to try to deal with hurts and disappointments. The downside of this strategy is that we disengage and can easily spiral down into depression.
To see all five parts of this series put the phrase “learning from the movies” in the search box up on the top right of the blog.
Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies, narrative on October 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »
We all cope in different ways. In this series we’re looking at ways of coping in parts 3, 4 and 5. In part 3 we looked at the activist way of coping.
Now let’s consider control as a strategy. The world can be a very scary place. For many people the events that occur in their lives face them with overwhelming uncertainty and doubt. If we feel the world is scary and dangerous and random, one way to cope with this reality is to shrink daily life into containable, controllable pieces. People do this to try and reduce the uncertainty and randomness in their experience. They do this by introducing routines, habits and rituals. They do this by either trying to control their physical environment – cleaning and ordering – and/or by trying to control the people in their lives. Watch the following three clips to see what this is like if we take it too far!
I’ll consider the third strategy – withdrawal – in final part – Part 5.
Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies, narrative on October 4, 2007| 1 Comment »
One aspect of understanding someone is listen to their story and hear what they talk about – material, physical, practical issues? emotional and relationship issues? or spiritual issues of meaning and purpose? Another aspect is to find out what kind of ideas they have about themselves in relation to others – in particular to explore to what extent they see themselves as connected to, and identifying with, others, and to what extent they see themselves as separate and independant. I’ve explored this latter aspect in Parts 1 and 2.
But another key issue for all of us is how we cope in the face of challenges, and how we adapt to change. Just as I have a map of body, mind and spirit in consideration of the kind of world a person lives in, so I have a map of coping strategies, and again there are three – action; control and withdrawal. Let me reiterate that this is a dynamic map and whilst some people almost always seem to default to the same strategy, most of us are more flexible and use each and all of these strategies to different degrees.
Let’s explore to activist – the person who when faced with a problem or a challenge, rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck into it –
You can see it takes a certain self-belief to be able to cope with challenges this way!
We’ll have a look at control as a strategy in Part 4
Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies on October 2, 2007| 6 Comments »
I was recently asked to give a talk at a Palliative Care Conference in Dundee. One of the organisers had seen me use movies as a educational tool when teaching doctors and wanted me to demonstrate that. It was well received and I thought I’d put up a series of posts based on the talk. I hope you like them.
TWO QUESTIONS FOR ALL DOCTORS
I think the core of a doctor’s job is to try and understand people. One thing I find helpful in that regard is to have two questions at the back of my head during every consultation –
With the first question, I’m trying to understand what’s important to the person and how they create a sense of self. I won’t go into this in much more detail just now but one well-known way of viewing the world is through the triad of body, mind and spirit. I find that quite helpful. We can consider each of these as a focus and for every one of us we can place ourselves on the this map – the body, mind, spirit map.
For the purposes of understanding where someone lives on this map, I think that the body represents the physical. These are people to whom physical security and physical reality are paramount. They prioritise material issues and they tend to prefer to have a rational, logical approach to problems – you’ve probably heard someone say “Don’t give me your touchy-feely nonsense!” when asked to discuss how they are feeling. Utility and practicality are their key values. For others, emotional security is more important. They are very aware of feelings and of relationships. They see themselves in relation to others. The third focus is spiritual and by this I mean the need to make sense of the world and the idea that there is something greater than each of us as individuals. This might be religious but it might not. What is important to that person is that they need to have a sense of purpose.
This map, by the way, is not a set of boxes into which people should be placed. The map is more like a map of three areas or neighbouring countries with flexible, moving, overlapping borders. Some people spend all their lives in only one of the countries but most move around!
This, for me, is a fundamental way of creating a sense of self – a way of answering the “who am I?” question. But related to this there is another way, which is how we see ourselves in relation to others. For all of us we live with a tension of two opposites – the need to be separate, unique, individual AND the need to belong, to love and be loved, to identify with others. I say this is related because I find that often the physically-focussed person is more towards the pole of individuality and separateness and the emotionally-focussed towards the pole of identification with others.
So take a look at this movie clip and listen the main character’s monologue. Here is a man who has a sense of being self-contained and who is materially-focussed.
“I am Ibiza!”
To see the opposite pole, have a look at this clip. Here are people whose sense of identity comes from the community –
“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”
These are two good examples of very different ways of experiencing the world, different sets of priorities and different ways of creating a sense of self.
OK, so some of you will be saying hobbits?? They’re not real! But, trust me, the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy isn’t real either! But let me address that in Part 2 where I’ll show a couple of clips from one of my favourite movies, Brassed Off, which is set in a Northern English mining community. You can compare that to the lifestyle of the hobbits in the Shire.
Heroes Not Zombies 