There’s a Roman site about an hours drive from where I live. I visited it earlier this year during one of the times we weren’t in lockdown. These three photos show you the three main parts of the site. First on the left is an amphitheatre. The guide says this kind of amphitheatre was used for performances, like plays and music, not like the different sort of amphitheatre they made elsewhere for gladiator fights. In the middle is the remains of a temple. Look at the extraordinary shape of it! Again, the guide says, it’s thought there was a Celtic temple on this exact spot before the Romans constructed theirs. On the right is one of the baths in an enormous complex of baths. You can sort of make out the floor level of the bath, and below that the area where they lit the fires to heat up the water. It’s an astonishing building with several different baths, each of which were apparently heated to different levels.
One of the things that astonishes me about this site, apart from just how big it is, is exactly which buildings were constructed and what they were constructed for – primarily you’ve got the cultural space of the amphitheatre, the religious space of the temple and the social/health space of the baths.
Now contrast that to a modern “High Street”! Or one of those rings of shopping malls orbiting a town or a city!
I look at this and I wonder…..is it time to shift our priorities? To put culture, spirituality and health at the centre of our societies and communities? How might that change our experience of life?
What do you think? I’m not wondering here about re-creating a copy of what the Romans did…..I’m wondering about what a contemporary or into the future equivalent would be if we picked up on some of those core values…..creativity, spirituality and healthy sociality. (is that a word? “sociality”? well, I hope you know what I mean!)
Aix en Provence is a city of fountains. There are dozens of them throughout the town. This one, in the Cours Mirabeau, is a simple bubbling up of water in the middle of a round basin. It’s not a dramatic spray or jet of water, but I love it. I can sit and watch the patterns on the surface of this water for ages. They are mesmerising.
At first, you could have the impression that there is one main point of activity, where the water emerges from the bottom of the basin, sending out concentric rings of ripples towards the outer edges of the fountain. They look like the rings inside a tree, and they remind me of how a small action spreads its effects over the whole body of water.
But, you don’t have to look terribly closely to notice that there is more than one centre of action in this fountain. I’ve zoomed in on just one of the several points where the water bubbles up onto the surface. Up in the top left of the image you can see some of the ripples which are clearly coming from another source. Those ripples interlace themselves with the ones from the centre focus, reminding me of a lesson I learned in school when we were studying waves – it’s called “interference” – two concentric circles of waves meeting each other, with two peaks creating a big peak, two troughs creating a deeper trough, and peaks and troughs cancelling each other out when they meet in the same time and space. It’s a beautiful pattern and you’ll be familiar with it.
This image of “interference” from two sets of ripples already demonstrates the beauty of interaction and complexity. It reminds me of the “attractors” we see in all complex systems, and also reminds me that “attractors” do not necessarily pull everything towards them the way the pole of a magnet does. Rather, they are organisational centres, influencing the structures and patterns of the environments in which they exist.
But, wait a moment, we aren’t done. Look a bit closer and you see a number of smaller circles dotted across the larger pattern of the concentric circles. Each of these is caused by a drop of water falling from higher up in the fountain, or from a splash which releases a few water molecules from the mass, a few molecules which fly through the air, then fall onto the surface a short distance from their origin. Look how each of those circles enhances the beauty and complexity of the overall pattern.
In the real world, in the natural world, there is no such thing as simple cause and effect. Everything which happens, occurs within an interconnected web of events, influences and forces. There is always this interplay. There is always this complex beauty which renders the future unpredictable.
What we experience, our health, our illnesses, our joys, delights, our sorrows and pains, are always multi-factorial, always complex in origin, always multiply connected. We pull out some of the threads, focus on some of the events and factors, and create a story which helps us to make sense of what we experiencing. that story is necessarily always complex, always changing, always developing.
I read a passage written by Umberto Eco the other day –
Per ogni problema complesso esiste una soluzione semplice. Ed è sbagliata. (For every complex problem there’s a simple solution. And it’s always wrong.)
I’ve long since been drawn to Romanticism. I feel they bring some extra, something deeper, something substantial to the dominant perspectives of the rationalist Enlightenment thinkers. It’s a funny thing, because in many ways I think I’ve lived with a foot in both camps. I trained in Medicine, practised as a General Practitioner for the first half of my career, then as a Specialist in what we came to call “Integrative Care” for the second half. That second half move was enabled by my training in Homeopathy which gave me a different framework to understand individual health and illness, as well as a set of therapeutic tools. We specialised in the care of people with long term conditions at the “NHS Centre for Integrative Care” in Glasgow, with the majority of our patients coming to us for help when they felt orthodox care wasn’t helping them enough. But we had a foot in both camps there, because our hospital was embedded within the Scottish NHS and we had access to all the tools, specialist help and advice of all that orthodox care could offer.
What does that have to do with Romanticism? I’m not sure, but I’ve recently been inspired to explore the Romantics in more depth, because I heard an interview with Eugene McCarraher about his new book, “The Enchantments of Mammon“. He talked a lot about the Romantics and I remembered that Iain McGilchrist had written about them too, so I picked “The Master and His Emissary” off my “most significant books bookshelf” (yes, I do really have such a shelf in my bookcase!), and yesterday sat down to re-read his chapter on Romanticism. One of the first lines in that chapter is
As always it was the clashes of theory with experience that showed up the cracks in the edifice of rationalism.
Well, that’s it in a nutshell……it was the “cracks in the edifice of rationalism” which opened the door to my enlarging my Practice to include a focus on the qualitative, and the “unmeasurable”. And, boy, was that a set of “clashes of theory with experience”!
Then this
Differences are as important as generalities
Now, this must be what became THE foundation stone of my Practice as a doctor. It still makes me a mixture of sad and annoyed when Medicine is conducted as if generalities trump differences every time. There continues to be a real struggle for individuals to have their stories heard and believed, especially when they don’t fit with either “generalities” or “theory”.
The idea of individual difference is central to romanticism
Well, if that is true, then I need to know more about romanticism, because the importance and the inescapable reality of individual difference lies at the heart of my life values.
What’s all this got to do with the photo I’m sharing today? Well, I just read this line
The Romantics perceived that one might learn more from half-light than light
OK, I’ve taken it out of the context of the rest of the chapter but Iain is arguing that a difference between the left and right hemispheres is that the left wants certainty, clarity and exactness, where the right is more interested in the whole, in the synthesis of opposites, in the distance between where we are and where we can almost see.
There’s real beauty here. There’s mystery and enchantment. There’s wonder and amazement. Well, I just love all of that.
I’ve got lots of photos of spider webs. When there has been a heavy dew and the sun is just up in the morning they look absolutely bejewelled. Mesmerising and gorgeous. Most webs have that classic spiral appearance with a clear centre, and strands all spreading outwards from that centre, then concentric rings of web woven around and around that centre point.
But this one is different, and maybe you’ll look at it and think it’s not as beautiful because it has neither a clear centre, nor any lovely symmetries. But this structure is one of the most fundamental shapes in Nature.
It’s a network. It’s made up of two simple components – nodes and connections. There is no single clear centre, no branching or hierarchical structure. Some nodes are multiply connected, others only connected to two other nodes.
The cells and organs of our bodies are like this – they are multiply connected and once change takes place somewhere it spreads quickly through the entire network. There is no single commanding point. This is an incredibly flexible, adaptive structure and it is exactly what every “complex adaptive system” looks like – either literally, or functionally.
I find it utterly beautiful and wondrous. I love how I can understand human biology through this lens. I love how I can understand the brain through this lens. I love how I can understand ecosystems through this lens.
Every single one of us exists within, and emerges within, these vast complex webs or networks of Life. We don’t function like machines. The connections are not linear – instead they are “non-linear” – so effects can accelerate as they cascade through the system, and changes can occur which are utterly unpredictable from the starting state.
This reminds me of the importance of seeing each of us, not as separate disconnected individuals, but instead as unique instances of change within the entire web of Life.
I’ve just finished reading Madeline Miller’s superb “Circe”. I can’t tell you just how much I enjoyed it. I found it a great read. I am a bit familiar with some of the Greek myths and legends, including the story of Odysseus, but this way of telling Circe’s story let’s Madeline Miller tell you some of those myths from a new perspective. I just loved it.
Last night I read a passage which made me think “Yes! I must share this!” Here it is –
When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon. He said that the medicines he gave out were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, he said, if you give them time. It was the kind of secret I loved to discover, for it made me feel cynical and wise.
I have long believed exactly that. I used to say to patients something like “If you break a leg, the surgeon will apply a plaster to your leg to hold it still. The plaster doesn’t repair the fracture. It just holds the ends together while your body gets on with doing what it does – healing – or, in this case, repairing the fracture.” Or I’d tell someone “This antibiotic isn’t going to cure your bladder infection. What antibiotics do is to kill bugs. That’s a good thing. But your bladder wall is all inflamed because of the infection, and it’s that inflammation which is causing your symptoms. The antibiotic will have no direct effect on your inflammation. But it will reduce the number of harmful bugs in your bladder to allow your body to get on with doing what it does – healing.”
Does that seem unnecessarily pedantic? I don’t think so. I think it reinforces the patient’s belief that their body can self-heal – which is exactly what all “Complex Adaptive Systems” do – all living creatures have these abilities to self-regulate, self-defend, and self-repair. It’s what they do.
That’s the wisdom part.
But in Circe’s telling this knowledge also brings a certain cynicism, and for me, that’s always been about the place of drugs in health care. There isn’t a drug on the market which is designed to directly promote and/or stimulate self-healing and self-repair. Each drug attempts to redress an imbalance, or to suppress some symptoms or pathologies. The business of the body doing what the body does – self-healing and self-repair is left to be a hopeful sort of side-benefit at best.
There are ways to work more in harmony with the body’s natural powers, but, in my opinion, those ways aren’t taken seriously enough. Targeting pathology/disease and/or symptoms remains the dominant model. But I do dream of a time when the balance tips towards targeting health/healing and/or powers of self-repair, and self-healing. The present types of drugs and treatments will then be seen as the potentially useful adjuvants that they really can be. They will no longer be seen as enough by themselves.
Oh, by the way, “Circe” isn’t a book about health or disease. It’s a telling of some of the Greek myths. It’s just that passage really resonated with me so I thought I’d share it. And, on reflection, don’t those myths have something to tell us about disease and illness, and how we cope, heal and grow?
I’m convinced the images we encounter daily influence what we feel, what we think and how we behave. In fact, I don’t just mean images such as artworks, adverts or photos. I mean how things look – including the shapes and sizes of buildings, the presence of trees, flowers and bushes, the colours of walls, the landscape or the cityscape, depending on where we live, and the decor, light and shapes of the rooms we live in, as well as the objects which surround us.
All of these images influence us deeply, and, largely unconsciously, creating moods, emotions and feelings which stimulate or inhibit well-being, and which change the course of our lives.
One dramatic example of that is in hospital design. There is a lot of research about this, but, to give one example, it was found that patients who had a view of nature from their hospital bed recovered more quickly, needed less painkillers, and had less complications than those who only had a view of a wall.
Of course the advertising industry is well aware of the power of the image. These days there is even a specialist area of knowledge and advised described as “neuro-marketing” which seeks to employ the findings from neuroscience to persuade customers to buy certain products. These things work at the level of image, sound and smell. Mostly, they work unconsciously.
So, I think it’s good to notice our here and now, our everyday reality. I think it’s good to be aware of the images we absorb as we work, play and relax in our home and shared environments.
Taking photos is a good way to become aware. When you look around, or go out somewhere with a conscious intention of photographing what you notice, then your awareness is automatically heightened. These days most of us have smartphones which are more than ably equipped to take photos. You don’t have to have a fancy camera.
These two photos I’m sharing today are of street art I noticed as I walked around the streets of Salamanca one day last year. The image on the left is like a work of modern art. It looks a bit “Miro” to me! What I really notice about it is how the artist has used the walled off entrance as a frame, using the concrete filling the space as a canvas, but, he or she hasn’t stopped there. They’ve spread their artwork beyond the bounds of that frame….reaching out to cover the left hand pillar. I like that. I like how it demonstrates how creativity can be opportunistic, inspired by what is already there (the walled-in entrance way), and how that inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. Would you have thought that entrance way represented a canvas? I like how the artist isn’t bound by that either. How they kept creating outside of the frame – thinking and creating “outside of the box”. This work inspires me to be creative, to see opportunities for creative work, and to refuse to be constrained by other people’s frames.
The second photo shows the power of stencil. I mean just look at this person holding their head. Are they in despair, or are they trying to figure something out? I can see both. So it’s an image of hopelessness which reflects something we all feel from time to time, but, instantly, it’s also an image of someone thinking, someone deep in thought, trying to come up with a solution. At least, that’s what I see there. How about you?
I know, with every interpretation we bring our own standpoint, our own sets of values and beliefs, our own moods and preoccupations. But that’s one of the great things about art, isn’t it? It isn’t just the power of the work to convey “percept and affect” (as Deleuze would say). It offers us the chance to wake up and change by engaging with it. And even if we don’t wake it, it influences us without us realising. It interacts with us, and we interact with it. It’s a relationship.
Probably because I was thinking about the metaphor of threads and weaving in the way we create our reality through our stories, I looked at this image again today and thought “Well, that’s what they have to work with. That store of colours and shades” So what if we think about how that idea might apply to how we create our daily experiences?
What is there in your palette? What can you select to weave together to create your unique, singular experience of today?
What if these yarns are like beliefs, ideas, thoughts and emotions? Which ones do we have to draw on, and which do we keep going back to, perhaps over-using, when we could be shifting our attention and using a different section of the palette if we want today to be really different?
I remember reading about a theory, which seemed to be validated by studies and observations, that when a baby is born, at the moment when the umbilical cord is cut, they experience their first existential threat. In those first few seconds if the baby doesn’t take their first breath, they won’t live. Perhaps, in those few seconds, the baby experiences certain strong emotions. We don’t have access to those memories because in our early years, our consciousness and memory functions haven’t formed to allow us to access them, but that doesn’t mean to say they aren’t happening, all the same. After all, most emotions occur below the level of consciousness, and becoming aware of them takes time, attention and practice.
So, what emotions might a baby experience in the midst of this first existential crisis? The theory proposes three – fear, anger or separation anxiety. Makes sense to me. So, the idea is that maybe which of the three dominates is genetically determined, but, whether it is or not, that particular pattern of those three emotions sets itself up as a core as we continue through life and try to make sense of our experiences.
So, some people have fear at the core, and that’s the main colour they use in their daily palette. For others, it is anger, and for yet others it is separation anxiety. You can try this for yourself. See if you can think back to your very earliest memory. Preferably one form before the age of five, from before you started school. When you recall that event, what emotions do you associate with it? Is it fear, anger or separation anxiety? I found with patients that some would identify one of these very clearly, some would identify a mix, or find more than one strong early memory, each with a different dominant emotion. Others would find none. They either couldn’t access any early memories at all, or they wouldn’t be able to say which emotions they associated with any they could remember.
For people who can find one, it is interesting to then follow that thread through life. To what extent does that emotion seem a foundation to other significant life events? Remember that with each emotion, we might suppress it, express it, or deal with in some hybrid way. So, if it is fear, then both fear and courage might appear. If it’s anger, both temper and avoidance of conflict might appear. And so on…..
Well, that’s one way to start to think about what palette you have, and what section of the palette you draw upon most frequently to create your daily reality.
You can also become aware of your dominant emotions, thoughts and beliefs by journaling….for example by doing “morning pages”. In fact, there are many ways to become aware of our habitual patterns of emotion, thought and belief.
I think it’s good to explore this, but we can take it a stage further by deliberately choosing certain part of the palette, or even adding new sections. We can decide we want to colour each day with more joy, more wonder, more love. We can decide we want to see each day through more half full glasses than half empty ones. We can do that with affirmations, with visualisations, with making more conscious choices about where to focus our attention, our time and our energies.
But all that is maybe for another day. Today, I’m just suggesting an exercise in awareness. Can you become more aware of what your personal palette looks like? Can you become more aware of which sections of that palette you keep going back to again, and again, and again? Finally, which underused sections of your palette would you like to pay more attention to? Or as you look at the vast range available, which colours of yarn would you like to add now?
I love stories. I always looked forward to hearing the stories patients would tell me, and I’m sure a significant part of my work was to be an active co-creator of stories. It would be common for a patient to sit down next to me for the first time, and I’d begin “Tell me your story”. Quite often that opening would be met with surprise or even some puzzlement, but I’d just stay quiet, maintain eye contact, and show I was waiting with undivided attention. Sometimes people would ask “Where will I start? How I am now, or what went wrong first?” I’d suggest there wasn’t a right or wrong place to start so just choose to start wherever they like.
The first part of the story would be up to the patient, but then I’d ask certain questions to explore particular aspects of the story, or to open up other areas which hadn’t been covered. So, together, we’d enable the telling of a unique story, a life story, with a certain focus – health and disease. Because, I am a doctor after all.
Now when I see this photo of threads beginning to be woven into a tapestry I think that rather than “focus” in that last paragraph, maybe I’d be better using the word “thread”. Because often the life story of health and disease is a story which needs unravelled, untangled, to identify the important threads, colours, textures, and images, or the important events, themes, experiences and patterns.
Maybe, in fact, the life story of health and disease is just one of the tapestries we create from all the threads and colours which allow us to create and experience our one, unique, and singular life.
So, threads, tapestries and images turn out to be as important for me as stories.
Where do the threads come from? The ones we weave into our personal experience? Some come from our genes. There are threads of lineage which run through each of us. Some come from our birth experience, and our response in those first few seconds to the cutting of the umbilical cord. Others come from our experiences, from the events of our lives and both our reactions and responses to those events. Yet others come from our relationships and from the physical environments in which we live.
Then there are other kinds of threads which we pick up and make our own. The threads of myths and legends. The threads of other peoples’ stories, beliefs and values. The threads of culture, music and art. In other words, the threads of our collective imagination.
Finally, as well as threads, the weaver has to have some idea of what they want to create. They have to have a vision, have imagination, maybe even have a pattern or a plan to follow.
I wonder what threads you can find in your life. I wonder what visions, thought patterns, feeling patterns, behaviours and influences create what you do with those threads…..
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?
This is a machine. It is manufactured by human beings. It has a number of solid, pretty unchanging parts (ok, they all gradually wear out with use), which are assembled into fixed relationships with each other by other parts…. nuts, bolts, springs, cogs and hinges.
These parts don’t grow. They don’t develop or mature. They don’t develop new ways of connecting to each other and they don’t change their function. Their relationships are linear. A always leads to B.
This machine looks a bit complicated but everything can be taken to pieces and understood. We can learn how it works and predict how it is going to work. It does what it was designed to do and if it stops doing that we can find the parts which are “defective” and replace them with new parts.
Living creatures are not like this. Human beings are not like this. We are not manufactured by human beings. Every cell, every tissue, every organ within the body changes all the time. The massive network of inter-connected feedback loops create relationships in the human body between cells, tissues and organs. These relationships are non-linear. A influences B in the presence C, D, and a host of others, whilst B, in turn influences A. These relationships are not fixed. They are not predictable.
Living creatures, like human beings, are “Complex” not “Complicated”. You can’t take them to pieces and understand the whole.
We are all “complex adaptive systems”, constantly bathed in flows of molecules, energies and information, which we transform within ourselves before contributing to their onward flow into others.
Machines can exist in isolation. Human beings cannot. We live only because we are embedded in the complex biosphere of Nature, dependent on the lives of a myriad of other forms of life, dependent on our relationships with others.
Machines are not unique. You can produce millions of identical machines. Human beings are unique. There has never been “YOU” before in the whole history of the universe, and there will never by “YOU” again, once you die.
The truth is every one of us is special, and every one of us deserves to be treated as unique. Every one of us deserves to be understood within our individual web of connections, relationships and life story.
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 