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Archive for the ‘life’ Category

Resilience from equanimity

Posted in from the living room, life, psychology, tagged on November 1, 2009| 2 Comments »

How often do you find yourself going over something upsetting? Something someone said or did which you found hurtful? Hurts have an impact. They make their marks on us. The bigger the hurt, the deeper, more long-lasting the mark.

Is there anything we can do reduce the impact? Or do we have to just stand and accept whatever comes our way, feeling the impacts deeply, and for the rest of our lives?

Whatever builds up our resilience, both reduces the strength of any impact, and increases our ability to bounce back, to stand back up, to find a way to go forward.

One aspect of resilience is equanimity. Balance. Stability. A kind of strength. Over centuries in many traditions and cultures people have practiced meditation to gain this kind of strength. One of the goals of meditation is increased equanimity, or greater resilience. You can’t stop events from happening, but you can have an influence on how you experience those events. My meditation teacher used the following analogy (the photos are mine!)

A mark in rock lasts a long time

kilmartin

A mark in sand disappears more quickly

footprint in the sand

Imagine what it’s like to make the mark on water

where the boat went

Now imagine what it’s like to make the mark in the air

flying by

 

Regular meditation practice builds resilience. Things still happen, but more and more, what people say, what people do, has less of an impact. You begin to experience less marks in the stone, less in the sand, more in the water, or, ultimately, in the air.

I like that analogy.

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Exercises in making sense

Posted in creativity, from the living room, life, narrative, perception on October 14, 2009| 3 Comments »

Human beings are sense-making creatures. We continuously process all the information we can gather from our environments – internal and external – and try to put the information together somehow. I think we use two particular sets of skills to do this, and they’re related.

The first skill is pattern spotting.

What do we think when we look up and see this?

oak

We pick out the colours, the shapes and the contexts of what we see, and we name it – sunlight behind oak leaves, casting overlapping shadows.

This happens so quickly and effortlessly that we don’t even pause to wonder about it. In fact, we’re seeing patterns everywhere, all the time. It’s a fundamental skill needed for understanding.

The other skill we use is storytelling, or narrative. We “join the dots”, or “put things together” by creating narratives. By creating stories we make sense of the patterns we see. Personal sense. When you look at this oak tree for example, you’ll perhaps become aware of certain feelings, and maybe those feelings related to previous experiences involving oak trees. As a species we create stories about trees, and, specifically, about oak trees, so maybe some of those stories will come to mind and your experience of looking at this tree will be enriched by that.

Well, here’s an interesting study which explores how we might enhance these core skills. The first sentence of the report caught my attention –

Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter.

Pardon?

Well, according to the psychologists who conducted this study –

exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions

It appears that reading a text, or watching a movie which is challenging to understand because it doesn’t appear to make sense, enhances our skills in making sense! I suppose it’s a bit like going to the gym (I wouldn’t know….never been!) and practising using your muscles so that they then work more efficiently and with greater strength.

Well, the questions which arise about what do they mean by “smarter” are answered by the specifics of the study. What they actually showed was that after reading Kafka, or watching a David Lynch movie, a person’s ability to spot patterns was enhanced.

Interesting. Actually, I spend most of every day trying to spot patterns, listening to stories, and trying to make sense of what I’m seeing and hearing. You could say that’s my job. But how interesting, even from the perspective of training doctors. Maybe we should be encouraging doctors and medical students to encounter surrealism, to read Kafka and watch David Lynch. Maybe that would help them to become more skilled doctors. The practice of medicine isn’t all about learning facts after all.

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Strange things happen…..

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, tagged , on September 1, 2009| 1 Comment »

The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it seemed to be a plea for a human approach to medicine, instead of a protocol-imprisoned one. I clicked “buy’ from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I do that quite a lot!). I then picked up a book from my bookshelf as I walked out of my front door. I wanted something to read on the train and I’d just finished reading “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (VERY enjoyable). The book I picked up was “Pharmakon“, by Dirk Wittenborn, and I’d read a review of it in the BMJ about a month before, thought it sounded like just the kind of novel I’d like to read, and clicked “buy” from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I told you I do that quite a lot!)

I settled down on the train and started to read it. I got to page 21 and this little piece of dialogue hit me between the eyes

“But how did you get it here?” “Friends in low places.”

The identical phrase. Twice in the same morning. No, twice in the same hour! What are the chances of that? Have you ever even come across that phrase before?

Spooky?

This story isn’t finished yet. Pharmakon is a great novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The following day, before leaving for work I was browsing through my rss feeds in googlereader and came across this astonishing video –

Go on, watch it. It’s amazing. It’s about how the Hubble telescope was pointed by scientists at a part of the sky where they could see nothing. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Watch the video to see what they saw when they looked where there seemed to be nothing……! Then I left for work, got on the train and continued reading Pharmakon. Page 95. Here’s what I read…..

Caspar tried to distract himself by looking out of the window in the direction of galaxy clusters not visible to his human eye

Well, I don’t know about you but it sent shivers down my spine. How does that work?

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Picasso on the subject of truth

Posted in art, from the living room, health, life on August 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme

I saw this quote at an exhibition of the work of Picasso and Cezanne in Aix en Provence. You only need to think about Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St Victoire to understand this. Or think of Picasso’s re-working of the themes of other great painters…Manet, Goya, and so on.

I find this also extremely applicable in health care. A patient never has only one story to tell, because as human beings, life is not like that. Not only is every patient’s story fascinating, but I find every time I meet a patient there’s a new story to hear and explore. Truth is never single. And it’s never complete. It’s always worth taking another perspective, hearing another story, exploring from a different angle

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Picasso’s Chateau de Vauvenargues

Posted in art, from the dark room, life, photography on August 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

Chateau de Vauvenargues

Chateau de Vauvenargues

The Chateau de Vauvenargues has never been open to the public before, but for four months this summer it’s possible to visit. I went yesterday and it was wonderful. It really is in a beautiful location as I’m sure the photos above will show. It sits at the foot of Mont Saint Victoire, which Picasso never painted. He had a deeply respectful attitude towards “Monsieur Cezanne”, as he always refered to him, and that seems to have led him to steer clear of painting the mountain which not only provides the backdrop to the castle, but part of it was even included in the title deeds of the castle itself. I think that was one of the big surprises. After all, Picasso had no qualms about revisiting the works of Manet and others!

The main surprise though, was what the guide refered to as Picasso’s “spartan” choice for the interior. He left pretty much the whole interior as he found it – didn’t redecorate it (apart from painting the plaster in the bathroom with a woodland scene!) and only “upgraded” the place by installing a new bathroom and central heating. There is very little furniture in the house which certainly does give a feeling of simplicity, and the walls and ceilings are faded and peeling. I was also surprised to learn that he didn’t paint the views he could see from the windows, but that he said that when he painted here his painting became more green! You can see this is true. There’s a lot more green paint used in the works he produced here. However, the ancient links between Barcelona and Aix allowed him to explore his favourite reds and yellows and even led him to have a huge Catalan flag as the headboard for his simple double bed.

Picasso and Jacqueline are buried in front of the castle with a simple Picasso sculpture over the grave – no headstone, no words.

Sometimes it’s the simplest of experiences which are the most intense.

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Learn to yearn

Posted in creativity, life, personal growth, photography on August 18, 2009| 3 Comments »

Atlantic lighting

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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The need to fit in, and the need to be different

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, psychology on August 12, 2009| 2 Comments »

the need to belong

Everyone has to deal with this paradox – how can I preserve my individuality, yet not be isolated? I think of it as a spectrum, with individuality at one end of the line, and shared membership of a group at the other. Our immune systems are designed to recognise anything that is “not me” and reject it, so our prime defence mechanism is to reject anything that we don’t recognise as consistent with our individuality. We all need a coherent sense of an individual self. We create that through the stories we tell ourselves and others. At the other end of the scale, solitary confinement is one of the worst imaginable punishments, used to control prisoners since time began. We need to belong. We need to know we are not isolated, unrecognised or unloved. I think we all juggle that paradox throughout our whole lives. It’s a dynamic. Some of us hover mainly around the individuality end of the spectrum and others hover around the group end, but we all need to satisfy both needs in our lives.

It’s this photo I took in Japan earlier this year which got me thinking about this. See how almost all the turtles are trying to crowd onto the one little rock! They need to be together! I say “almost all”, because if you look closely you’ll see one little guy out there on the right happily paddling his own way.

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Patterns

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, music, perception, photography on August 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Whether its due to synchronicity or something about focus, attention and awareness, I find that I often have the experience that something I’ve been reading about crops up in all kinds of places. At the moment it’s pattern-spotting. In fact, this pattern-spotting theme is a fundamental one for me. I think it’s an important part of the way I work, but sometimes it just becomes a more conscious issue. Last week I had to conduct a training session for a junior doctor about consultation technique and one of the things I mentioned was how doctors are trained to spot patterns. We do that to make a diagnosis for example (“Oh, I know what this is. This is a thyroid problem”) In parallel with this I’m reading the novel “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (and thoroughly enjoying it by the way!), and the part I’m reading just now is about the links between code-breaking, mathematics and music – the link being patterns and the ability to spot patterns. While I was driving at the weekend I caught the end of a discussion in a programme on Radio 4 about musical scales, and Pythagoras’ view of harmony. Didn’t hear enough of it to understand what it was about, but then, last night the chapter I read in the novel explained exactly the role of Pythagoras in the connection between music and mathematics (subject of another post I feel!). How strange, isn’t it?

Here’s a photo I took recently. What I noticed here was the pattern of the flowers. I thought it looked like a constellation of stars in the sky.

flower constellation

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Where water meets rock, look what happens

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography, tagged on August 3, 2009| 2 Comments »

One of my favourite walks locally is to the Bracklinn Falls in nearby Callander. I love to gaze at the peaty brown water tumbling and foaming over the rocks and to wonder (yes, with emerveillement) at the incredible way the water continuously sculpts the stone.

water and rock
water and rock
water and rock
water and rock

Isn’t that amazing? It makes me think of the interconnectedness of everything and of Deleuze‘s concept of becoming. It makes me reflect on how we shape our environment and our environment shapes us, because we are like the water, constantly moving, changing, making choices to go one way or another, our set of possible choices made in the world which we have partly shaped as the water shapes the rock. A constant, dynamic, where the path we take today creates the possible future paths of ourselves and others, as the rock the water shapes creates the water’s possible paths.

But most of all, it just absorbs me, captures my attention, and fills me with wonder.

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to see ourselves as others see us

Posted in from the reading room, health, life, perception, psychology on July 27, 2009| 1 Comment »

That famous line from Burns’ “To a Louse”…….Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us – lovely sentiment, but just not possible! I was reminded of it as I read two related articles by Emily Pronin recently (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,Vol. 28 No. 3, March 2002 369-381 and the 30 MAY 2008 VOL 320 of SCIENCE Magazine)

Do you ever think why am I only person to see something rationally and reasonably, and everyone else seems biased?
Well, that’s a common experience. It’s also common to wonder why nobody really understands you, and to always fail to completely understand another person.
Why is that?
The practice of medicine is based on understanding……trying to understand what another person is experiencing in order to try and identify whether or not they are ill, and what kind of help they might need. Sounds simple, but it’s far from it.
I recently read two related articles which explain these difficulties very clearly. As with most insights, what they have to say seems clear and obvious once you read it. Both articles deal with the differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others.
In essence they show that for self-knowledge we have continuous access to our inner subjective experience of reality, including the full range of sensory inputs, our emotions, and our thought processes. However, when we try to have knowledge of another person we have no direct access at all to any of these phenomena. How exactly does another person perceive and experience a particular colour, or sound, or smell? What emotional experience are they having? And what are they actually thinking? We don’t know. We can’t know. We have to listen to what they have to say and watch how they behave then make our assumptions. Our assumptions, of course, are based on our perspective, not on theirs.
So it isn’t possible to know another person the way can know ourselves. On top of that, our subjective experience conveys a degree of authenticity to our sense of self, which can never be matched when interpreting the language or behaviour of another.
It’s just how things are. We function in a way which gives great weight to our subjective experience…..even our opinions and assumptions about others gain, for us, this high degree of authenticity. We have a tendency to think we can understand another person better than they can understand themselves. The reality, however, is just the reverse, and we should always doubt our understanding and judgement of others more than we do. That’s why true empathy requires a high level of humility.

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