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Today, an amazing day

Posted in from the dark room, life, philosophy, photography on November 10, 2008| 12 Comments »

Platform 3 rainy morning

I took this photo while standing on a cold, wet platform waiting for a train to take me to work.
This is not an unusual experience. It’s not a rare experience. It’s very easy to bury your head into your shoulders, stand and shiver, and just wish you were somewhere else.

This year I’ve been reading some contemporary French philosophers, Jean-Philippe Ravoux, Pierre Hadot, and Bertrand Vergely. I’ve not read much, but both in interviews they’ve given and in the few books of theirs which I’ve read, I’ve found that they all three mention two common concepts. The two concepts are captured by these two French words – “quotidien” and “emerveillement”.

Quotidien means daily, but not just in the sense of “daily paper”, or “daily bread”, but in the sense of the “everyday”, of daily life. You’ve probably read a lot about the importance of living in the present. It’s certainly a common theme in Eastern philosophy, but it’s also a very common theme in the work of Western self-help writers and psychologists. Both the concept of the present, and that of the “quotidien”, concentrate us on a period of time – the period of time in which we are most alive. I find the concept of the present a little tricky. It’s very hard to pin down. You only have to breathe out and the present has already become the past. So we tend to stretch the boundaries of the present outwards from a moment to a period of time lasting maybe a few minutes, or hours, or even a day or number of days. The more we stretch the boundaries though, the more what we call the present loses its power. I like the French term, “quotidien”. It’s a period of time I can grasp. It’s today. Every day. It’s the time period in which we are alive, our conscious time, the time when we can act.

The second word, “emerveillement”, is about an attitude towards something. It means a state of wonder, of marvel, even of amazement, or awe. Probably the best way to understand this is to think about the way children engage with the world. Young children find the world a fascinating place. Think of how much fun a child can have even with the packaging in which a present is given. The world really is an amazing place. Ceaselessly fascinating. It’s just that on a day to day basis we slip into autopilot, and as we stumble through our days like zombies, our lives literally pass us by.

So here’s the alternative. Today, this very day, let something catch your attention, and just pause for a moment and wonder. That’s what I did as I stood on that windy, rainy platform. I noticed the lights and the way they reflected on the concrete and the rails. I noticed the row of lamps on the opposite platform, and their reflections stretching into the distance. And I saw the green light glowing at the end of the platform, signalling GO. Green for go. Green, the signal to start. The day was beginning. Another amazing day.

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Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech

Posted in life, video, tagged , on November 5, 2008| 8 Comments »

I don’t think I’ve ever been more impressed, moved and inspired by a politician’s speech, than I am by this one.

His beliefs about the possibility of change, the importance of hope and the need for people to join together to act as adults really strike the right chord with me.

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Stories and genes…..how we are made

Posted in art, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, narrative, science on October 26, 2008| 1 Comment »

Although I get a genuine thrill out of scientific discoveries about how the body works, it’s never quite enough for me. I’m always aware of something else. It’s partly that knowledge that a complex whole human being is so much more than the sum of his or her parts. But it’s also the knowledge that characteristics such as consciousness and highly developed language/communication skills aren’t just other elements which make humans different from all other living creatures. Rather they transform us. Our capacities to remember and to imagine open up whole other ways of being for us.

I’m re-reading one of my favourite trilogies (actually I’m re-reading the first two books in anticipation of the publication of the third and final one…….coming soon in English). It’s Jan Kjaerstad’s The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer. In the first of these, I came across this dialogue.

I think what I’m trying to say is that every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules. I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years. They don’t leave me. They settle inside me like – how can I put it? – like sediment.

So you believe the stories you have heard are every bit as important as the genes with which you have been endowed?

Maybe that’s what life is about. Collecting stories, Axel said, building up an arsenal of good tales, that can be put together in all sorts of complicated ways: like DNA.

If you’re right, then it’s not a matter of manipulating our genes but the stories in our lives, said Jonas.

It’s not the sequence of base-pairs, the genes, we ought to be mapping out, but the sequence of the stories that go to make up a life, and who knows? Arrange them differently and you might get another life altogether.

I certainly find that I gain insights and understanding about life from novels, from painting, from music, from movies and photographs, which I don’t get from a reductionist/materialist science. And I think there’s a lot of truth in this dialogue. Sure, it helps us to understand the mechanisms of molecular function, but if we want to understand living, human beings, then we have to understand how to listen and how to tell stories.

This is a significant part of my work as a doctor…….to understand a person by mapping out their stories and, therapeutically, to help them rearrange those stories in ways which enable them to create a different life.

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Statistics, statistics….

Posted in from the reading room, life, science, tagged on October 25, 2008| 3 Comments »

I really enjoyed an Editorial in the Guardian about the unreliability of statistics – here’s the phrase which really made me laugh –

Research in 2005 suggested that only 36% of people think official statistics are accurate

I don’t know, what do you think……..do you believe it?

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Another kind of growth?

Posted in from the living room, life, tagged , , on October 24, 2008| 6 Comments »

The main news programme on the BBC tonight had the word RECESSION plastered behind the newsreaders for virtually the entire duration of the programme. Got me thinking about what on earth’s going on in our “global economy”. It seems the economic system we are all living with is designed around the concept of growth. Technically, a growth rate less than zero for two consecutive quarters is the official definition of a “recession”. Some of the items covered under this heading included fears of shop owners that people won’t buy so much this Christmas. But hold on a moment. Does this make sense? Can you really design a system that will work forever on the basis of consumption and production of more, more, more? We’ve already seen in recent weeks the consequences of a financial system geared around the mantra of making more and more money. In a finite world, does any of this make sense?

And what happens when human beings just keep consuming more and more? Oh sure, they grow all right – take a look at this map of the increasing levels of obesity in the USA – watch it spread across the whole continent like a contagion. This growth, this getting bigger, fatter, consuming more……this is health? This is a goal worth striving for? This is a system which will deliver good lives for the human race?

I don’t think so.

You see growth in a healthy way, growth in Nature isn’t about ever increasing consumption and accumulation. It’s about development. A healthy child grows into a healthy adult by maturing and developing. This involves learning, experience, acquiring skills, becoming resilient, adaptable and fit. That kind of growth is sustainable. That kind of growth is worth pursuing.

I don’t have the answers to this one, but it just strikes me that maybe we need an economic model which is based on a more natural and a more human concept of growth…….development, maturity and the fitness to be able to cope with what comes along. Not the current model based on greed, consumption and ever increasing production. The current model doesn’t work. It’s an illusion.

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Metaphors for education

Posted in from the reading room, life on October 24, 2008| 5 Comments »

I just stumbled across this quote and I liked it so much I thought I’d share it –

We are to regard the mind not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statute by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and feel–to dare, to do, and to suffer.
– Mark Hopkins, Induction address as president of Williams College, 1836.

The flame metaphor really does work for me. I feel the same way about sharing ideas and insights – the things I put in this blog. When my flame adds to your flame there’s twice the energy, twice the heat and twice the light.

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Happiness, wellbeing, love……

Posted in life, personal growth on October 14, 2008| 3 Comments »

The “self-help” industry has been around for many years, but it seems to be growing ever larger. There are countless books, websites and courses on this subject. However, it’s hard to find anything which takes a fresh angle on the subject. One change is that increasingly the explicit language used is about “happiness” or “wellbeing”. But the focus is still, largely, the same – SELF. We read about “self-help”, about “getting what you want”, about “personal growth”. Has it ever struck you how often it’s about “me”!

There’s a change in the air however. Roman Krznaric writes about “outrospection” as a counter to the predominance of “introspection”.  And Mark Vernon has recently written a book on “Wellbeing” which also seems to develop this way of thinking. Here’s a great review of his book on Mark’s own blog. The review is by John Armstrong, and he writes…

Losing weight, taking exercise and eating the right food, improving your looks, making a sea change or a tree change, simplifying your life: these are strategies for wellbeing and they are the stock topics of a million and one newspaper articles. But the avalanche of advice suggests collective desperation: we have to tell ourselves so much about how to be happy, and say it so often, because things aren’t going well. It’s striking that the kind of advice that’s given tends to target the body first: it’s all about how you look, how healthy, fit and active you are.

He goes on to say….

In this pointed little book, British philosopher Mark Vernon argues that we’ve been looking for happiness in the wrong places. He draws attention to two aspects of life that are deeply connected to living well: love and what he calls transcendence. Love involves caring profoundly for something apart from yourself, and doing so requires that you discover capacities for generosity and self-sacrifice. Love, in a curious way, is intensely unfashionable. That’s because love isn’t egotistical; it isn’t cool; it doesn’t focus on how sexy or hip one is; and you can’t possibly love another person for being trendy or famous or rich or wearing the right clothes. So real love is counter-intuitive in a shallow world. And that’s ironic because love is central to leading a good life, and to being happy. Our world is addicted to the idea of happiness but rejects a crucial way in which happiness isattained.

That particular sentence about love – “Love involves caring profoundly for something apart from yourself, and doing so requires that you discover capacities for generosity and self-sacrifice.’ – really struck home for me. I think “health” is a positive experience which has distinct characteristics, and one of these characteristics is “engagement”. When we are engaged with what lies outside us – Nature; other people; Art; community, and so on – then we experience “flow”, “happiness” and “wellbeing”. In that sense, “health”, strangely, isn’t really found inside a person, it’s found in the contextualised person, the connected person, not in a separate, discrete individual.

Even more of a challenge is what Armstrong writes about the place of suffering in life –

These are not in any way recipes for a painless life and that’s how it should be. Understandably, we seek to avoid pain. But much of what is important and valuable in life is inescapably connected to suffering. You cannot form a deep relationship with another person unless you worry about them, fear what could happen, get bitterly disappointed with yourself for letting them down or for causing them anguish or frustration. And eventually you will have to mourn for them or they will have to mourn for you. You can’t engage with the things that make for a good life unless you are able to cope with suffering. It’s the same with any worthwhile creative effort, with noble political hopes, with any desire to improve the world: worthwhile, valuable, but a hard road.

What this paragraph provoked for me was Wim Wenders “Wings of Desire” (remade in English as “City of Angels“) which tells the story of an angel who becomes a human in order to fully experience the pleasures and the suffering (ultimately, the mortality) of human life. It’s a great movie and is, I think, one of the greatest celebrations of what it is to be human.

There’s definitely something worthwhile and interesting here. What I like about it is a change of direction away from looking inwards, towards emphasising what we’re connected to which is greater than ourselves, towards looking outwards – it’s about becoming more loving.

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Is every day the same?

Posted in creativity, life on October 9, 2008| 7 Comments »

When I recently made myself a visual diary, I explored the origins of the names of the days of the week. In fact, a while ago, when I went to Japanese language evening class, I was struck by how the days of the week in Japanese were named after certain planets, and knowing a bit of French I was struck by the fact that the French too named the days of the week after the same planets. It’s not so clear in English because we’ve swapped the Greek and Roman Gods for Norse ones – like Woden and Thor, but in fact, these Gods are associated with exactly the same planets for each of the days as we find in the Japanese and French traditions.

One of the things which makes human beings unique is our ability to handle and play with metaphors and symbols. We are great at both applying and discovering meanings. Absolutely everything can be considered to be a representation of something else. This allows us to experience life in a rich variety of ways. So I got to wondering about the Classical myths associated with each of the planets and their associated gods. How would a Monday feel if I was more aware of its association with the Moon? Any different? How about a Friday and its association with Venus? Would the week develop a different rhythm if I reflected on each day and the different qualities related to the myths and stories we’ve associated with each of the planets? Let me be clear, I’m not talking about astrology, I’m talking about myth, narrative and symbolism……the way we use these ways of colouring and even creating our experiences.

I’m still working on this but before I say more about it, there’s another factor affecting my thoughts about it. I’ve just finished reading “La sagesse des jours”, by Andre Guigot. The translation of the book’s title would be “The Wisdom of the Days”, and in it, this French philosopher considers how each day has its own unique qualities which can stimulate our thoughts about different aspects of life and living depending on which particular issues are predominant on specific days of the week. In fact, it wouldn’t be possible to write a book like this in English, certainly not for a UK audience (and probably not for a US audience either), because we’ve lost the kinds of rhythms to life which the French still enjoy. To give you a flavour of his book, he identifies Saturday as market day for example, (I don’t know any towns in France which don’t have a market on a Saturday!) and he identifies Tuesday as the first day of commerce in the week (many shops in France, in fact most shops in smaller towns, close on a Monday) It’s an inspiring little book but translating it into a UK context isn’t very easy.

So I’m wondering how to ascribe certain qualities to particular days of the week. And I’ve come up with a few ideas already. For example, the moon is usually associated with feelings and with reflection. Could Mondays be days to be more aware of what’s going on inside? To be more aware of my emotional reactions throughout the day? Then, Tuesday is Mars day. Themes associated with Mars are themes of physical strength and fitness, and themes of the urge to distinguish oneself as a unique individual. This contrasts a lot with Friday which is associated with Venus. Whilst Mars is associated with maleness, or with yang energy, Venus is associated with femaleness, or yin energy. Whilst Mars is associated with distinguishing ourselves as individuals, Venus is associated with togetherness, with love, relationships and belonging. Wednesday’s name comes from Mercury, the “winged messenger”, a day to play with words and symbols, to be linguistically creative….hey, maybe a day for writing poetry, or for communicating. Thursday is named after Thor, or Jupiter, associated with expansion, of reaching out, of empathy and the understanding of others which comes with travel. Whilst Saturday is associated with Saturn and themes of conservation, of strengthening and consolidating. Which leaves Sunday as a day to celebrate Life and being alive.

You get the idea? This is just a brief outline, but I hope you can see the germ of an idea here. I hope you can see a way of creating your own personal rhythm to the week. I’ll work on this and return to it, but meantime, I’d be really interested to hear your own take on this. How do you distinguish the days of the week from each other? What qualities or characteristics would you ascribe to particular days?

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A Visual Diary

Posted in creativity, life, tagged , , , on October 5, 2008| 15 Comments »

It’s come to that time of year when I’m needing to put some events, meetings, trips and so on into a 2009 diary. For the last couple of years I’ve been using a small moleskine week over two pages diary but I’ve grown disenchanted with the linearity of such diaries. They are all divided up into sections (either per day, or per week, or month) and all the sections are of the same size but because days are all different (well, they are in my life anyway!) I find that some days the entries are spilling over into surrounding days and other days are virtually blank. This all comes down to how you use a diary. I’m pretty minimalist. Key points only for me.

So, having looked around in the stationery stores I decided to MAKE a diary which was better suited to my purposes. I won’t lay out here all the steps involved in the creative process but I thought I’d share the result. Maybe you’ll be inspired by some element of this, make your own, or borrow some of the ideas I’ve used.

I decided to stick with Moleskine, but to use what they call a “Japanese fold” notebook – like this –
Japanese fold moleskine
This is a continuous single sheet of paper which is folded instead of cut to make the separate pages. I wanted to use a double page spread for each week. I mark the top right hand corner of the right hand page with the starting and ending dates of that week (my week starts on Monday and ends on the Sunday).
I want to use the whole spread to lay out my commitments and information in a kind of “mind map” style, so I thought I’d put the days of the week down the middle of the spread. That looked pretty ugly and I am a very visual person (which you’ll have realised from all the photography on this blog!), so I decided instead to use a symbol for each day of the week. Well, it turns out that in many languages of the world the names of the days are related to the names of the sun, the moon and five planets – the same ones in many, many languages.
Sunday = Sun
Monday (French; Lundi) = Moon
Tuesday (French; Mardi) = Mars
Wednesday (French; Mercredi) = Mercury
Thursday (French; Jeudi) = Jupiter
Friday (French; Vendredi) = Venus
Saturday = Saturn
I didn’t want to draw all the symbols every week so I made a jpeg of the symbols and uploaded it to moo.com to get stickers made. Here they are –
moo stickers days of the week
I place one sticker just to the left of the centrefold (I have more entries usually on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, than I do on Thursday, Friday and Saturday). You’ll see I’ve got the Sun in the middle (it’s not a day I usually enter any commitments). There are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the right, and Thursday, Friday and Saturday on the left, and they follow the sequence like a clock face (time goes clockwise in my life! 🙂 )
one week spread

To enter a new piece of info I draw a pencil line out from the day of the week and enter the details. I can follow this item out with branching lines, mindmap style, if necessary. (I’ve found it useful to put the actual date (numerical day of the month) at the root of the line.)
That’s it really.
I’m enjoying it. It’s aesthetically pleasing and it suits the way I think and I organise.
I’ve added two additional features to make it more functional. In the pocket at the back of the moleskine I put 3 x 5 index cards, one for each month ahead (carrying only 3 or 4 at a time). This gives me a kind of planner overview.
monthly index cards

And I’ve attached two small post-it pads inside the back cover, to write details of any dates not covered by the existing spreads or cards.
post-its

I’ve been using this new diary for about a month now and I’m finding it’s sparking off a whole chain of thought I hadn’t predicted. But I’ll tell you about that in a separate post!

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What makes life unbearable?

Posted in from the reading room, health, life on September 30, 2008| 6 Comments »

I read a short article in the Glasgow Herald yesterday about a London based financier, Kirk Stephenson, Chief Operating Officer of a private equity company called Olivant. Originally a New Zealander, he had a senior position in his company. He was a wealthy man who had a £3.6M Chelsea home, a home in the West Country and who loved to travel, acquiring a formidable knowledge of boutique hotels and loved going to opera. He was married and had an 8 year old son. Here’s how his family described him –

a life-enhancer – not with a showy, life and soul of the party sort of charisma, but as a planner and coordinator who quietly and with no fuss ensured everyone around him had a marvellous time. A dedicated father and a devoted husband, he valued his family above all else. At the same time he had a gift for friendship and was a generous and exceptional host, gathering his wide circle around him in summer villas all over Europe, as well as for parties, dinners and opera. Any occasion with Kirk was a wonderful experience. He spent many a fine – and less than fine – summer evening listening to opera at Garsington, Glyndebourne and the Grange with friends. (He) also loved board games and tennis, passions he shared with his treasured eight-year old son Lucas.

Aged 47, he killed himself by throwing himself in front of a train last week.

How do you make sense of that? You’ll find so much in self-help books, books about happiness, websites which advise you how to have a good life……..but just what constitutes a GOOD life? By good life, I mean one worth living, one you want to hold onto, one you don’t want to give up.

Obviously I only know what the papers published about this man, but the details are desperately perturbing. Those little details paint a picture of a successful professional, a materially wealthy man, a loved man with many friends, a young son…….a man who committed suicide at 47.

I don’t have any answers here. It’s just the story really disturbed me, and it’s continued to niggle away at me since I read it.

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