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Archive for the ‘life’ Category

An amazing story

Posted in from the reading room, life on December 13, 2007| 3 Comments »

The front page of The Independent today carried an amazing story of a Kenyan man, Sammy Gitau. Sammy was born and grew up in the slums of Nairobi, scavenging on the rubbish tips. He found a prospectus for Manchester University and it captured his imagination. He dreamed that one day he’d go and study there despite the fact he only had two years of formal education. However, people laughed at the ridiculousness of his dream so he stopped talking about it. Things got worse for him and he became the main family breadwinner at 13 looking after his 10 siblings after his father was murdered. He earned his family income through drug dealing and theft. Then he ended up in a coma after a cocaine overdose. He survived and said of this experience

“When you are dying you make a deal with God,” he said. “You say, ‘Just get me out of here and I will do anything. I will go back and stop children going through the same kind of life as me’.”

He set up projects teaching slum children skills like carpentry, baking, tailoring and so on and came to the notice of some charities working in the area, one of whose employees heard about Sammy’s dream and helped him apply for a postgrad course in Manchester. They accepted him but British immigration turned him down not believing that he had any chance of managing the university course. Seven months later a judge overturned that decision and Sammy, with financial support came to Manchester.

Today he graduated with a Masters degree and said

“For the past few days I haven’t been able to sleep – I’ve been too excited. So many doors had been shut in my face because I didn’t have this or that. Now, finally, I can think big. Now I can go back to my projects and make sure they do well.”

sammy

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The importance of the invisible

Posted in life, philosophy on December 11, 2007| 8 Comments »

What’s important in your life? Go on, take a pen and paper and make a list.

What’s on your list?

I’ll bet that much of your list will be invisible things – relationships, love, meaning, purpose, happiness, health, safety……..I don’t know – you tell me – what would you include and what’s the ratio of invisible things to visible, material things on your list?

Robert Solomon uses the idea of thin-ness to rail against the sterility of a life which is based on logic, but excludes a consideration of emotions. I think a materialistic life is a thin life – not that we don’t need material things (like food!) but that to consider only the material, physical phenomena of life as real, is both a delusion and, frankly, a poor experience of life. Life with the life taken out!

Saint-Exupery had it right in his Petit Prince –

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

 or – in the original –

– Adieu, dit le renard. Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

– L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux, répéta le petit prince, afin de se souvenir.

so, do you agree? Are the most important things in life invisible? Are they exactly what cannot be measured?

 

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Fountains

Posted in from the dark room, life on December 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Our garden at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital is lovely but one feature never quite made it to completion – the fountain. In fact the original fountain was ruled unacceptable by “health and safety” (don’t get me started!) “in case it causes Legionnaires Disease”! They did actually build the stonework with a modified design which would “bubble but not spray”. Well even that never got going so our fountain is a pile of stones. Sad!

One of the things I love about France is fountains. They seem to have no qualms about Legionnaires Disease (even though they’ve got way more legionnaires!).

Here’s a spectacular one in Nice –

Fountain Nice

You’ll see one of the men on poles there.
This is a dynamic fountain and at full force it shoots way up into the sky.

Full fountain Nice

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Flow

Posted in from the consulting room, health, life on December 9, 2007| 2 Comments »

Flow

There’s something about the idea of flow which really seems to work when thinking about health. In Chinese medicine there is a concept of “chi” or “Qi”– a kind of energy. We don’t use such a concept in our Western model but maybe we should. Why? Well a couple of reasons –

First of all – measuring energy – I’m not talking about weird and wonderful machines that claim to measure energies in a human being – I don’t think we’ve understood what energy is in a biological sense. I don’t mean calories and basal metabolic rates and so on. I mean that sense of vitality, of well-being, of having a certain amount of energy, that’s hard to pin down but so, so easy to know. Think of the 1 – 10 scale and asking people to self-rate their energy level with 1 representing the worst possible energy they can imagine and 10 the best. They can do it in a flash. People have no trouble quickly assigning a number on scale to their current energy state. You can even break it down into different energies – mental, physical, emotional for example, assessing each using the 1 – 10 scale. People can do it easily. What are they doing? How do they assess their energy level? What are they measuring and how? It’s not at all clear but it still seems both possible and useful.

Secondly, there is the idea of energy as flow. In the Chinese system chi isn’t just energy that sits there humming away at a certain level. It’s something more dynamic than that. They have descriptions of this energy as flowing or becoming sluggish or even stopped. So for us, we can not only measure our energy levels but we can sense the flow – is my vitality flowing? Is my physical, mental, emotional energy flowing? Or have I become sluggish, or even blocked? Maybe we can just adopt the Chinese concept without looking for a thing called chi, and without taking on board all the detailed dogma of TCM chi?

Csikszentmihalyi uses the concept in relation to psychological processes in his studies of happiness. I like his work and I think he’s described something very real by using the concept of flow, but I’m meaning something more holistic than he does. I mean flow in the sense of the whole organism, not just a psychological state or a function of mind, but also the function of all the body’s systems and processes.

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Community

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on December 6, 2007| Leave a Comment »

old town Nice, originally uploaded by bobsee.

This is a photo taken looking up from a junction in the old town of Nice. The old town has very narrow streets and very tall buildings. It struck me that photos of cities built in recent years aren’t so different from this and a line or two of T S Eliot popped into my head – from his Choruses from The Rock

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

Metropolitan Plaza Ikebukuro Tokyo

(……looking up in Ikebukuro, Tokyo)

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Happiness or meaning…..you have to choose?

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.

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Walking in step

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on December 5, 2007| 1 Comment »

in step, originally uploaded by bobsee.

It is important for each of us to be aware of our uniqueness and to celebrate our differences. We need that to develop a strong secure sense of self and we need it even at the level of our immune system which rigorously defends us against everything that is not us.
But we also need to connect, to build relationships and to share experiences with others. We can do that in many ways, and lots of those ways are quite subconscious. I wonder if these two young women went to the shoe shop together and bought these shoes? I wonder if they chose to wear them explicitly to make a connection with each other. They are different enough in the rest of their dress style after all.
But what really struck me in this shot was how in step they were. They’re not just wearing red shoes of similar (but not same) style, but they are walking perfectly in step. Almost like dancers.
You’ll be familiar with mirroring. It’s something I see in consultations frequently. When two people are connected, their unconscious gestures, (scratching their nose, touching their ear, body position etc) often mirror each other. There’s even a neurological theory about mirroring neurones which are networks in the brain which fire off movement patterns which would mimic another person’s movements.
Whatever the explanation, these connections are the basis of empathy – the ability, sometimes literally! to put yourself in another person’s shoes!

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The influences on attractiveness

Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, psychology on November 30, 2007| 2 Comments »

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder it’s said, but maybe it’s not just in the eye? This study asked people to rate the attractiveness of others from photos along with short personality descriptions. They found that

individuals – both men and women – who exhibit positive traits, such as honesty and helpfulness, are perceived as better looking. Those who exhibit negative traits, such as unfairness and rudeness, appear to be less physically attractive to observers.

This reminded me of a study I read ages ago which got students to guesstimate the height of a lecturer who was introduced as either “Mr”, “Dr”, or “Professor”. There was a consistent increase in the perceived height of the lecturer when introduced as “Dr” over “Mr” and “Professor” over “Dr”.

It also brought to mind the effect of pupil size on perceived attractiveness. A study done using actors and actresses with sets of photos before and after having their pupils dilated showed that observers consistently rate the photos where the pupils are larger as being the more attractive.

So I guess there are many influences on our perceptions of the physical – personality traits, status and state of arousal. Are there others you are aware of?

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Tv or not tv?

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on November 30, 2007| 2 Comments »

I like your tv, originally uploaded by bobsee.

Some people think TV is a bad thing. They ban it in their homes. I knew some families who had this approach and one day their kids didn’t appear back home from school at the usual time. When they set out to search for them they found them all standing outside a TV rentals shop watching programmes through the window!
This little boy reminded me of that.
I think it’s a good idea to teach your children how to handle the technologies that pervade their lives.

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Once upon a tree

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on November 29, 2007| 2 Comments »

As I walked into the Place de l’Hotel de Ville, in Aix-en-Provence, last night, I could hear somebody speaking very loudly. Well, these days, there are always people around you using mobile phones. Mobile phone users fall into one of two camps. There are those who try to speak very quietly, maybe even holding a hand over their mouth while they mumble and whisper into their phone, but there are others who are a bit like old-fashioned town criers yelling their opinions and news so that everyone in a 500 yard radius hears exactly what they have to say. These latter seem to outnumber the former. So when I heard the loud declamation I assumed it was somebody on their mobile phone and didn’t think any more about it till the square gradually cleared and the voice continued loudly. It seemed to be coming from near the great tree.

the voice

But it wasn’t someone on their phone and it wasn’t even one of the people strolling past the tree. In fact, pretty much everyone walked on and the loud voice from the tree continued. I noticed a bike resting against the trunk of the tree and up above I saw a man.

up above the bike

Yep, there was a man, sitting in the branches of a tree and reading. Loudly. My first thought was that he was declaiming poetry. French is such a beautiful language to my ear that the assumption I’m hearing poetry is an easy one. But as I listened I realised it wasn’t poetry. He was reading the book out loud and it was a textbook. My French isn’t good enough to but he used the word “technic” a lot, and other words from economics and politics were scattered through the sentences. What was he doing? Studying? When I was at University, one year, a fellow student walked back and forth across the grass outside my window, textbook in hand, reading it out loud as he got it into his brain. By exam time that one student had created a deep trench! Not just a path, but a trench! Was that was this guy was doing? Getting the facts of the textbook into his head? Or was he trying to change the world with words? There’s a man walks around the streets of Carcassonne singing a song of his own making. He has sheaves of handwritten paper in his hands and walks round and round the streets of the old town singing his words at the top of his voice. You can hear his words about the ‘Carcassonais’ and ‘Cathars’ and several entirely private fantasies about places and people echoing down the narrow streets. I’m never sure what he’s doing either. Everyone just ignores him. As if he’s doing nothing unusual. And the man in the tree was the same. Nobody stopped to listen. Nobody called up ‘hey, what are you doing up there?’ (nope, I didn’t either!) Was he marking his territory with his words? Was he casting spells to change his world?
Isn’t reality strange? You couldn’t make it up!

once upon a tree

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