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Archive for the ‘personal growth’ Category

The down cycle

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on August 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I’m pretty keen on creativity. I have an eye for what’s new. In fact, I’ve been pretty impressed with the old philosophy which says to treat every day as if it’s the first time you’ll have experienced it. Because it is. Each patient who came into my consulting room was coming in to tell me a new experience, a new story. Even if I already knew them quite well they’ll still come and tell me something I hadn’t heard them say before. Everyone had the capacity to surprise me.

I love the Spring time of the year because I love to see the new seeds pushing up the first green shoots, love to see the buds beginning to form and unfurl, love to see the first sight of the migratory birds returning from their winter travels.

But Autumn is sort of opposite to that. It’s a time of a certain paradox – a time of fruition and therefore harvest, but also a time when the world begins to wind down, go to sleep, or even die off. It’s a time you might call the “down cycle”. I love that too. I love to see the leaves turn yellow, red, brown, golden. I enjoy sweeping up the leaves that fall from the mulberry tree.

This photo reminds me of the down cycle. Here’s a piece of iron. Some large, once strong panel or plate which someone created. But it’s been cast aside for a long time, and Nature has begun to break it down. The once smooth and shiny surface is breaking up into these little chips and flakes. The chips and flakes will, finally, turn to dust.

Does that seem like a loss?

I suppose viewed from one perspective it is. But Nature has down phases as well as resting phases, waking, growing phases, and maturing phases too. Could anything exist if any of these phases didn’t exist?

I think we need to remember that sometimes, and not get too upset and anxious about change. Nothing stays the same. And because nothing stays the same we are able to start each day as if we had never lived it before….because we haven’t. Imagine! How much there will be to discover today. How many new experiences and sensations you will have. How many new thoughts and feelings you will experience.

Life is dynamic. As Carlo Rovelli, the physicist says

A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

I think an awareness of the phases and cycles of life reminds us of that. There’s beauty in every phase.

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Nostalgia for normal

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on August 24, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I came across this old photo the other day. I took it in Paris. In the foreground you can see some of the famous love locks. I’m not sure where this habit began but you can find it all over the world now. In this case these ones are along one of the banks of the Seine. On the opposite bank, the first thing you probably notice is the huge “Printemps” department store with its facade covered with scaffolding for building works. Rather than just cover the scaffolding with boring, bland material, they’ve made it look like a giant mural depicting a happy, carefree shopper swinging her bags of purchases as she almost flies over the ground. Right in front of the shop, but down a level on a promenade, you can see a gathering of people. Maybe if you zoom in you’ll make out that there are some musicians in this little crowd, because that’s what was going on. There was a jazz band playing by the side of the river. A kind of large busking event. They attracted people to gather around them and listen to the upbeat delightful music, but you can see a fair number of people also stopped on the bridge up above them to look and to listen.

Last night I watched a movie. A British rom-com called “Finding Your Feet“. I enjoyed it and had some real laugh out loud moments. For example, the character played by Joanna Lumley saying she had been married five times and the last time the marriage had ended “due to religious differences” – “He thought he was God and I disagreed”. But there are sad themes of loss and dying in the movie too. In one scene most of the cast go off to Rome to take part in a dance performance, and as they spend a day and an evening enjoying Rome together I was suddenly struck with a feeling of loss myself.

I realised I had the same feeling when I looked at this photo here. It’s a sort of nostalgia for what we used to call normal. There they are, all kinds of people, out in the city, no need for masks, no need for “social distancing”, as carefree as the character painted on the Printemps mural.

I have a longing for that normality again. I guess a lot of us are feeling pretty fed up with this pandemic by now. I guess many of us aren’t feeling that comfortable with all the measures introduced to “protect us” by making us wary of others, and constantly reminding us that we might catch this virus, get ill, and even die. It’s not getting much easier, is it?

So what are our options?

Mine is a mixture of acceptance and adaptation. The virus is present. It’s highly unlikely that I will catch it, and, apart from my age, I’m not in any of the groups likely to suffer the infection most severely. In fact, most people won’t catch it, and most of those who do won’t suffer much. But some will. Enough to overwhelm hospitals and carers….potentially. So, at the very least from a position of care and solidarity I need to change some of my habits. So I choose to go along with the increased physical distancing, the wearing of a mask to reduce the chance of spreading the virus, and to let go off some of the things which had become a normal part of my life – travel, day trips to cities, visits to museums and galleries, lunch in a seaside town during the holiday season. I’m sure you’ll have your own list.

So, I have this nostalgia for “normal” and I hope “normal”, at least as an experience will return soon.

Meanwhile I’m drawing my focus in to the everyday wonders of life here and now. Enjoying the glimpses of the “Little Owl”s, or the “Barn Owl” which flew over my head the other night in the dark. Gazing at the sparkling night sky wondering what I’m looking at. Sunset bathing…..basking in the glorious colours of the clouds as the last minutes of the day turn the world pink, and rose, and violet. Losing myself in wonder at the drunken stumbling movements of bees gathering nectar deep in the big yellow pumpkin flowers. I could go on.

I’ve started the practice of “morning pages” again (if you don’t know this practice, google it. Or check out this older post of mine). I’m writing these daily posts, compiling and editing photos and texts for my next book (remember to check out my last one – “And not Or“) I’m reading as avidly as I’ve ever read, and pretty much each day feels like a good one.

What are you doing?

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The importance of contexts and connections

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on August 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

When you look at this photo I think it seems to be a mountain with clouds and sky just above it. But you immediately recognise that’s not quite right.

So then you see this and you think it’s trees with the sky above….maybe one of those forest pictures where the photographer directs the camera straight up to the sky and catches the topmost branches of several trees. But that’s not quite right.

In the first photo, the apparent mountain in the foreground is an odd shape. Mountains just don’t look like that, then, in the second photo, what’s that rock doing balanced on top of the trees?

The thing is, these are both photos of reflections on the still water of a loch. Once you know that, the whole image makes sense.

This inspires a train of thought in my mind…..about how we perceive and make sense of reality. It’s a complicated business but it involves context. It helps to know where you are when you are looking around and what you can see in the immediate environment. There is nobody standing at the edge of this loch wondering what they are looking at. They know where they are and how they got there.

We make sense of reality by spotting patterns, but we need to learn the patterns before we can spot them. A bit chicken and egg-ish isn’t it? In normal life these two aspects of the same thing are iterative…..we are constantly learning and spotting patterns, the more we learn, the more we spot, and the more we spot, the more we learn.

Medical Practice is like that. Doctors learn pathology and the natural history of diseases. In other words, they the patterns of illness. The better a doctor knows the patterns, the more easily they’ll be spotted – or diagnosed. And the more diagnoses a doctor makes, the better the knowledge of patterns. We call it experience. I always felt that a good diagnosis was crucial in good health care. If the diagnosis was wrong, the chances are the treatment would be wrong.

In my first Paediatric job, my mentor told me on the first day that his goal for my six months with him was to teach me how to recognise a sick child. When he said that I thought it was a pretty bizarre thing to say. I mean, wasn’t it obvious when a child was sick? Wasn’t the goal to diagnose ie name the sickness? Well, of course, he was right. I was wrong. What he wanted to teach me was that very first important step…..how to recognise, in an instant, that this child was ill and needed immediate attention. Working out exactly what the disease was and how to treat it came a close second, but if you didn’t recognise that the child was sick, all was lost. It turned out that learning was by experience, encountering sick children and healthy children of all ages, to become familiar with what was normal behaviour and demeanour at different developmental stages. That teaching was crucial for my practice as a GP. It let me walk into someone’s house and know instantly that this child needed close attention and help.

The clues, and the signs, were in the contexts, the environments and the relationships. Yes, some were in bodily or facial “signs”, but mostly they were in behaviours and responses.

I suppose it’s that kind of experience and learning which made me suspicious of reductionism and generalisations. Every individual is unique and can only be understood within their contexts, their environments and their relationships.

Diagnose, like pattern spotting, is like joining up the dots. It’s got a lot to do with connections and behaviours. It’s not all about “data” and “measurements”. Especially when considering the real, actual, unique individual here and now.

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Social distancing

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on August 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »

One of my most favourite sculptors is Antony Gormley, he who made “The Angel of the North” which stands beside the M1 in the North of England. His “The Field”, which I saw in Inverleith House in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens years and years ago left an indelible mark on me. I recalled it in my mind time and time again as I wrestled with the paradox of what makes every patient unique and what they share with others.

But I was thinking again of his work the other day and I remember “Capacitor” which is what you see in this photo at the beginning of this post. This was one of the works he created from an outline shape of his body. In this case he made it with dozens of metal rods.

Maybe this came to mind because for the first time since I moved here almost six years ago I came across a hedgehog in the garden after dark, as I was out closing the shutters for the night.

I have such a clear memory of being in the same room as “Capacitor”….how awkward and dangerous it felt to be anywhere near this work. Like it could take your eye out, or pierce your body if you got too close.

So, you can see why that’s come back to me now. When I’m out and about now I sometimes think everyone has got on a suit that makes them look like “Capacitor”. Except all the spikes are invisible. Has this become the famous “new normal”? All of us increasing our stand-offishness (is that a word?). All of giving each other “a wide berth”. Everyone now regarded as a potential threat.

Then it struck me…have you seen the images of the coronavirus?

It’s a ball of spikes!

Yikes! It’s turning us all into images of itself!!

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Intricately bound

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on August 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Plants send out creepers and tendrils which twist and turn and spiral on their way are always fascinating. For the last five years I’ve been composting grass cuttings and “garden waste” then spreading it on the veggie patch. It’s turned a stony, hard, bare piece of ground into something of a mini-jungle once each year’s vegetables start to grow. This year there must have been some viable pumpkin seeds in the compost because a couple of pumpkin plants started to grow in places where I definitely hadn’t planted them. Once they started to grow they took off, spreading all around the entire patch, weaving between other plants, sending spiralling tendrils out to grasp onto to anything it could touch, reaching each of the two boundary walls (the veggie patch is in a corner), climbing those walls, the fences above them and by now developing over half a dozen huge pumpkins. Every morning you could see how much further the plant had managed to grow since the previous morning. It’s astonishing.

This photo isn’t of a pumpkin plant. There are many, many varieties of plant which have this ability to send out these incredible tendrils. They reach out, touch and catch on. They connect, they bind, they tie together. Look at the size of these ones! You can sense how strong they are.

I was thinking this morning about how pretty much every single atom on the Earth has been here since the planet was formed. They arrived here from distant stars. I was contemplating how the Earth doesn’t make new copper atoms, gold atoms and so on. But what Nature does is create what’s unique and new every single day. She does that by making connections, reaching out, touching, drawing together, blending and binding. In other words, the world is full of newness every day….not new elements but new forms. Nature is like the most inventive creative artist you could imagine, fashioning brand new, individual, unique, forms every single day.

Making connections. Making new connections. That’s the essence of creation.

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Alarm

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on August 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I know there’s a colour called “sea green” but I must say that most times I look at the sea, I don’t think “Look how green the sea is!” But on this particular day, I did. In fact, the singular most striking feature of the sea in this photo is how green it is. Growing up in Scotland I’m used to seeing the land as green….the hills, glens, fields and forests. There is a lot of green in Scotland. I associate those greens with Nature, and with Life.

When I think of a calm, soothing landscape, I usually envisage one which is green, but this green seascape isn’t calming at all. The fact that the wind is whipping up the waves and causing them break far from shore tells me this is a day of a more “active” form of weather…..not a day of peace and ease. And there’s something else in this scene which makes it a bit disturbing….the lighthouse.

The lighthouse? Why should that be disturbing? Well, what’s a lighthouse for? For warning people sailing in this area. Why this area? Because there are dangerous rocks, and/or dangerous tides here. If you’re not careful around here then you could run aground, and even lose your life.

Noticing the lighthouse and realising that I was feeling unsettled as I looked at this image reminded me that we are constantly bombarded with warnings these days – “yellow weather warnings” (what is yellow weather by the way?), “red weather warnings”, “danger to life”, “virus warnings”, “health warnings”, “safety warnings”…….there’s no end to it.

What do all these warnings do? Keep us safe? Maybe. But one thing they certainly do is trigger our inner warning systems. There’s a part of the brain which is called the “amygdala” which has a key role in our alert system. It sets off the famous “Fight or flight” response, flooding our bodies with adrenaline, speeding our hearts and our breathing, tensing our muscles, tightening our stomachs, preparing us to take action. What kind of action? Survival actions.

This essential survival system comes with a problem however….when it’s constantly triggered it sets a higher level of body defence…..that’s the inflammatory system…..and a chronically alerted, activated inflammatory system is at the basis of most chronic disease – from heart disease, to any form of “-itis”, to autoimmune diseases and chronic psychological problem states like chronic anxiety, phobias and depression.

So, I think it’s important to be able to do something about that, and here’s a simple, but helpful exercise – take three very deep breaths, slowly one after the other, completely filling your lungs, then gradually letting all the air out bit by bit. Repeating that big, deep breath three times.

That’s it.

Sure, there are loads more things you can do, but, believe me, this is a good start! Firstly by consciously choosing to do these three breaths you’re taking your attention away from the alarm state. Secondly, this form of breathing changes the chemical balance in your body, changing the oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio in a way which triggers cascades of anti-inflammatory change in your whole system. Thirdly, it triggers the vagus nerve, slowing the heart and pretty much literally steadying your nerves. Finally, this all breaks the loops, helping your break out of stuck hyper-activated circuits….a kind of “re-set” if you like.

If you want to extend these benefits and deepen them, the next thing to do is call to mind a calming, safe, relaxing scene…..preferably one you once experienced. Re-create that event, or that circumstance for a few moments and the emotions which arise with it will begin to dilute the alarm state and deepen the benefits of the three breaths.

You might want some help with this. I find a sunset helps. Here’s one taken from garden on a night where the crescent moon sat above the plum tree and the planet Venus hung in the depending night sky just above the moon.

You might well have a photo of your own somewhere on your phone…..a peaceful, pleasing, calming scene, which you, yourself witnessed. If you do, mark it as a favourite and keep it handy. It could be just what you need.

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Catching the light

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on August 16, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Emanuele Coccia, the Italian philosopher who brings a new and refreshing perspective to the life by considering plant life says that what plants do so well is capture “extraterrestrial light” and turn it into energy and forms.

Two things struck me when I first heard him say that – “extraterrestrial light”? What’s that? Well it’s the light which comes from outside of the Earth isn’t it? Natural light. The light of the Sun, and the light of stars. The light of the moon is reflected light, so is just another dimension of the light of the Sun.

Without this “extraterrestrial light” from the Sun there would be no Life on Earth. Plants are THE way of transforming light into energy. We get all the energy we need by consuming other life forms at different stages on the food chain, but all of what we eat has plant life at its core. We fundamentally consume the light of the Sun through plants. Maybe through some animals we eat, but they do didn’t capture the energy directly from the Sun. All animals get all the energy they need AFTER the plants have captured it from the Sun.

The second thing which came to mind was Richard Feynman’s observation that trees make themselves “out of thin air“. That startling observation was based on the fact that trees capture carbon dioxide from the air, turn it into carbon based structures and emit oxygen as a “by product”. They also capture all the energy they need directly from the Sun using photosynthesis (a trick no animal ever managed to acquire!)

Then a third thing came to mind….the fact that we are all made from the atoms created in the stars. All the natural elements we find on Earth didn’t originate here. They originated in the great furnaces and explosions of distant stars millennia ago.

All of Life pursues this “extraterrestrial light” – all the plants, all the animals, all living creatures get the energy they need either directly from the Sun or indirectly through the consumption of other creatures which have already captured the sunlight.

Isn’t that a startling thought? That we are ALL light-seekers! All of us surviving and growing by finding and consuming the “extraterrestrial light”.

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The glory of diversity

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on August 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a photo of a small part of something called a “Scratch Patch”. It’s an area about the size of a large room. The floor is covered with polished stones. You pay for a container/jar and can then spend as long as you like filling it with the particular stones which attract you most.

I shared a photo of a pumpkin stall at a farmers’ market the other day to demonstrate the beauty of diversity but then I came across this photo which shows exactly the same thing in the mineral world.

We have a bit of an ambivalent attitude towards stones I think. Maybe because they are inanimate we don’t often value them as much as we do plants or animals, but on the other hand, “precious” stones are considered to be amongst the most valuable objects in the world.

At a simple level many of delight in spotting and picking up a few “interesting” stones when we are out walking – whether it’s through the vineyards, or along a beach. You probably have some favourite stones of your own. Maybe in your pocket, at the bottom of a bag, or on a shelf somewhere in your house.

We must know, instinctively, that stones are not all the same. Otherwise how would we notice some but not others? Why would we choose to pick up and keep certain ones?

I think the attraction of uniqueness runs right through everything in this universe. We humans, each of us unique in our own right, are delighted by uniqueness, whether we find it in our gardens, the paths we walk along, the flowers and trees which grow around us…….

I have often said that what I looked forward to most on a Monday morning was the first clinic of the week. Every single week I knew I’d meet unique patients. Every single day I knew I’d hear unique stories which I’d never heard before. Every single consultation was unique, never to be repeated.

For me, good Medicine couldn’t be reduced to protocols, guidelines and algorithms because every single human life is a unique one. Every single human being is “extraordinary”, not reducible to a class, a type, or a disease. Every encounter occurs only once.

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Going with the flow

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on August 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

You know that advice…”go with the flow”?

Well, what does it mean really?

I think of it when I look at this photo I took in Capetown several years ago. The trees which had been planted along the promenade were blown by the winds every day which made them grow the way you can see in these photos above.

That would be a good example of going with the flow…..rather than being blown over and broken the trees bent to the wind and grew WITH it rather than against it.

But then see what happens when someone turns up to park their car on a sunny day? They find the perfect spot to keep the car cool and shaded!

Now that’s what I call “going with the flow”!

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Against “efficiency”

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on August 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Here’s where I’m for “efficiency” – in machines and in situations where you can accurately predict the outcomes.

Here’s where I’m against “efficiency” – in human situations. Human beings, all other living creatures, Nature and the environment are all complex, open systems. You cannot predict the outcomes with accuracy and certainty from any starting point. For three reasons – change is constant (nothing stays the same), everything is connected so subject to unpredicted influences, and the phenomenon of “emergence” where a complex system develops new characteristics and behaviours which couldn’t have been predicted from its prior state.

Everywhere you look in Nature you find something called “redundancy” – natural systems have more checks and balances, more options in play, than logic would lead you to believe was either necessary or “efficient”. This is the key to their robustness.

As Professor Margaret Heffernan, author of “Uncharted”, points out, aircraft are built with more control systems than they “need”. They have more engines than they “need”. It’s these backups, alternatives and “redundancies” which make a plane robust. She clarifies the difference between “resilience” which is the ability to recover, and “robustness” which is the ability to avoid failure in the first place.

Austerity economics plus managerial philosophies of “efficiency” plus neoliberal politics created the perfect conditions for the pandemic to be a disaster. In many, many countries the health care services had been cut to the bone. They weren’t robust. In many countries social care services had been cut to the bone. They weren’t robust either. In many countries industry, employment conditions, education…..you name it, had all been pared back, trimmed down, downsized, made “more efficient” by under-resourcing them, failing to replace staff who left, and, in fact, doing the exact opposite of developing and strengthening any of them.

How do we cope better with the next pandemic?

Well a good place to start would be to set our sights on “robustness” instead of “efficiency”. After all, in human beings and in all of Nature, the future cannot be predicted, the exact outcomes cannot be known. We are not machines.

Ok, you’re asking, what’s all that got to do with a table of pumpkins at a market? Well, that photo is from a fabulous Saturday morning farmers market in Capetown, and I love this display of diversity and abundance. I love how DIFFERENT they all are! No standardisation by size, shape of colour. Nature is like that. Diversity, abundance and redundancy are key features of healthy natural systems.

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