Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘science’ Category

“And not or” – writing and publishing

Posted in books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on June 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

At the beginning of the year I received an invite to speak at a conference in Canada. The invitation was to talk about my experience of four decades of work as a doctor who used homeopathy. I was surprised, but it was a very kind invitation and I accepted.

The way I prepare for talks is to let some ideas and questions rattle around my brain for a bit, then start making notes. The kinds of notes I make are sort of mind maps. They aren’t as formal as those you’d find in books about the mind mapping. I just put down key words and phrases on a page, then draw circles, squares or diamond shapes around them and link them up. I’ll do a few versions of that, then I open up “Keynote” and I make a slide for each element in the mind map, pull in images from my photo library, write a few words (not many) on some of the slides, then arrange them to create a sequence which enables me to tell the story I want to tell. Well, I ended up with a set of three presentations, each of which would take about an hour to tell. I’d been told I’d be allocated two 90 minute slots in the schedule.

Then before the time arrived for the conference, along came COVID-19 and the event was cancelled. Maybe it will happen some other time, but maybe not. I’d enjoyed putting the presentations together so that gave me an idea. Why not write a book covering the same ground? I’d had an idea for a long time that I should tell my own story. I didn’t want to write a textbook, or a polemic, an argument for a way to live, a way to practice Medicine, or even make the case for the use of Homeopathy. I just wanted to make a record of my own life, my own experience.

I’m sure if any of us sat down to write our own story we’d immediately come up against the question, “But which story?”, because there are many stories of our lives. I didn’t want to write an autobiography which told the story of my family, my relationships, and my personal development. I wanted to tell the story of why I became a doctor, what kind of doctor I became, and how that came about. Not least because I thought it would help me to understand my own life better. I suppose it’s my “professional story”, but really, it’s the story of my “calling”.

I wanted to publish the book too, because I wanted others to be able to read it. Not to earn money from sales, nor to try to convince anyone of anything, but more to add to my over all project of sharing my personal experience of curiosity, wonder and joy – that’s what this blog is all about – and that’s what I committed to do daily from the day of lockdown. I’ve been writing a post based on one of my photos every day since the middle of March and I don’t feel like stopping any time soon. I already know, from feedback from some of you, how much you appreciate these posts and that completely delights me. Writing them adds to my life, so I’m very, very happy if reading them adds to yours!

Now, more than ever, I want to set off some positive, loving, inspiring waves. I’ve no idea where they will go, or what effect they will have, but it feels like a way to make a positive contribution to our times.

With lockdown, with the presentations already mapping out a story, and with the daily practice of writing for the blog, it all came together and I wrote this book – “And not or” – “A calling and a listening”.

This is how I did it, the tools I used, and what I had to learn.

I wrote the text using an A4 sized notebook and a pen. I wrote and wrote and wrote, till I thought I’d written all I wanted to write. Then I used that handwritten text to write the digital version using a program called “Ulysses“. Listen, before I go any further, I’m just laying out what I did, not saying you should do exactly what I did if you want to write your own book! But, on the other hand, I’ve always found it helpful to read what other writers have done. So, you could use any software you want. I started with Ulysses. I use this program on my desktop Mac, as well as on my iPad (for which I have a proper Bluetooth connected keyboard).

When I wrote the first digital version, I didn’t just copy out all the words I’d written in my notebook. Instead, I’d read a section, then start to transcribe the words into the wordprocessor, but I found I often decided to write it differently, to leave out whole sentences or passages, and to write brand new ones instead. By the time I’d done that I had what I called “draft 2” (the written text constituting “draft 1”). The way Ulysses works is that you write “sheets” – for me, each “sheet” was a chapter. I like the simple markdown language you can use with Ulysses. If you put a # sign at the start of a line it turns that line into a heading. If you put two ## signs it turns that line into a secondary heading. I only used those two levels of headings. The first level heading were the chapter titles, the second level to navigate sections within a chapter. The other main markdown tools I used were for inserting images (hey, you know how much I love my photos!), for marking a paragraph as a quotation, and for creating lists. That’s pretty much it. Ulysses presents you with a left hand column of your sheets, each one showing just the first line or two. I used that to get an overview of the whole book. That let me see what I thought was repetitive, and what I thought was missing.

Next step was “draft 3” – read through the whole digital text, correcting and editing as I went. Once I got to the end of that, I felt, well….dissatisfied! Something wasn’t right, and I couldn’t see what it was. So I put the whole project away for a week. Then when I came back to it I saw there were half a dozen chapters which seemed problematic. They were in two groups of three, and each group had overlap and repetition in it. I still couldn’t see the way ahead though. So, here’s the next neat thing about Ulysses, you can select whichever sheets you want to review and print them off. I printed off the six in question. Then I read through the printouts with pencil in hand, scoring out, adding in, and linking up different paragraphs. Once I’d done that I went back into the program and changed the text according to that latest “edit”. I also chopped out three other chapters that just didn’t seem to fit well at all. What do they call that? “killing your darlings” – dropping some of the sentences you love the most – because they just don’t fit. I guess I now I had gone through “draft 4”, to “draft 5”.

Time for another complete read through, correcting and editing as I went – “draft 6”. OK, this felt good now. Time to try and turn it into a published book. I decided I wanted a physical, paper version, and a digital version (and not or….get it?).

For the paper version I decided to use Blurb. This is a company I’ve used about once a year to make a photo album of my best, or most memorable photos of that year. I love their quality of print. And I’d already taught myself the basics of their software – “Bookwright“. Now, I’m sure with all the software I use that I’m no expert and there are probably easier ways to do things, but, hey, I only know what I know, so I don’t know any easy way to import all the text into “Bookwright”. Instead I created the pages, inserted either text or photo “layout boxes” onto each page, copied and pasted the text, chapter by chapter into Bookwright, imported all the photos I’d used, and dropped them into the right places, then ran the “preview” option, and the error checking, both of which identified things that needed fixed. Then I uploaded it to the Blurb site and ordered up my proof copy.

Meantime I had to think how to produce a digital version. Apple have something called “iBooks Author” which I’d used before, (I’ve since learned Apple are about to discontinue that software) and there were ebook creation tools I knew existed to produce “Kindle” or “ePub” versions.

Whoa! Too much to think about it! I then discovered that Amazon had produced new software called “Kindle Create“. I downloaded it, discovered you could import a “Word” file into it, make a cover, preview it, then upload it to Amazon. Ulysses makes it easy to export your sheets as a single “.docx” file so I did that, opened it up in “Pages”, then exported the document from there as a “Word” doc into Kindle Create. It was easy, and straightforward, just took time and care.

Now, I’m sure if you use Windows your workflow and the tools you can use will be different, and maybe some of you know a lot more about these programs and methods than I do – and if that’s true, please go ahead and share what you know in the comments here, or share links to your own articles if you’ve written them.

Well, this is where I’ve got to now – a paper version – you can get it from Blurb at https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10155078-and-not-or

and a Kindle version – https://amzn.to/2UozjIw – if you are in the UK. If you are not in the UK, go to your local Amazon site and search for “Leckridge” – you’ll find it quickly that way (let me know if you don’t!)

Here’s my summary of the book –

Why become a doctor? This is one doctor’s response to that question. It begins with a calling, then continues through listening. Patient after patient, over four decades of Practice, tells their own unique story. Each one is an attempt to find healing. To find healing, the doctor and the patient embark on a relationship which allows them to uncover Nature’s pathways to health. 
Each pathway is a life of adaptive strategies revealed through the body, the emotions, and in patterns of behaviour, language and thought.
Two small words open different doors of understanding.
“Or” divides, separates and focuses attention on single parts.
“And” connects, integrates and focuses attention on the whole.
We need both approaches but if we are to heal, individually, together, and at the level of the planet, we need to shift the balance away from “or” to “and”. 
Through an exploration of narrative, psychoneuroimmunology, neuroscience, complexity and complementary medicine, this is one doctor’s experience of shifting the balance from “or” to “and”.

If you fancy reading it, go ahead, and if you’d like to give me feedback you can find me most places by searching for “bobleckridge” – I’m here on WordPress, but I’m also easily found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and I use gmail.com (just put “bobleckridge” before the @ sign)

Read Full Post »

Entwined, embedded, embodied

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on June 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This remains one of the strangest trees I ever saw in any forest. In fact, it seemed to me that there were two trees here. You could clearly see two trunks arising from the forest floor, then something odd happens, the one of the left sends out a substantial branch, so substantial I’m not even happy calling it a branch, which connects with the one on the right. They fuse. Then they continue upwards in parallel, each distinct but traveling in the same direction, until about a metre or so further up they fuse again, and from that point on, continue upwards as one.

I’m happy simply to contemplate them, to trace their separate and entwined paths as they reach up to the Sun…..but I seem unable to resist the thoughts they inspire in me.

This is such a beautiful representation of how all of Life seeks out more Life. We get close to certain others, connect with them, form relationships with them, bond with them, entwine and entangle our lives with them. We influence each other. Yeah, sure, we still know that we are individuals, that I am me and you are you, but our shared experiences change us. I am not the same since I met you.

Each of us emerges from, and lives in, a multiplicity of environments. We are embedded in certain times and places. We exist within certain cultures and societies. We become who we are becoming in vast interconnected webs of relationships which span across the face of the Earth and reach both back in history and forward into the futures we will create together.

Each of us lives, an embodied, unique, singular being, never completely separate, never completely alone, never completely independent. So let’s just embrace that shall we?

How might life be if we acknowledged our entwined, entangled, embedded, embodied nature? Could we begin to share our lives better, here and now, in this present time and place, as co-inhabitants, co-creators, and co-operators?

Wherever we are….in a particular street, town, city, region, country, hemisphere, planet…..we share our entangled, interconnected lives with everyone else who has ever lived, every other inhabitant of this time and place, and every other child we haven’t even dreamed of yet.

Read Full Post »

Touch

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on June 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Social distancing, physical distancing, isolation, “confinement”, lockdown. We’ve been going through an enormous period of physical separation from each other, and from the Earth.

Sure, there’s Zoom and WhatsApp, and FaceTime and all the rest, but we’ve been reduced, I think, by connecting through screens. These virtual meetings, avatars and asynchronous communications have got two sides, haven’t they? They open up channels for us and allow us to speak, to send messages back and forth, and so to have some sense of connection. But they add an extra layer between us, almost as if there is a mist, or a fog that we can’t quite see through.

I think part of the problem is that reality is physical and even the apparently invisible, un-measurable, Self, is embodied. Our feelings and our thoughts are embodied. Our everyday experience exists within physical reality.

Yet we’re being told that touch is dangerous. That we must keep a metre or two away from everybody else. In France you’re not supposed to kiss anyone on the cheek anymore, and in many countries you’re not supposed to shake hands…..and I don’t know about you but this knocking elbows or kicking each others ankles just doesn’t do it for me! We’re told that surfaces are dangerous. They need to be wiped, and washed, and sprayed and cleaned again and again and again. We’re told to wash our hands for longer and more frequently than most of us have ever done before…to remove all trace of whatever we might have touched.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand what this is all about. I know this virus can only spread through physical and/or close contact. But, all the same, these new habits and new rules have turned the sensation of touch into a fear of touch. And that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.

So, today, I want to remind you of that particular one of your five senses – touch.

Look at this tiny white feather. Don’t you just long to reach out, pick it up, stroke it gently, or stroke your skin gently with it? It is beautiful to look at, that’s for sure, but to touch it, to feel its almost weightless physical presence, makes it more real.

At the other end of the scale, look at this burr. What an amazing creation! What a way to spread around the world! It looks a little bit like those images we’ve seen of the coronavirus, and if you’ve ever brushed up against a burr like this you’ll know it catches onto to you pretty damn effectively. And no wonder…look carefully….every single one of those spikes has a sharply hooked arrowhead at the end of it. If you wanted to design something to easily fix onto whatever creature comes close to it, you couldn’t do much better than this. At first glance, of course, this mass of needles looks like a protection mechanism. It looks like a huge STAY AWAY signal. And if you touch it with your fingers, it really isn’t a pleasant experience. But it’s not designed to keep creatures away. It’s designed to connect, to attach, to hook on and stick.

Here’s my box of curiosities. You know the idea of a “cabinet of curiosities“? That always appealed to me. Those cabinets were, in some way, the precursor to museums, but they were more personal. I kept this box right next to my chair in my consulting room. Children, almost always less inhibited than adults, were fascinated by it, but, actually lots of the adults were too. In fact, the majority of objects in my “box of curiosities” are gifts from patients, colleagues and friends over many, many years. People who saw my box, often brought me something to add to it.

You’ll see there is a quite a variety of textures in there. There’s feather, leaf, and stone. There’s metal, shell and chestnut. There’s cord and there’s wood. Every single one of these objects begs to be picked up and handled. Yes, to be looked at, but mainly to be touched.

So why not take a little time to explore the sense of touch today? I think it connects us to reality in a completely unique way.

Read Full Post »

Nature’s transient jewels

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, perception, photography, science on June 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Something which always catches my eye and makes me stop to lean in and look closer is the sparkle of light on water.

Look at these little water droplets on this leaf on the forest floor. They are absolutely like little jewels. Each one lying perfectly on this fallen oak leaf, presented to me as if on a platter. Each one looks like one of those glass paperweights which draw you in so that you can look closely and see if you can see a whole world inside.

How do they form?

I don’t really know. I suspect these particular ones may have come from the rain, but they could have appeared with the morning dew. How does each one make such a beautiful shape, yet every one unique in size and place? How do they form exactly where they form? What is it about the ground, or the leaf, or that part of a leaf, which lets the water molecules coalesce like this, to make these shining beads?

I remember learning about water tension and how water molecules hold together to form these perfect surfaces, but what determines the size? Why are some so much bigger than the others?

The other thing I immediately think of when I look at these images is how it takes the water, the sun, and the forest to create them. I might be drawn to the sparkling droplets on the leaf, but it takes all three of these forces, or presences, to make them. Nothing exists in isolation.

The one closest to you in this photo (I mean the one which is lowest down in the image), hints at a whole world. Click on it and look as closely as you can. There is a forest in there.

No wonder people have long since been intrigued by crystal balls.

But, for me, is the added quality of transience which makes these jewels so beautiful. You can’t pick them up and put them in a bag. You can’t sell them or horde them.

You can only enjoy them exactly where they are in this short but present moment.

Read Full Post »

Another kind of life

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, science on June 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I don’t know about you but when I think of the different kinds of life which exist, first I think of animals and plants. After that, maybe bacteria and viruses. Somehow, I often forget about fungi.

Yet, fungi, are a kingdom of Nature all of their own. They aren’t like other kinds of life, and Life as we know it wouldn’t exist on this planet without them.

The best place I know to find fungi is a forest. Although, at certain times of year the grass in my garden is also a great place to find them. They always astonish me. They seem to appear suddenly, as if from nowhere, and they come in all shapes, colours and sizes.

They amaze me.

And that’s enough.

But there are two other, not so obvious things about them, which intrigue me. Like icebergs, there is a lot more to them below the surface than just the parts we see above ground. So they speak to the hidden, the invisible parts of Life. Secondly they network like mad. Fungi don’t seem to exist as individuals. They are hugely and extensively connected through vast webs of threads throughout the soil.

In recent years we’ve come to understand their significance in maintaining the health of forests. The term “Wood Wide Web” has been coined to describe the immense network of connections between bacteria, fungi and trees in the forest to move nutrients, water and even information around.

So, apart from their beauty, variety and curiousness (is that a word?), I find that fungi remind me of how interconnected ALL of LIFE is, here, on this one, small, shared planet.

It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time, because it applies to us as well, not just trees.

Read Full Post »

Close to the edge

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on June 3, 2020| 1 Comment »

We like to be close to the edge, don’t we?

I think that the “call of the sea” is real. We are pulled towards the oceans. Are houses with seaviews the most expensive houses in any country? Why is that? Is it that the sea represents both freedom and adventure? When we look out across the water towards the horizon it is somehow incredibly appealing when all we can see is water and sky. We don’t need to glimpse any distant coastlines to feel drawn to the edges of our land.

It does seem as if the sea, itself, stirs our souls.

But I think there is another factor. The edge.

I am naturally drawn towards the edges. I love to walk along a beach, gazing at the far horizon, breathing in tune to the rhythm of the breaking waves. That constantly changing, dynamic, irregular, line which marks where the water meets the sand, and the sand meets the water.

It’s the same with rocky outcrops. Just like the fisherman in the second photo there, we love to get to the edge (of course, he’s hoping to catch fish so if he doesn’t go to the edge, he’s not going to have much success!). But it’s not only the fishermen who like to stand, or sit, at the edge of a rock.

I wonder how much this instinctive attraction is due to a basic law of Nature – that all complex adaptive systems move towards “far from equilibrium” points? All living systems do. All ecosystems do. In fact, I think the concept of “steady state”, or “balance” misleads us. When I was taught about “homeostasis”, the idea that our “internal environment” has multiple checks and balances to maintain a constant inner state, I thought it made a lot of sense. I learned about all the feedback loops which kick in to ramp up or damp down activity in the body, to keep things ticking along in the “normal range”. But gradually I realised that was a bit simplistic.

The missing pieces included growth and adaptation, both of which are linked to creativity. That creativity manifests itself in “emergence” – the appearance of new behaviours and conditions which couldn’t have been predicted from the pre-existent ones. It manifests itself in novelty and difference. It manifests in growth, development, and maturity.

Once we start to understand that Life is based on a dynamic equilibrium – the kind of balance which never settles down – then we notice that everything tends to be drawn towards the edges.

It’s the same when we look at the activity of organs like the heart and the brain. The rhythm of the heart is constantly changing. You can measure the “heart rate variability”, and find that when there is next to none, the heart has become rigid, non-adaptive, and is about to fail. On the other hand, when you find that it’s chaotic, the heart is also about to fail. The sweet spot is the zone at the edge of both of those extremes. Same with the brain. When a seizure occurs the somewhat chaotic activity of the brain waves suddenly develop zones of constancy. It’s the imposition of rigid, regular wave patterns which seems to obliterate the underlying, normal, variable rhythms. The sweet spot, again, is in that zone at the edges of these two extremes – the zone between rigidity and chaos.

If we are going to learn from this pandemic we’re going to need new thinking, new ideas, different ways of living and organising ourselves. We aren’t going to learn if we try to “return to normal”.

The future is still to be invented, and we’re going to find it at the edge.

Read Full Post »

Freedom of movement

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on June 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a photo I took a few years ago when I was visiting friends in South Africa. There were kite-surfers skimming across the sea, pulled at great speeds by the wind, as the sun began to set.

I’d never seen kite-surfing before and it was pretty spectacular. Quite something to use the power of wind and sea at the same time to experience the joy and freedom of movement.

On the horizon you can see the outline of a cruise ship.

During this pandemic all of these activities have been curtailed. It’s been quite a trauma for we human beings to have our freedom of movement taken away. We are the most social of all creatures with complex skills which enable us to establish bonds with others which enable us to create relationships and connections. We are able to read the emotions of others in their faces. We are fabulous copiers, learning from the actions, behaviours and thoughts of others.

We are also highly mobile creatures. I know there are many people who never leave the town or village they were born in, but over the centuries we have migrated from continent to continent. Every single one of us has ancestors around the world. If you were to try to draw out as complete a family tree as you could, following all the branches of siblings, cousins, and all their spouses and children, you’d end up with a giant web rather than a tree. I’d be surprised if that web didn’t span great distances. DNA analysis shows us that we all have threads which connect us to ancient peoples in distant places.

Sometimes I think we forget that. We become too insular, too separated. History, archeology and biology tell us a story of hyper-connectedness and mobility. We are ONE species and we have spread across the entire planet.

This second photo has a very pleasing symmetry for me. If you look very very closely, you can see a crescent moon at the top of the frame, which is echoed in the shape of the kite. This photo also shows that we social creatures like to do things together. The first photo might have led you to believe there was just one person kite-surfing, but you can see, from this one, that there are several (and in fact there were several more you can’t see in this frame)

I think these are two of our most precious values – our connectedness and our freedom of movement. It saddens me when either, or both, of these are constrained. I’m a fan of making connections and building relationships, and I’m a fan of freedom of movement.

Read Full Post »

The view from the left brain

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on May 31, 2020| 1 Comment »

I have a shelf in my bookcase where I collect some of the books which have made the biggest impact on my thinking and understanding. On that shelf sits a first edition of Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary”. If you’ve been reading these posts for a while you’re bound to have come across my references to his description of how our two cerebral hemispheres engage with the world in different ways.

When I came across this old photo from Marseilles the other day I immediately thought of the “left brain” view of the world. The left cerebral hemisphere is utterly brilliant at focusing in on whatever we are considering. It helps us to see the trees in the wood. It picks out elements, features, characteristics or parts. Then it helps us to analyse, label and categorise whatever it is that can be recognised.

It needs to have a narrow focus to be able to do that. It zooms in. It hones our attention. It separates and abstracts by blanking out the connections, the contexts and the environment.

This long corridor of arches looks very much like that kind of focused attention to me.

But there’s more. At the end of this passageway what do we see? It’s kind of hard to make out, isn’t it? What you are looking at here is an installation of irregular, angled mirrors. So you aren’t seeing a complete picture. Rather you are seeing a number of disconnected views or parts.

Our left brain is pretty good at doing that too. Its preference is for the parts, not their connections.

How the brain is supposed to work is that the after the left side does this focusing, separating, labelling and categorising, it’s supposed to pass this information back to the right side to have it contextualised. In other words, after seeing and recognising the pieces, the left passes over to the right to recreate the whole picture, to help us to understand whatever it is we’ve “grasped” by seeing how it connects to everything else.

Iain McGilchrist’s thesis is that this natural flow has become rather disrupted. The left brain has a tendency to hang on to what it grasps, and to convince us that whatever it has analysed is “correct”. Over the centuries we’ve evolved a complex society and civilisation which has encouraged us to prioritise the left brain over the right.

That’s a big mistake. That’s only using half a brain. To rectify this we have to learn how to use the whole brain again, and to practice doing that as often as we can. That’s going to involve deliberately returning again and again to the right brain functions – seeing the connections, discovering the particular, appreciating the whole, and weaving together the multiple threads to enjoy the entire tapestry of the world.

I don’t know about you, but that excites me!

I love that this idea is not about abandoning our left brain functions but re-integrating them into the right brain ones. How satisfying!

Read Full Post »

The upside down view

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography, science on May 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

At the port in Marseilles there is a hug mirrored roof over an open area. It provides people with some shade, but also attracts people to gather underneath it and look up – to see the world upside down.

Looking at the world upside down can be very revealing.

Think about this current pandemic. We are told there is this COVID-19 virus sweeping across the surface of the Earth, seeking out victims to slaughter. Several governments have used war metaphors accusing the virus of being an invisible, cunning and evil enemy. The answer, if this is your perspective, is to “beat” the virus, to “crush” it, “flatten” it, or “eliminate” it.

In the absence of treatments which kill the virus, the authorities pin their hopes on better defence – by which they mean immunisation – a mass vaccination programme to increase each individual’s ability to “resist” infection by this particular virus.

But, what if we turn our view upside down? What if we look at ourselves instead of the virus? Who gets sick when they catch this virus? Mainly the elderly, those with ongoing chronic health problems, the poor, and ethnic minorities. Why can’t either Public Health or the hospital services prevent the deaths of tens of thousands? (I mean reduce the number of actual deaths, not save the lives of an imaginary number who haven’t got sick)

What if we addressed these problems by making them the central target of our efforts? That would need our societies to deal with inequality, poor and overcrowded housing, poverty, low waged precarious contract work, racism and discrimination, under-resourced health and social care. We would need to invest in the creation of resilient well-resourced Public Health services including laboratory testing, contact tracing and the supply of safe place, supported isolation of the infected. We would need to invest in the resources of the clinical health services to have enough beds, nurses, doctors, equipment and personal protection for staff. We would need to address under-staffing in the health and care sectors so that too few workers didn’t have to look after too many people in too many different locations, so spreading the virus.

In other words, if we look at this pandemic from an upside down view, we might avoid future pandemics by creating healthier, more resilient, stronger societies…..no matter what the next virus is.

OK, I’m sure you’ll be thinking “but we need to treat all the sick, kill the virus which is overwhelming them, and reduce the current spread through hygiene and distancing measures”. All probably true. But none of those measures are enough. Remember my favourite phrase?

“And not or”.

We need to do both. Treat the sick, try to reduce the spread of the virus through the community, AND deal with the problems in society and the economy which have made us this vulnerable in the first place.

Sometimes it helps to add the upside down view.

Read Full Post »

Looking for straight lines

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, science on May 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »

“There are no straight lines in Nature”

I don’t know where this teaching comes from, but it’s not true.

There are plenty of straight lines in Nature. OK, maybe they don’t cover great distances in the way manufactured lines do (I’m thinking railway lines and Roman roads) but they are everywhere, all the same.

One typical expression of straight lines is “radial” – they start at a centre point and radiate out in many directions from there. This poppy bud in the image above is an example of that.

Not straight enough for you? Well, how about this?

Do you know what that is? Let’s look from the other side….

Plants show this “radial” spread of straight lines too.

As do shells…

and spider webs

Seeds designed to be carried by the wind use this pattern of radiant straight lines from pointed origins too.

We pick up on these patterns and use them in our art and architecture.

Have a look around today and see where you can spot this pattern. When you do find it, do you think it is beautiful?

One of the things I really like about these “radiant” straight lines is that each line has a beginning and an end, just like a good story. You can see where it has come from and you can see where it is going. It reminds me of a concept from Deleuze and Guattari, which they named “lines of flight”. When I read about this I saw its relevance to complex systems. You might have read elsewhere on this site about “complex adaptive systems” (if not, why not pop that phrase into the search box on the top right of the page and see what comes up?). The complex systems model does more than explain living organisms, it reveals a lot about the underlying structure and function of the universe.

Complex adaptive systems tend to move towards “far from equilibrium” zones. This is what gives them their dynamism, their points of growth and their ability to change. But how do they get there, to those “far from equilibrium” zones? By following particular “lines of flight”.

One of the reasons I liked that so much was it helped me unravel the stories my patients told me. One of my most favourite questions to ask was “When did you last feel completely well?” It often took patience and time to get a clear answer to that question, but time and time again it revealed that the chronic ailment from which the patient was suffering, began either after a particularly severe trauma, or from a phase of life where the traumas piled up on each other, one by one. I wasn’t trying to prove causation, but following the narrative line from that time forwards to the present often revealed both the nature of the traumatic impacts, and, crucially, the adaptive strategies the person had employed (probably mostly sub-consciously) to cope.

Lines of flight, and radiant lines, are typically multiple, and they are also highly unlikely to exist in isolation. However, unravelling what they are, where they intersect, and how they influence each other, is, I believe, at the heart of understanding a person and their life.

I’ll leave you today with another depiction of lines – well, two pictures actually, and neither taken by me –

On the left is the image of Mumbai at night, photographed from a satellite. On the right and image of neurones in a section of a brain. Interesting to think how this structure of intersections and nodes connected by straight lines scales up and down through the levels and dimensions. But I’m taking the original idea of straight lines a step further now, by seeing them in their context.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »