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Archive for the ‘science’ Category

The lens of the past

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography, science on January 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I don’t believe the past was a better place or a better time than the present. I just know it was different. But as I look at this image of the old glass in a window, I see how the patterns in that old glass act as a kind of lens on the present, and that makes me think about how it seems to me, that in many ways, we are too focussed now on the immediate, the instant gratifications, and always on what might come next.

But don’t we learn from the past? Isn’t how things were before, or what actions we took before, a useful lens through which to view the present?

Let me be clear, I am very, very keen on living with awareness of this present moment. I think that too often many of us are living on autopilot. That’s one of the big themes of this blog – “heroes not zombies” – encouraging us to wake up, become aware, and become the authors/heroes of our own stories, rather than living a life of semi-conscious manipulation by others. I’m also keen on looking forwards, though, to be frank, I’m not a big fan of predictions! But I also think that unless we pause, reflect, consider, and look back, then it is pretty difficult to learn. It seems true that if we keep doing what we are doing then we are going to keep on the same track. So, if we want to learn, want to grow, to improve, to develop, then we are going to have to learn something from how things were before.

I don’t think that means a romantic longing for an imaginary idyllic past when everything was wonderful. That’s not real. I mean learning what led up to this present moment, learning what it is we’ve been doing which might have contributed, at least, to our finding ourselves here, in this specific present, today.

I think about that as I watch this pandemic unfolding. I can’t help wondering about the countries of the world, like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and others, where the case numbers and deaths are, frankly, tiny compared to those in Europe, America and Brazil. And, whilst there is no doubt something to be learned from each other, from comparing how each country tackled this pandemic, I think there is also something to be learned from how we humans have managed infectious disease, and epidemics in the past.

Time and again we see that there is a basic principle – separate the sick from the well. In times gone by that was done in what now seem pretty cruel and crude ways, expelling the sick, putting them in colonies outside of the towns. I don’t think we’d want to repeat that particular strategy, but the basic principle remains a key one. To control an infection you have to identify who has the infection and limit their contact with the rest of the community. We can do that now in much more humane ways. We can treat the sick in hospitals. Actually, there was a time when there were quite a number of specifically infectious disease hospitals (and “asylums”) but most of those seem to have been closed down. Maybe it would be a good idea to create new centres for the treatment of those who are suffering from infectious disease, and staffing them with doctors and nurses who can work in the community when there are no epidemics raging. That might be better than diverting the resources for treating cancer, heart disease, etc towards infectious disease, leaving those non-covid patients to suffer (which is what is increasingly the case).

Maybe it would a good idea to have a really effective, community based, human-centred system of testing, contact tracing and genuinely supported isolation – in isolation hotels, and in peoples own homes with daily visits from health care staff?

One of the things we are seeing with Covid is how many people get very, very slow recovery, relapses and lingering, debilitating symptoms. In the past we used to have convalescent hospitals, spas and rehabilitation centres. A lot of them got closed down too. Maybe it would a good idea to open those up again, to make new ones, to support and treat those who are in for the long haul.

Finally, in epidemics in the past, people controlled their borders. The countries which have the lowest case rates now did that too. The countries which didn’t bother, have the worst rates. Isn’t it time to do that? And not just to insist on a negative test and advise someone to quarantine for 10 or 14 days. But to insist upon supported isolation during mandatory, supervised quarantine periods for all those who cross borders? OK, I know, there will be those who need to keep traveling and who can’t keep doing those quarantines, but let’s vaccinate them, and monitor them more carefully.

Just some ideas I’ve been having about how we could better manage this pandemic, by looking at the present through the lens of the past.

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Making beautiful connections

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I must admit I have a penchant for bridges, and I have several photos of beautiful ones I’ve seen in different parts of the world. It’s pretty amazing how different a bridge can be. You could say that every single bridge is unique. Even two bridges of the same design will be built over different rivers, or different parts of the same river, and will connect two quite distinct, and particular areas of the Earth (banks, fields, towns, or whatever)

I think we need bridges more than ever. We need to make better connections between ourselves, and between human beings and the rest of the living world. In fact, between human beings and the rest of the entire planet.

Building bridges are about creating integrative relationships – the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts. In other words they are about connecting diversity and difference in ways which enhance, support and nurture both of the parts.

We need that physically. We need it emotionally. We need it socially. We need it metaphorically and literally.

Here’s to more beautiful bridges! Let’s make the connections!

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Unfolding

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 17, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday I wrote about “unfurling” and this morning I came across this photo in my library.

It’s another example of this process we see everywhere in Nature – the opening up of a bud as the flower expands itself at the end of a stalk. It’s an “unfolding”, a “revealing”, or even, a “revelation”.

Really at this stage of a flower you get a strong sense of what is to come…a strong sense of potential. But it’s not quite there yet. It’s in the process of getting there. I like images which capture that concept because I have long been taken by the primacy of “becoming” over “being” – see the phrase at the top of the blog “becoming not being”!

I first encountered the importance of the concept of becoming in the works of Giles Deleuze, but having seen it there I went on to see it everywhere. Really, as I understand it, it involves a significant, and important shift of focus from looking at objects with fixed dimensions to looking at experiences and events which literally unfold before your very eyes. When you shift away from seeing, or trying to see, reality as composed of discrete, separate, bounded parts…..like marbles in a sac……to seeing reality as composed of flows and connections, then you stop wanting to pin things down and fix them. You delight, instead, in the dynamic, living, changing, nature of the universe.

This thinking helped me understand my patients and their illnesses, because instead of looking for discrete pathologies, I became more interested in how those pathologies arose, how they were affecting the person in their everyday life, and trying to understand how to influence the direction and nature of their development into the future. I became less interested in “outcomes” because every “outcome” is an arbitrary point, and more interested in a “life” and a “life story”, and therefore far more interested in following that patient over many years, rather than seeing Medicine as a tool applied to a thing at a particular time – not “getting it done” but “understanding, supporting, encouraging and teaching” instead.

I don’t know if that brief summary is enough to help you see what a radically different way this is to live and to make sense of the every day, but I suggest you try it…….try to notice the processes of becoming, the unfolding, the revelations, the unfurling today, and then let your curiosity follow the threads back to the past and origins, as well as forwards, to potentials and maturity.

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Unfurling

Posted in art, books, creativity, education, from the dark room, from the living room, from the music room, from the reading room, life, music, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »

During this pandemic our horizons have been drawn closer, our worlds have become physically smaller and our social worlds have either diminished completely, or have been translated into the virtual world of messaging, video calls, and emails……something which can be enriching, even vital, but which still seem second best to the physical-social world of shared time AND space, and, especially of touch.

It’s a time where there’s a sense of collapsing into ourselves, of withdrawal, and of separation. Which is one of the reasons why this image is particularly appealing to me today. It reminds me of the fact that in Nature there are cycles and seasons. There are times, for example in the winter, when creatures and plants withdraw into themselves, hibernate, go dormant, on in old Scots “courie in“. In other words, there is a time in Nature when it makes sense to fold inwards, to snuggle, to curl up. But the appearance of a first crocus plant in my garden this week reminded me that there is another season around the corner – Spring – and that in the Spring time we see the opposite direction of movement…..a shift towards expansion, reaching up and beyond, of unfurling and unfolding.

I chose the French word “epanouissement” for my word of the year this year…..it means to flourish, to open up, to unfurl, in the way you see a plant move from the phase of a bud to a fully opened, multi-petalled blossom or flower. So I think of that word as I look at this fern unfurling.

I don’t think this unfurling motion is something we need to wait for. It’s not just that we are in winter and spring is around the corner (if you live in the Southern hemisphere, of course, you are in summer, and it’s autumn that’s just around the corner!).

No, I think that every day we can find a way to tune into this unfurling – this expanding, developing, growing, shift from potential to realisation. One way I try to do that is to deliberately choose two activities every single day – one activity of learning, and one of creating. Because I think learning and creating are our two most fundamental ways of growing and developing.

I have had a love of learning all my life, and my curiosity and appetite for discovery and understanding has only grown over the years. It utterly delights me to learn something every day. Amongst my learning activities I do language learning. Every day I learn a little French and/or Spanish. It’s become a habit (I use Duolingo to embed that habit) and I do it formally, following exercises, and informally reading in French, every day. I’m just a beginner at Spanish but I’ll move on to reading Spanish soon. I’m always learning other things too. Questions pop into my head as I live an ordinary day, and I pursue some of those questions online, using wikipedia, blogs, youtube, podcasts and articles.

I also love to create – for me that’s primarily photography and writing – but playing music is part of it as well. Well, in the creative areas of life, I find there is also always something more to learn – whether that be at the piano, on the guitar, on the computer, or in writing exercises.

So, I think unfurling happens all the time for we, humans. We just have to choose to become aware of it and give it some time and attention.

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The two forces of the universe

Posted in art, books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I think this skeleton of a leaf is beautiful. For me it reveals the often hidden, or difficult to see structures which underpin reality. But what it does most is make me think about the two forces of the universe….

The flowing force – the energies which vibrate throughout the entire cosmos. And the structuring force – which gathers some of the flowing forces together to make patterns, shapes, forms and objects.

I like this way of thinking. It’s definitely not new! The yin and yang forces of Chinese thought are sometimes described as “active” and “passive” and I can see how that relates to “structuring” and “flowing”. Others translate these forces into “masculine” and “feminine” and while I do love the ancient myths and legends, the rich symbolism of art throughout the ages, a lot of people find it difficult to apply gender to these forces, and, sadly, once you add in hierarchies and male-dominated culture, then the “feminine” seems to lose out to the “masculine”, so, for me, thinking of the “flowing force” and the “structuring force” is more helpful.

Clearly we need them both to be working in harmony, or in an “integrated” way with each other if we are to have the reality which we experience.

One of the key books I read which helped me understand these concepts was “The Crystal and the The Dragon” by David Wade. I highly recommend it. He uses the crystal as the symbol of the structuring force, and the dragon as the wild, flowing force. But “the universe story” as described by Thomas Berry in “The Great Work” is a brilliant, engaging, description of this same idea. Thomas Berry calls them the forces of “wildness” and “discipline”.

Whatever the metaphors, symbols and words you find work best for you, I think it really helps to understand and be amazed by the reality of every day life, if you raise your awareness of these two fundamental forces.

Try it, and see what you think…..

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Shape-shifting water

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, science on January 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Water fascinates me. Maybe it fascinates you too? Because it’s pretty universal to find that little children love playing with water, isn’t it? They love to play with it in their bath, in a tub, at the beach, in a pool or a pond…..they love to make snowballs and snowmen, to sledge down snowy slopes, to jump in puddles in the rain.

I don’t think that fascination leaves us. It’s a core energy which courses through us for our entire lives. Hey, around 60% of the human body is water. Water, in various forms, flows around us, into us, out of us, circulates within us. We need water much more quickly than we need food.

Maybe one of the most fascinating things about water is how it is present around us in gas, liquid and solid form. We see it in the air when we breathe out on a frosty day, creating little, temporary clouds which vanish, quickly, into the air. We don’t see it in the air as we speak and sing (which is why we’ve ended up wearing masks during this pandemic – that coronavirus rides the water droplets from one person to the next). We see it mostly as liquid….in a glass, in a puddle, in the rain, in the oceans, rivers and lakes.

Sometimes you can see a mist rising from the surface of a loch, float above the surface, and drift across the face of the forested hillsides like ghosts. Other times, like in this photo, you can see the water turn from liquid to solid. Do you remember that lesson from school? How cooling most substances down causes them to shrink, but how freezing water expands it? Weird, huh? Water is weird. We really, really don’t understand it.

In this photo you can see the edge between the solid frozen water, and the still liquid form. You can see the trees reflected in the mirror-like surface of the liquid water, and you can see the white frosted edge of the solid ice. I think, in this image, that gives the lock a nice “yin yang” appearance. Somehow, by doing that, it captures the sense of dynamism, of how the one form exists in the presence of the other, and of how the liquid and solid forms are constantly shape-shifting, from the one into the other.

As water freezes it takes on all manner of shapes – you know that no two snowflakes are identical, don’t you? Don’t you think that is astonishing? I do. But when water freezes on the surface of something else it is also able to create the most incredibly beautiful shapes.

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Entangled

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on January 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

It’s not hard to find a pile of nets and ropes on the dockside at any little fishing village or port. I often find them quite fascinating and sometimes, like this one, quite beautiful. Look at the gorgeous palette of colours in this photo!

Without fail these images make me hear the word “entangled” in my head, and that’s one of my favourite words. It captures both the idea that everything is connected, and the fact that you can’t touch, or interact, with any single “element” without affecting everything else. It’s like the “butterfly effect”, where a small change in a complex system cascades throughout the entire network and has unpredictable significant over all changes – in the case of the butterfly effect linking the changes in air pressure and movement in one part of the world to storm and hurricane systems in other parts.

Well, that’s sure something we’ve had proven to us during the last year isn’t it? Even now, we hear of a “mutation” in the coronavirus, in one country and within a few days we’re hearing of it turning up around the entire planet. We sure are all “entangled” with each other, aren’t we?

There’s an aspect of this entanglement which has bothered me during this pandemic, and it comes up in the way that politicians and, also, many experts, are dealing with it.

It seems pretty clear that the present emerges out of the past. In other words we find ourselves in this current predicament because we’ve been living in a certain way. Yet, repeatedly, governments don’t want to admit “mistakes” or to look back and understand how our societies became so vulnerable. Probably because they don’t want to admit responsibility, but sometimes because it doesn’t fit with their favourite set of beliefs.

Would the health services in Western Europe be under such stress if they had been better resourced and organised over the last couple of decades? Of course, we can’t know for certain, but if the present really is entangled with the past, then can’t we try to understand how we became so vulnerable?

And if the present is also entangled with the future, which surely it is, then if we are to become more resilient then we need to create healthier societies. This virus has made it absolutely clear that those who will be hit hardest are those who are already the most frail and vulnerable.

I’d like to see politicians begin to lay out plans for our “exit strategy” from this pandemic which don’t rely entirely on technological fixes, but which, instead, firstly, develop and deploy better health and social care, to be better able to help and heal when help and healing is needed, but, secondly, to reduce poverty, poor housing, poor education, poor nutrition, inequality and environmental damage.

That would seem like a good place to start.

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The end of the office?

Posted in education, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on January 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This pandemic has been going on for months now, and in many countries office workers have been working from home. I had to deal with a government agency recently and I could tell from the background sounds that the person I was speaking to wasn’t working in an office, so I asked him if he was at home. He replied that he was and he thought it was great. He no longer had to commute for about an hour and half in each direction between home and work every day, and when he wanted a coffee, he said, he could just reach behind him and switch on the coffee machine – no queue to join! He sounded relaxed and happy.

In surveys I’ve read it seems a lot of office workers are hoping they will never have to return to an actual office. Maybe this will be one of the big bonuses to come out of the pandemic……a shift away from commuting, from impersonal workspaces, and an increase in both quality of life, and time spent locally with friends, family and in local businesses and communities.

I took that photo above many years ago, one evening as I walked through Aix-en-Provence. I guess these two folk found a way to access free wifi! But that image comes back to me now as I think about how we are breaking out of the old ways and habits of office working.

On another evening in Aix I came across this man sitting high up in a tree, reading a book. I don’t know why he picked that particular spot but I remembered him just as I was writing about the unusual places a lot of us now work from, or study in.

I do think one of the main lessons we are going to get from this pandemic is to challenge our orthodoxies, and our habits. You can even make a case for saying that we got to where we are today by doing things the way we’ve been doing them, so if we want to get out of this and not fall back into it, perhaps we are going to have to get creative and come up with new ways of living, new ways of working, studying and sharing our time and space.

Maybe this isn’t the end of the office as we’ve come to know it, but it surely challenges the dominance of the current model. If that leads to more flexibility and more diversity then I think that can contribute to a better, healthier way of living.

Apply this same thinking to education and you can already see that the way we’ve been delivering education to children and young people is also going through a potential revolution. I’m a bit of an optimist at heart, and I can’t help thinking that, although these changes bring lots of challenges and difficulties, they can also bring us the opportunities to learn and to teach differently.

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Webs of connection

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography, science on January 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Webs fascinate me. They are such beautiful structures woven each by a single spider. How do they do that? Spiders have far more rudimentary neurological structures than mammals, but they certainly have brains which enable them to create these webs. Exactly how they know how to spin a web is a mystery. I also think it’s pretty incredible that the actual material from which the web is made is created in the spider’s body.

I wrote yesterday about the underlying structure of reality which is built upon the concept of a network – nodes with connections. In a spider web, the nodes are where the threads meet and the threads are the connections. The fact that the entire web is inter-connected is what enables the spider to detect the movement of a fly when it is caught on the web, and to know exactly where to find it.

But as that example hints, webs exist, not as separate entities, but in complex dynamic relationship with other creatures and with the environment in which they are created.

This photo is of a complex of wind-borne seeds stretched between several stalks of a plant. I don’t know if there is a spider web hidden in the middle of these seeds. I couldn’t see one. But it is reminiscent of the web I’ve shared at the top of this post. But there needn’t be a web inside this seed group. Perhaps they just all attached onto each other as they were released by the plant, and have formed a structure that looks just like a web, because each seed is connected to several other seeds through those fine filaments which are designed to carry the seed on the wind.

However this structure came about it shows how nothing exists in isolation. Not only are these seeds connected to each other, but they are connected, both physically and historically, to the plants which produced them, and so on back in time to the seeds from which these particular plants grew, connecting back over decades, centuries, aeons. They are also connected to the visible and invisible surrounding environment in which they exist. They interact with the wind, with passing creatures, and with other plants.

When you pause to consider anything from the perspective of its connections, you find yourself following trails which extend both back and forward in time, as well as connections to other objects, creatures, energies, physical and environmental phenomena. Really, if you were to attempt to tell the story of a single seed from the moment you encounter it back beyond its origins, and forward into the rest of its life story, then you’d find yourself lost pretty quickly. There seem to be no limits to the chains of connections and relationships we can uncover for any single object, creature or person.

So, really, nothing is completely knowable. There is always more to discover. There are always paths, connections and relationships which change our understanding of what we see in this present moment.

I think that fact keeps us humble, and stokes the fires of our wonder.

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The structure of reality

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on January 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Did you ever come across an ancient Chinese philosophical concept, “Li”? I’m no scholar of Chinese philosophy but the sense I make of this idea is that there are invisible patterns, structures and forces throughout the universe which shape the forms that we see. (If you understand this better than me, and you think I’m mis-representing “li” please explain in the comments section)

It does seem to me that there are certain patterns in Nature which seem pretty widespread. This one which is a “honeycomb” pattern in rock in the West of Scotland is one of these, and, for me, it’s one of the most fundamental.

It’s a bit like a web, or a net, and really it’s simply connections and points of connections. The connections are the thin almost thread like pieces and the points of connection are where two or more of these pieces meet. This is the basis of all networks – we call the points of connection, “nodes”, and the lines represent the ways in which nodes influence each other.

Simple nodes receive information, energy or materials from other nodes, and pass them on. More complex nodes do some processing, so that the exact information, energy or materials which it receives, leave it in somewhat different form.

One of the places we see this structure is in our brains – we have billions (yes, billions) of special cells in our brain. We call them “neurones” and their main purpose is to transfer information from one place to another. The neurones all meet up with other neurones at specialised junction points called “synapses”. Every single neurone is connected this way to several thousand (yes, several thousand) other neurones. You can imagine pretty easily that the permutations of firing, communicating neurones, neuronal pathways and neural networks in the brain might not be infinite, but it’s so gobsmackingly (is that a word?) large that we literally can’t actually envision it in its totality. I’m sure I once read someone say that the number of whole brain states, determined by which neurones are firing is greater than the number of visible stars in the universe. Well, don’t know if that’s quite right, but it sure gives you a way of imagining the immensity of it.

Another place we see this structure is in the human body. Think of each of your several billion cells as a node, and once you realise that every single one of those cells lives in constant relationship with all the others (either directly or indirectly, cos that’s the way a network works) then you get a good understanding of why we need to think of our health and wellbeing holistically. None of our parts live in isolation. In fact all our cells, all our tissues and all our organs, are continuously, dynamically relating to others by establishing and maintaining “integrative” relationships – that is “Mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts”. There’s a key point to see here – the most fundamental kind of relationship in the universe is collaborative, integrative and co-operative.

Yes, competition exists. Of course it does. But we have been duped into believing that competition is THE key relationship in the universe…….THE driver of evolution. It’s important and it’s real, but by itself competition could not produce evolution, could not produce Life, cannot describe reality. We need relationships which are essentially integrative, fundamentally well-meaning, mutually supportive, collaborative, to do that.

I don’t know about you, but I think we could all benefit from this simple shift of understanding – we need to put “collaborative, integrative, co-operative” relationships at the heart of our decision making.

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