Heroes Not Zombies

Possible answer number 3 in Sarah Blackwell’s book about Montaigne, “How to Live”, is entitled “be born”.

At first, I thought this was a joke, like the one that goes “Q. What’s the first thing you have to do before getting off a train? A. Get on it”

However it turns out to be a very thoughtful piece on the circumstances of our births. By circumstances I mean the parents we are born to, as well as the social and cultural situation into which we are born.

How much of your mum or dad do you recognise in yourself? Whether it’s due to genetics or family socialisation, there will be aspects of your personality and behaviour which you may recognise in your ancestors (from parents, through grandparents and so on). That’s a common thread in the BBC’s excellent “Who do you think you are?” series. Time and again the person tracing their family tree discovers ancestors who had strikingly similar occupations or traits to their own.

Of course, it’s not all about having similar characteristics to our parents, or grandparents. Sometimes the next generation goes the opposite way….perhaps in reaction to their experience of how they were parented.

One of my grandfathers was an avid reader and read me stories frequently (including Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather). Did he pass on that love of reading, storytelling and history, to me (traits not shared with his daughter, my mum)? It seems he did. I even learned he used to give talks with a “magic lantern”, something I used to recall as I’d head for a venue with my laptop and projector in hand.

It’s an important point. How we live is enormously influenced by the contexts of our existence. By our roots. That isn’t to say they are set in stone and I don’t accept it in a fatalistic way, but I reckon if I want to understand myself, or someone else, then I need to take into account the circumstances of early life, the “family history”, the social and cultural influences.

In that sense, how we live, is better understood by learning about our origins, and our early years.

This also makes me think of what I’ve learned about attachment theory and neural development…..how a healthy attachment style with the primary carer in the first few months of life can influence the development of the brain, including the number of interconnections formed between the neurones. Those early months and years can also set up inflammatory patterns if there is poverty, poor nutrition and a lack of safety at that time. (Something known as the “allostatic load”). So the patterns of chronic illness which can appear in adult life can often be traced back to those early years.

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The second possible answer to How to Live is “pay attention”. Here’s an answer close to my heart. You could argue that “heroes not zombies” is about paying attention, because what we pay attention to creates what we experience on a day to day basis. Whatever we focus on is magnified by the attention we give.

Isn’t it interesting that we even talk of the “attention economy” nowadays? Whether on social media, tv, or other mainstream media, everyone is competing for our attention and is awarded for success by the advertising industry.

I’d argue that most modern politics is “attention politics” with its emphasis on focus groups, three word slogans and communications which stoke fear and anger and division.

If we’re not aware of where our attention is spending its time, we are in zombie mode, driven this way and that by those who seek to manipulate us.

Montaigne learned the importance of paying attention from the ancients.

Those traditions emphasise the benefits of paying attention to Nature and to everyday experiences. That makes a lot of sense to me. As you’ll find in many of my posts “l’émerveillement du quotidien” is a core principle for me – the wonder in the every day. I’m constantly fascinated by my daily encounters with birds, plants, trees, people, what I read in books, art, drama, music, poetry…..you name it.

Which brings me to another aspect of attention. Iain McGilchrist has shown that our two cerebral hemispheres pay attention in two very different ways. We need both and we experience life at its best when we integrate both halves. The left hemisphere has a narrow focus, honing in on particular details, abstracting them from the overall context and analysing them. It’s great for “grasping” things. The right, however, enables a broad, whole, engaged form of attention. It helps us to see the big picture, to discover and to create connections.

By using both we discover both the unique and the common. We see the context and in so doing better understand the parts.

I like the phrase “engaged attention”. It implies an investment in whatever it is we are paying attention to. It suggests a depth of experience greater than that which is achieved by flicking quickly through channels, “doom scrolling” social media, and purely reactive, unconscious ways of living.

This is one thing I feel quite certain of – it’s a good thing to pay attention !

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The first of Montaigne’s twenty answers to the question of how to live (according to Sarah Bakewell) explores the issue of death. That might seem an odd place to start, because surely death is at the end of the story. However, it was an accident which gave Montaigne a near death experience and changed his whole way of thinking about life. It was this event which prompted him to begin exploring his own sensations, thoughts and emotions, and writing about them. In other words it was a near death experience which inspired Montaigne to create a whole new way of writing.

Prior to the accident he wrestled with the classical teaching of the Stoics who taught we should imagine our death, vividly, and in great detail, in order to prepare ourselves for dying when the time came. The trouble was he didn’t find thinking about and imagining his own death did anything other than increase his anxiety about it. He didn’t feel it was preparing him for it at all.

When I read that, I thought of the many Woody Allen films where his character constantly worries about death!

Montaigne processed his near death experience and concluded that the most striking thing was how dying felt a bit like falling asleep. It seemed like slipping from life into death was almost like floating effortlessly from the one to the other. Not a frightening process at all. Yet even as he was experiencing it, it seemed his unconscious body was writhing around, he’d been told. The inner experience didn’t seem to match the outward one.

As a doctor, you can imagine, I’ve witnessed many deaths over the years, and I’ve often wondered about those very final moments where, it seems, “the lights go out”. It’s always been a dramatic and emotional experience and I still don’t really understand exactly what happens at the final point of transition. In fact, “point” is the wrong word. It’s typically something that happens over a period of time greater than just a moment. But I’m not sure I ever imagined it was the way Montaigne described his near death experience.

Until one night on the island of Capri a couple of decades ago. As a young adult I ate oysters on two occasions and I was violently sick afterwards both times. As I grew up in central Scotland my family never ate seafood so I didn’t have any experience of mussels, clams, scallops and so on. One evening on Capri I was at a party and had spaghetti vongole. That was the night I discovered I had a shellfish allergy.

In the middle of the night I woke violently sick and rapidly got much worse. My wife went for help and I remember as a lay on the toilet floor realising I couldn’t move my legs any more and when I tried to speak no words came out. I knew in that moment I was really seriously ill and I still remember the floating feeling I had and the clear and distinct thought – “well, this is it. I’ve had a good life but I’ll be off now”.

Of course, I recovered. I wouldn’t be writing this today if I hadn’t. But that was my own personal near death experience. That all came back to me when I read Montaigne’s description. It did indeed feel from the inside a floating, slipping, easy transition. Not something to be afraid of.

Once Montaigne understood this he decided that, for him, at least, the old teachings about preparing for your death weren’t helpful. That, rather, death would come unexpectedly and naturally. He decided that instead of preparing to die, he’d put his efforts into living.

He shifted his focus from death to life. He decided to put his efforts, instead, into living a full, rich and fulfilling life. A good life. In the rest of his book he describes how he went about that. Each chapter is about his attempts to do that – “Essais”, translated as “Essays”, is the title of his book, but that French word actually means attempts, trials or tries. He describes what it was like to be Montaigne and as he does so uncovers many of the general issues we all share. So it’s common, even for contemporary readers, to wonder – “how did he know that’s what I experience?”

Well, that’s certainly my experience about this subject. For me, too, I’ve long since chosen to focus on living my life to the full.

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Is this a green leaf or a red one? If the colours represent two parties or choices in most modern democracies you’d have to say the greens won and the reds lost.

That kind of thinking does my head in! It produces everything from a tyranny of the biggest minority over all the other minorities to deepening divisions and resentment.

I understand that in a game, football, or tennis, for example, one team or player will score the most, be declared the winner and all the other contestants have to come to terms with their loser status. But that’s no way to run a society or a country.

Every population contains a diversity of individuals with different, probably evolving, or changing views and beliefs about everything. Democracy, if I understand the idea correctly, is a system designed to build consensus and promote social cohesion. But the current varieties of it don’t seem to work that way.

From first past the post voting, to us or them political groupings, to for or against votes where “winner takes all”, all of these practices deny the reality of complexity and diversity.

Does “we won” so “you” have to “shut up”, “suck it up”, or “move on” ever build understanding, improve relationships or build communities of people who want to work together? I don’t think so.

We need a better way to live together if we want to get off this divisive one track road to hatred, anger and resentment.

In politics, as in life, nothing is ever “finished”, “done” or “settled”. We need to be able to adapt, to make different choices as the world changes rather than digging deeper trenches and building bigger tribal walls.

I love this image of the green and red leaf, and I love it in this moment of its transition which speaks to me of Life, of dynamic cycles and seasons of change and difference. More than anything, in response to the question of its colour, I resort to “and not or”. It’s green AND red.

Would it be so hard to create a democratic system based on that reality? One that works for all of us, not just a minority?

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I moved house six months ago. Since moving I’ve been very busy, every day. The house and garden haven’t been lived in for a few years so they’re needing to be brought back to life. They’re needing some care and attention. Some of that busyness is very satisfying. Some of it can be pretty frustrating. Much of it can be really exhausting. It’s certainly squeezed out other activities, blown away old habits.

My every day now feels quite different to my every day a few years ago. But then that’s pretty normal isn’t it?

Sometimes I think of my life as a book, so here I am in the next chapter. The title of my blog, heroes not zombies, reminds me that each of us is both the author and hero (main character) of our personal life story. So I’m busy writing this new chapter, and embracing fully every paragraph!

But this photo reminds me of another metaphor which I’ve always liked – the path, with it junctions, intersections and, occasionally, signposts.

My garden has a neglected overgrown area of trees in it and one of my main activities just now is opening it up and reclaiming it. I’m doing that, not by following any signposts, but by creating brand new paths.

It’s delightful, even when it’s tricky and hard work, to make your own new paths into the unknown, the unexplored, and to make new discoveries every day.

Sometimes there are helpful direction indicators in life, but they are always only suggestions, and the path we choose will always be unique, will always be our own.

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Reality, which we can appreciate, and apprehend, directly in the natural, living world isn’t like the re-presentation, the model, or the map which is used most commonly in contemporary society.

What is that model or map? The machine.

A machine is constructed from parts, each of which is complete and independent from the others. It functions linearly, each movement or change leading to a predictable and exact outcome. The best machines are the ones which work most “efficiently”, producing the same outcomes time and again with the least amount of energy consumption.

The living world is not like that. Human beings are not like that. Reality is not like that. Machines and models are artificial. Complicated perhaps, useful perhaps, but not something we should try to emulate.

Reality is a constantly changing interactive flow of materials, energy and information. Everywhere we look in the natural world we see subjects, not objects…..living organisms which are born, grow and develop, flourish, reproduce, decline and die. We see unique creatures, every one with a different life story, living in a particular place over a particular period of time.

Living creatures are self-balancing, self-repairing, self-making individuals living in vast, intricate webs of relationships and connections, open to the flows of materials, energy and information from which they emerge, and into which they return.

A plant like the one in this photo lives abundantly. It produces as many blossoms as it can, it produces as many seeds as it can. An excess, some might say. It isn’t parsimonious and it isn’t “efficient” like a machine.

There’s a characteristic in all complex adaptive systems known as “redundancy”…..it involves having more ways to do something than you “need”. When some is lost, or some part of the system is damaged, there’s always more to come on stream or take over.

We seem to be in a bit of a mess these days, with crises and shortages everywhere. From airports, to ports, to supply chains, hospitals, GP Practices, ambulance services, or food production, the pandemic, we are told, has made them all collapse.

Well the pandemic highlighted something and made it worse, but it’s not THE cause. It’s a factor.

We entered the pandemic in the midst of a time when we’ve been trying to organise ourselves as if we are machines. Economic and management theories based on machine models – of identical, predictable parts working efficiently to produce the greatest financial profits with the least human input.

It’s not working because reality isn’t a machine.

We can try something different, can’t we? By seeing that each of us are living, complex, adaptive creatures who exist and flourish in a living world wide web of relationships and interconnectedness. We can create organisations and societies, as diverse communities and families of unique, singular, particular, unpredictable, uncontrollable, glorious, amazing individual beings.

What might that look like?

Not a machine.

But then the main focus would have to shift – from making money and consuming “stuff” to nourishing and nurturing Life.

Might be worth a try….it works in the natural world.

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I was never a gardener. I didn’t grow up in the tradition of gardening and for many years I lived in a top floor apartment with no garden. But since I retired and moved to rural France I’ve become a gardener.

It began with living in a house surrounded by vineyards and in a climate which drew me outside pretty much every day. I’d eat in the garden throughout the summer and I’d take a book outside to sit under the mulberry tree and read. I started to notice the birds which lived there or came to feed there and I’d notice the changes in all kinds of plants through the cycle of seasons.

I bought a battery operated lawnmower and found I’d enjoy listening to podcasts as I cut the grass. Cutting the grass would take between an hour and an hour and a half, an ideal podcast length of time!

We planted some vegetables in a “potager”, and I was amazed at the taste of fresh tomatoes, courgettes, lettuce, radishes and cucumbers. We planted a fig tree which quickly began to offer an abundance of fruit. Have you ever tasted figs just plucked from the tree? Amazing.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to Nature, never felt more in Nature at any other time in my life.

Now I’ve moved and bought a house in a small hamlet in the countryside. I’m no longer surrounded by vines, but by trees and fields. This house has a big garden and it’s needing to be reclaimed, to be re-inhabited. There’s still plenty of grass to cut, but no potager yet, and it has a significant area of overgrown trees – a little forest really. Most of the plants here have arrived without the assistance of human hands so there are surprise discoveries every week, different kinds of wild orchids, massive roses, sprawling ivy, wild clematis and honeysuckle.

This is not a garden which is ever going to be “finished”. Is any garden? It’s to be lived in, enjoyed, nurtured and cared for.

And there’s my greatest lesson I’ve learned from gardening. You can’t force it. You don’t fix it. It isn’t a giant machine with parts which need replaced or repaired.

To enable a garden to flourish you have to live with it, over time, get to know it and understand it. You have to “attend” to it, pay an engaged, committed attention to it. You have to care about, and for, it. You have to nurture it……especially the soil.

I think my work as a doctor was like that too. I knew that true healing only occurred when the individual patient was attended to, understood, cared for and nurtured. I knew that it wasn’t me who healed, nor was it any drug or procedure. It was the natural ability of a living organism to self-repair, self-heal and to grow and flourish. It was my job to support and facilitate that through long term healing relationships and by helping people to understand why they were suffering and what they might do to live differently, and thrive.

So there are threads in common here, between my work as a doctor, and my recent experiences as a gardener. Paying a particular kind of attention is perhaps the main one. Our left hemisphere facilitates a narrow, analytical focus on parts, helps us to grasp and manipulate the world. But left to itself, it produces a false sense of control and power, a false view of reality. Our right hemisphere enables us to have engaged attention. It helps us to find connections, to discover uniqueness, promotes a sense of wonder and wholeness. It helps us to “attend” to the real world directly.

Whether in gardening, or in Medicine, it turns out it’s best to use the whole brain, but to allow the right hemisphere to integrate all the activities of both sides. That allows us to realise life is not about fixing and controlling. It’s about the creation of caring relationships, attending and tending to, learning and growing together.

At least, that’s how it seems to me.

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Leaf skeletons are beautiful and fascinating. You really don’t know they are there until the green substance of the living leaf has gone. It reminds me of the cyclical nature of the seasons and of the phases of our lives. From buds bursting with potential to full flourishing and on to dissolve back into the world from which the leaves emerged.

But there’s something else….this feels like a revelation….a glimpse at the underlying structure of the universe. Not a permanent, fixed structure of course, but a transient one based on a fundamental tendency to create nodes and links – the network or web-like nature of our universe which connects everything to everything else.

The Chinese concept of “li” captures this idea – it’s the multiplicity of patterns we see in all living forms which manifests itself in the beautiful patterns which we see.

However you think of it, I think this wonderful leaf skeleton opens a door to understanding that the universe is not totally random, and matter is not distributed smoothly and evenly everywhere. But that reality structures itself and the hidden structures create, or at least profoundly influence, the myriad of individual forms which we see around us, and within us.

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One May, a few years ago I saw this rainbow at the top of the vineyards behind the house where I was living near the town of Cognac. It was quite the most extraordinary rainbow I’ve ever seen. One thing that made it different and powerful was how it seemed to divide the Earth below into two separate areas…..the one within the rainbow’s arch, and the one outside it.

I’ve seen many rainbows but I’d never seen this phenomenon where the sky and the land below the bow itself turned a completely different colour. That had a powerful effect on me which is hard to describe but which was a profound state of awe – such a small word for such an intense experience.

The second thing about this rainbow was the intensity of colour it reached. You know how if you look at a rainbow you can see it clearly but soon it starts to fade, the colours weakening until it disappears. Well this rainbow intensified to the strongest light I’ve ever seen. It was if the strongest multicoloured searchlight was beaming down from heaven onto the vines.

The third aspect of this extraordinary rainbow was its sheer presence. Not only did it manifest as a full arc, but it lasted a long, long time…..over 20 minutes. I’d never witnessed such a complete and long lasting rainbow ever before, and haven’t since.

So this rainbow is obviously unique. Yes, I know every rainbow is unique, but these characteristics combined to take it to a completely other level. One I’ll never forget.

I think these intense experiences change us. They alter our consciousness. They change how we see the world. I’ve always valued wonder, awe and beauty but this particular experience brought my connection to the universe to another level.

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Look at these fabulous flowers. I love this photo. It’s simple and pretty ordinary yet at the same time it reveals complexity and seems extraordinary.

These two flowers with their gorgeous red, pink and purple petals. Waving their “pistils” in the air, sending out signals which say “come closer”, “touch me”, “caress me”.

Isn’t it amazing how plants use beauty and the most delicate of elegant shapes to exert the power of attraction. Of course, what you can’t see in a photo, and often can’t see at all, are the tiny chemicals each plant sends out into the air, the scents, pheromones, chemical messengers, all magnifying that power of attraction.

What’s essential is invisible to the eye.

The Little Prince

Plants don’t survive and flourish through violence and bullying. They do it through beauty and attraction. There’s a lesson for us there……that Nature shows us these are the most important, most successful ways to live…..by making connections, by establishing relationships, by giving and receiving.

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