Heroes Not Zombies

You’ll know that I have a thing about conscious living. My blog’s title, heroes not zombies, is a call to step out of autopilot and get involved in the conscious creation of the unique story of your one precious life.

Habits and routines can easily allow us to switch off and just keep doing what we’ve always done. However, they can be both useful and enjoyable.

They can connect us to certain rhythms and cycles in life. We can relax into them, basking in feelings of familiarity. They can be the unchallenging, comfortable stepping stones across ever changing, even threatening rivers of everyday existence.

This photo represents one of my favourite habits, or routines. It’s a Saturday. Market day. I’ve stopped off at a boulangerie, picked up a croissant or chocolatine, and I’ve ordered a “grande crème” at a little cafe or bistro where I’ve chosen a seat in the sun.

Now, this isn’t going to happen every Saturday. It’s a good weather choice. (I’ll sit inside if it’s cold and wet!). And some Saturdays I’ll do something else. But it’s still a pleasing, comfortable routine.

I think that’s the trick with good habits and routines – becoming aware of them, and choosing them consciously.

Do you have some particular habits or routines which you’re happy to keep choosing? And are there some which, now you think about them, have become constraints which you’d rather shake off?

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I wandered around the nearby village of Saint Savinien at the weekend. It’s an incredibly pretty little town nestled along a curve of the slow moving Charente. It has a few narrow streets climbing the hill up to the church, and I took this photo in one of them.

I often wonder about the naming of streets. Some are descriptive, indicating what lies, or used to lie, in a particular direction. Rue de la Gare, for instance (station street), or Rue de la Moulin (mill street). However many are named after famous people or events, maybe connected to that locality, or maybe National characters, battles, or historical dates.

This street, the one in this photograph, has a descriptive name. What do you think it is?

I’ll make it clearer for you with this photo ….

The street name is on a plaque just above that no waiting sign. Can you see it?

Isn’t that lovely?

What a well named street! “Rose Street”.

Are there any streets near you which you think are especially well named?

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Look at this little plant. I don’t know how it got there but somehow a little seed landed on this stone step at the side of this wall.

To you and me it seems there’s nothing there to support survival, let alone growth and flourishing. There’s no obvious soil, surely little in the way of nutrients and it’s an exposed, sunny, stone alleyway.

Yet that little seed found enough to germinate, enough to survive, and grow, and, most amazingly, to flourish.

Épanouissement is the French word for this.

Yet again I’m astonished at the capacity which Life has to find what’s necessary to survive and flourish in this Earth. It amazes me everyday.

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I moved house in December, and there’s a wisteria plant in the garden here. I was really looking forward to it blooming in the Spring but in South West France the beginning of the year was abnormally warm. That resulted in various plants and trees, including the wisteria, producing their early blossom. Then, the temperatures plummeted, with minus 2 one night, minus 3 the next, and minus 4 the final night before the place started to warm up again.

All around the village, pretty blossoms turned brown. Disaster.

Well here we are a couple of months on and the wisteria has started to produce some flowers. Here’s a photo of some of them. Aren’t they glorious?

Yet again I’m amazed to witness the power of plants. Their resilience, adaptability and opportunism means they surprise you again and again.

Aren’t these great qualities for us all? The ability to spot opportunities and grasp them, the ability to adapt, and the self-healing, self-repairing power of resilience.

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I’ve got a bit of a thing about taking photos of benches! I think it comes from the days when I was working as a GP and my days were super busy. Sometimes I’d pass a park bench as I drove from one house call to the next and the thought of being able to sit there and just do nothing for a wee while was tantalising but impossible!

Benches say to me “sit down, take the weight off your feet and your mind” and that is SUCH good advice. We all need to pause from time to time, even if only for a few moments.

We need those pauses to catch our breath, break out of vicious cycles of over-busyness, and give us opportunities to reflect, take stock and see the bigger picture.

Have you got any favourite places to enjoy a pause?

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Ten years ago this month I took this photo from my bedroom window. The mountain is Ben Ledi and what amazed me was that every day it looked different. The mountain itself probably changed so slowly that it looked exactly the same one day after another but the light, the clouds, the mists…..they combined to create a brand new scene, not just daily, but every time I looked.

On this particular day, two things struck me. Firstly, the colour of the sky as the sun lit the clear area below the dark grey cloud. Secondly, the wisps of constantly changing mist, or low clouds, which slid along the surface of the mountain, closely following its slopes and curves.

One patch of mist, towards the right of this image, curled up towards the sky, circled around, and headed back down towards the Earth. It seemed to me I was watching mist become cloud, and cloud become mist.

Absolutely beautiful. Take a moment to enjoy the dance.

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Isn’t this window beautiful?

There are some windows which are simply beautiful even when you can’t see through them to what lies beyond. I think I find round, or arched, windows especially appealing. Can you think of any windows which you really like?

What this image does for me is set off a train of thought about how we frame our views of reality. Is that a big leap for you? Stick with me for a moment…..

Have you ever noticed how your mood or mindset seems to influence what you see on a particular day. If you’re feeling a bit sad, you might notice other sad people, come across sad scenes, or feel that everything around you is bleak and grey. On the other hand, when you’re feeling happy, it can seem the world is full of delights and smiling people. You get the idea…

But it’s more than mood that creates a frame of mind. Our beliefs do that too. I think you can see that with luck. People who feel lucky, get lucky. People who consider themselves unlucky, get plenty of opportunities to confirm that. Which raises an important point….what beliefs are you carrying around with you – about yourself, about others, about the world?

My daily experience is that people are kind and friendly. I’m sure that’s partly because I believe that, at heart, most people are indeed kind and friendly. Of course I come across some people who are quite the opposite. I know they exist. But, in my life, they are by far the minority.

So here’s my question to you….do you believe the universe is a friendly place?

Actually, it was Einstein who first posed that question.

For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

“If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.

“But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”

“God does not play dice with the universe,”

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Our two cerebral hemispheres allow us to engage with the world in very different ways, particularly by the types of focus they enable. If you browse through my blog, or search “McGilchrist” you’ll find lots of detail about this.

One difference is that the left hemisphere is always on the lookout for the familiar. It seeks to re-cognise what we encounter and to classify it according to previous analyses. The right hemisphere however is primed to spot what’s new. It seeks to focus on the unfamiliar, the unique, the particular.

You could say that the right hemisphere promotes discovery by seeking novelty.

Maybe that partly explains our common fascination for new life, for seedlings, shoots and buds. Maybe it explains why we find the unfolding of leaves and petals so beautiful, or why we enjoy seeing growth, development and emergence.

The right hemisphere helps us elevate becoming over being.

What do you notice that’s new or different today?

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One of my favourite ways to photograph a plant is with the sun shining through its leaves or flowers. I suppose this breaks the same rule about shooting with the sun behind you, which I wrote about the other day. But in this case the sun is nowhere to be seen.

I like this image because plants capture the energy of the sun and turn it into structure and nutrition. They also gobble up carbon dioxide from the air, and in exchange, produce oxygen.

If plants weren’t able to transform the sun’s energy then none of us would exist. Plants evolved before animals, after all, and if they’d never emerged then the Earth wouldn’t have developed the protective atmosphere which it has now.

I also like this image because it seems as if the plant is radiating light. To me, it seems as if you can see its Life Force, a phenomenon we are all aware of, but which isn’t considered nearly enough in health care.

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The ceiling of this room has been decorated with stars which makes you think of the night sky, although you know, instantly, that it’s not at all like the night sky. How do we know? The stars are distributed too regularly. The universe doesn’t do “regular”, well, not a grand scale.

I know one of the big questions scientists ask is why is the universe so “lumpy”? If the Big Bang happened as theorised why didn’t all the matter created distribute evenly as the universe expanded? How did we end of with randomly distributed stars, planets and galaxies?

Looking at this image again today I’m thinking of a novel I read last week where one of the characters pointed out that although we have described patterns of stars and called them constellations, those stars exist in three dimensions and are not nearly as close to other as they appear when we see them in the shape of a constellation. That’s just one of the mind boggling things about the night sky, the fact that the light we see from each star set off towards us hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, so as we gaze at the night sky we are witnessing the past.

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