Heroes Not Zombies

There are lots of ways to make life good, but, here’s two practices which work best for me.

The first is, “stop”. Take a pause. We have a tendency to go through life semi-consciously, following habits, zoning out, and just not noticing the here and now. We can drive a regular route and when we arrive at our destination we can’t remember what we saw on the way. We can get to the end of January and think “Where did that go?” Everything is getting faster…..the news cycle, where the latest drama shocks you and upsets you, then, before you know it, it’s gone, as if it never existed, having already been replaced with the next shocker. Technology develops faster and faster, and the latest smartphone is virtually redundant from the moment you buy it, because already they are hyping the next “better” model. “Fast fashion” is just that….try and keep up….what you bought today is out of date tomorrow. “Doom scrolling” hooks us into an endless flow of mini posts, headlines, adverts, each one forgotten within days, of not within minutes.

The counter to all this is to slow down and pay attention. Yes, it might even involve actually stopping. You can set off today with an intention to notice…to see what catches your attention, to notice beauty, to allow yourself to be curious. But you have to slow down to reap the benefit. You have to pause, to really become aware of the present – what do you see, hear, smell, or taste, or what can you feel, right now?

The second is “reflect”. You can reflect right within the moment…as you notice something, take a moment to reflect on it, to contemplate it. And the other thing I like to do is take out my phone and take a photo. If you photograph what caught your attention, you give yourself multiple opportunities to reflect on it later.

There’s my two practices for today – “Stop” and “Reflect”. Try them both.

Our brains have evolved a brilliant talent for spotting patterns, and one of the patterns it is best at noticing is a face. Not only do we have an ability to recognise a face quickly in a crowd (even if we have trouble putting names to faces as we get older!), but we see faces where there aren’t any.

Look at the surface of this rock. Doesn’t it, for all the world, look like a painting by Munch? A distorted face, perhaps, but a face all the same. These faces which are not really faces, but simply face-like patterns, always amaze me. I tend to see them most commonly in trees and rocks, but sometimes they are apparent in flowers or even buildings.

What’s the point of that? I wonder. What’s the value in being able to see faces which are not actually faces? Is it just a sort of side effect of the face-pattern-spotting skill? Maybe it is. However, even though I don’t know why we’ve developed this ability, I love it. It speaks to our capacity for imagination and creation which is so fundamental to human life. And it adds a layer, or, better, perhaps, reveals a depth, to perception which takes it beyond the mere utility of seeing. It can inspire. It can bring us moments of wonder and delight. It can spark our creativity and slow us down, stopping us from just breezing past, not really noticing. It brings beauty and reflection to life itself.

What face-patterns have you spotted recently?

This photo of Boschendal garden in South Africa always makes me think of two forces of the universe – order and chaos, or, as Thomas Berry says, discipline and wildness. Everyone who writes about these polar opposite forces argues the same point – we need both, and we need them in a particular kind of balance. Too much of either destroys what we have.

We live in an ever more divided world, presented, day after day, with a black and white version of reality, with one pole presented as “right” or “true” and the other presented as “wrong” or “false”. Genuine dialogue and understanding disappear under the noise of anger, indignation and distrust.

Reality is full of paradoxes and polarities. And it’s not that some “happy medium”, or some bland “neither this nor that”, is better. It’s about understanding and acceptance, about seeing the necessity of apparent opposites.

Reality emerges from the synthesis of these two forces, not from their dilution, or from the exclusion of one in favour of the other.

I wonder if we have dreamed of being able to fly. I know that many people experience some kind of flight in dreams. If you listen carefully, their descriptions are quite different. Some people have the experience that they are flying like “Superman”, zooming here and there, able to go wherever they have the fancy to go. Others don’t have that experience of being in control but, rather have the feeling that they are being blown long distances by the wind. For yet others they find themselves following a winding road or river, tracing its twists and turns. And, for many, it’s not so much a flight, as a fall. In this latter case, it’s quite common for the dreamer to have the actual sensation of falling, so vivid that it wakes them with a start.

I take great pleasure from listening to, and watching, the birds in my garden. For much of my life I was either too busy in my medical career, or I lived in a top floor apartment without any outside space, but since I retired to rural France I’ve been blessed with a garden, surrounded, in my first house, by vineyards, and, now, by trees and fields, and I have the weather for most of the year to be able to just be outside….either gardening, strolling, noticing, photographing, swimming, or sitting reading….and I am surrounded by birds.

I’ve had a number of very special exchanges with particular birds over these last ten years or so, and I feel their presence more than I ever did. I don’t know if that’s a common experience, or peculiar to me.

What’s your experience with flying dreams? What place do birds have in your life?

This sculpture in the Dylan Lewis garden in Stellenbosch evokes the sense of an ancient primate, maybe an early human, maybe a creature evolving between the higher primates and first human as we now know them.

I love how he’s captured the sense of the creature walking, not quite yet upright, but still using a hand to get around. I did think, at first, maybe it was someone bending over to pick something up, but I think the positions of the legs convey a feeling of movement, not simply stooping. I also love how the shape of the creature’s back echoes the shapes of the mountains in the distance.

I enjoy sculpture in nature. It often arrests me, capturing my attention, my gaze, and stimulating my thoughts and reflections. The whole Dylan Lewis garden is large and has many, many sculptures, placed throughout it, and its position at the edge of a wilder area, without any fences or walls around it, make it feel much more natural, although, I believe, it was created in a massive work of landscaping just a few years ago. It looks ancient, and it’s embedded in the even more ancient.

His sculptures often capture a kind of betweenness – in this case, a stage of evolution, between primates and modern man.

Here’s a gift for you today – a blue, blue scene which I find SO calming, and I hope you will, too.

I took this photo a year ago when visiting good friends who live in South Africa. The sea was especially calm that day, and the sky so clear, even though there were thin white clouds in the distance.

Rebecca Solnit writes incredibly beautifully about blue in her wonderful “Field Guide to Getting Lost”…you can read an extract here.

Meantime, just take a moment and immerse yourself in this gorgeous palette of blues.