Heroes Not Zombies

PRESENT

CREATIVITY

These two words, or concepts related to them, keep coming up for me. I read a LOT, and I have one of those minds that seems to be good at seeing connections, patterns, echoes, themes, and in all those ways these two words keep coming to mind. Whether I’m thinking about flourishing, about happiness, about health, about living a good life, about understanding what it is to be uniquely human, and most especially when I think how to be a hero not a zombie!

If you don’t want to be a zombie, you have to wake up and smell the coffee. Different thinkers and authors refer to this in different terms. Some talk about waking up from the sleeping state, others about living consciously, and yet others about living mindfully. What it amounts to is being present. Really being present. Not just being somewhere in your body while your head is in the past, worrying about the future or drifted off somewhere into the clouds. So it’s a deliberate act to be present.

I am very attracted to the ideas of the “slow movement“. If we take our time to fully savour the here and now we enrich our experience of living. Fast food, quickly prepared and gulped down with hardly time to even taste it is one kind of experience. Picking up fresh food in the local market, walking home with it, preparing it, cooking it, sitting down to savour it (whilst not doing anything else!) is quite another kind of experience.

Mindfulness is a very popular term currently (other traditions over many years have taught the same concept) The famous mindfulness meditation exercise of the single raisin is one simple way to understand experientially what it means to be present.

I often find myself sharing with patients the simple understanding that your mind can only be in one place at a time. If you are giving attention and focus to the past (remembering, ruminating, ruing?), or giving it to the future (planning, worrying, fearing?), then you aren’t giving it to the present (sensing, savouring, being?). So, if you are troubled with too much of the past or the future in your head, deliberately turning attention and focus to the present can change your inner experience instantly.

I find that having a sense of wonder, of seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, drives my attention to the present.

What about creativity? Life, it seems to me, is constantly evolving, adapting, growing, developing. It’s a dynamic phenomenon which moves as a whole in the direction of ever greater complexity, diversity and uniqueness. In fact, that’s how I see the universe story – one of continuous and ongoing creation.

Creativity is also about expression. I believe every one of us has our unique and special contribution to make to the universe through living this life. We engage with and understand the world uniquely and we react and interact with it uniquely. Those interactions are creative. In biological terms we use the word “emergent” to describe phenomena and behaviours not seen before. That’s what we do. We are complex adaptive organisms in a process of continuous development, emerging, evolving (potentially) to higher consciousness.

Whether you create through art, through music, through building, through problem solving, through being with and sharing with others…..every day, you have countless opportunities to create, to make the world anew.

What does it mean to you to be present? And how can you be more present today?

What does it mean to you to be creative? And what will you create today?

I came across some interesting research into the factors affecting long term happiness. Positive psychology researcher, Sonja Lyubomirsky found that your long term happiness is partly determined by your genes, partly by external circumstances and partly from your disposition/choices. It breaks down something like this –

Whatever you think about the proportions, this got me thinking more widely about not just happiness, but health.

It strikes me there are three contributing influences – the given, the random and the chosen.

The given includes not only genetic factors, not just the DNA inside you, but also the circumstances of your birth. A child born in a Mumbai slum doesn’t just have different genetic influences from one born my home town of Stirling, Scotland. There are the physical, economic, cultural, familial environments into which they are born. Let’s assume the child neither chooses their genes, nor the circumstances of their birth. (I know not everyone sees the world that way) This is the given.

The random is whatever happens by chance. If a drunk driver loses control of his car and knocks you down as you walk along the pavement, that’s bad luck. If you happen to be on a train which derails, to be where a tornado hits, get caught in a tsunami…….unpredictable events – the random.

The chosen – we are always able to choose how we respond, to choose what to say or do in any given circumstance. As Viktor Frankl found, what matters is what stand we take in the face of events. See William Glasser’s “choice theory” for more on this.

I don’t know if the proportions are always the same, 50/10/40, but that’s not really the point. The thing is choices are what we can do something about. In fact, it’s not as separate as this description seems so far. We now know that we aren’t just our genes using us to replicate themselves. Epigenetics shows that genes can be switched on or off by external factors. We can influence whether or not certain genes are expressed. Similarly we can influence our luck. Watch the movie, “The Cooler”, with William H Macy for a really entertaining exploration of that!

Then I thought, it’s a bit like a game of cards. You have the hand you are dealt (the given), luck (what other cards other players are dealt and how they play them), and then you choose what to play when – something you can do well, or badly, depending on your skill level.

And that brought back to mind the phrase, “its the hand you are dealt” – which is usually a statement of something pretty limiting. People tend to say that when they think that whatever has happened is completely outwith the person’s control, when it’s all down to Fate, or to genes or whatever….but I think we can reframe this card game analogy much more positively.

We take the hand we are dealt, use our skills to play the game well, and make our best choices in the face of lucky (or unlucky) breaks!

We have the given; stuff happens; and we can usually make choices, develop strengths and skills.

What choices are you making today? What strengths do you have which you can develop?