Heroes Not Zombies

Think of the places on this Earth which mean the most to you….the places where you feel at home, the places which feel as if they are your origin places, where your roots lie, the places which feel special because what happened there was so important to you, or had such an impact, the places where you feel in awe of the beauty there, the places you love, and those which your loved ones love.

Stirling, in central Scotland, was where I was born, where I grew up, and where I learned, post university, to become a doctor. It’s a city steeped in history with the castle and the monument, two of its most prominent features on its skyline. But it’s also a city with a great river snaking through it. The River Forth winds and bends and loops its way through Stirling, heading towards Edinburgh and the North Sea. The Old Stirling Bridge was the only crossing point linking the Scottish Highlands to the Lowlands.

Stirling has been a meeting place, a market town, a Royal town, a town where people met from East and West, and from North and South.

My gran told me that boys born in Stirling were known as “sons of the Rock”, after the ancient rock on which the castle was built. I think that was a pretty powerful message to give to a child, conveying a deep sense of roots, of stability and consistency in the face of flow and change, a kind of constancy.

Those are qualities I own, and which others have remarked upon.

I wonder how much my environments shaped me, and how much I continue to contribute and influence in turn as we shape our world together.

I read a study today comparing children in pre-schools with different types of playground. The researchers looked at the state of their “biomes” – in other words, the health and diversity of their gut “flora” which, we know, plays an important part in the immune system.

The children whose school playgrounds were concrete and tarmac had poorer “biomes” than those whose playgrounds had grass and woodland ground cover eg heathers and blueberries.

This is yet another study, taking a slightly different angle on things time, which shows there is an immune benefit from time spent in natural environments.

Recently another study indicated that urban air quality is so poor in European cities that it’s probably responsible for many thousands of deaths every year.

We also know that Covid and other airborne diseases spread much more intensively in indoor environments where the air quality is poor – yet little seems to be happening to rectify that!

These are just some of the examples which show that if we want to get a handle on these waves after waves of viral and bacterial infections then we should address the condition of the environments we are living in.

Can we envisage a two pronged programme to improve indoor and outdoor air quality, hand in hand with increasing natural diversity in our urban environments and habitats.

Whitehead, pointing out that inanimate objects last much longer in the world than living organisms, asks, “how did complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolve”…..”They certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them”.

Trees can live for hundreds of years, some bacteria for millions, so if survival is a key driving force behind evolution, how come a human life is still only 70 – 80 years, yet we presume ourselves to be THE most fully evolved creatures on the planet.

There’s definitely more to evolution than survival and reproduction. What do you think that is?

Humble dazzle
of autumn:
these leaves
on the ground - 
each one a page
in the book. 
A poem that says:
I lived. 
I was
a small part
of the whole
story - this 
is my song,
this is my glory. 

Gregory Orr

Isn’t that a beautiful poem? Autumn can be such a colourful season, and although there are still many golden, yellow, red and brown leaves falling to the ground, we’ve had our first frost here and really I think we should be calling this winter….maybe the seasons are becoming more interwoven?

But what this poem reminds me to do is see the individual in the crowd, pay attention to the particular which can be hidden by the general.

Each single leaf has lived its own life, fallen at this particular moment and landed on this specific piece of ground. Each leaf, like each and every living creature, sings a unique song, tells a singular story.

Every one of us lives this “one precious life”….it’s our glory.

You can see lots of mistletoe around here throughout the year, but it’s significance is at a height at this time of year….Christmas.

The Romans associated mistletoe with peace, love and understanding, which seems especially relevant to me here where I live a few metres from a Roman aqueduct.

It has long been associated with male fertility in a variety of cultures and has been used as a medicine for a number of different complaints. It’s highly toxic….a feature which seems to be characteristic of so many different “medicinal” substances. I wonder why that is….why do we humans use poisonous plants to bring about healing? It seems a dangerous game and I often wonder how the first humans discovered that certain plants had both harmful AND beneficial powers.

We humans create a whole extra dimension of reality through our use of symbols and stories, seeing not just a cluster of leaves and white berries attached to a tree, but empowering those plants to turn our minds to love, to peace, to kisses and to protection from evil.

When the first frost of the winter arrived I went out to take photos before breakfast. Here’s one I took of the ice particles which formed on a plastic cover.

Aren’t they beautiful? I don’t think I could’ve dreamed up shapes like this. I’ve looked at this photo again and again, and if you’re a regular reader here, I bet you know what’s fascinating me….

This is one of those places where at first glance you think, oh look at all these identical clusters of ice! Then, immediately you notice differences and the closer you look, the longer you take over them, you realise…..there are no two exactly the same.

Yep, every single one of them is unique. Just like snowflakes. Just like each of us are unique. Just like every moment of every day is unique.

Isn’t that wonderful?

When I started to read philosophy books I came across the word, “teleology”, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. Best I know it refers to an end point, or a goal….so when something is described as teleological it means it has a purpose determined by its destination. Maybe that’s not an exact definition and I’m happy to be educated if you know better, but the destination doesn’t have to be a fixed, limited one….it can be like a “North Star” or “lode star”…. something to aim at.

So when I read this sentence about the universe, I read it as stating that the universe isn’t random and purposeless, rather it is moving forward in a particular direction…..it’s going “somewhere”, and that somewhere gives a clue about purpose.

So what’s the suggestion here? That, the direction, the “somewhere”, the purpose, is beauty, complexity and uniqueness. That’ll do for me.

I have my eyes and ears open for that every single day….to be awoken by, to be absorbed by, beauty, complexity and uniqueness, so that I stop, wonder, and savour, enriching my life and my soul.

Is the universe moving in a particular direction? Does the cosmos seem to evolve towards some destination? Or, better, perhaps, if not a destination then, at least, in developing it reveals a purpose?

Is that purpose beauty, as Whitehead suggests? Beauty, which Iain McGilchrist describes as “gloriously superfluous and unnecessary, its nature is that of a gift.”

I can’t see a destination, or a pre-imagined purpose – at least, I don’t see it from any utilitarian perspective. I don’t see that the universe exists as a tool to achieve the completion of some hidden task.

Rather, I’m more convinced by those right hemisphere understandings of the direction being towards beauty and ever greater interconnected complexity, and the purpose as the daily celebration of Life, of creativity, of difference, uniqueness and diversity.

I enjoy the idea that the universe exists as a celebration rather than as a tool, and that the direction of travel, or of the “flow”, towards ever more beauty, creativity and uniqueness is exactly my “touchstone”, my “values and principles” with which I want to orientate my life.

“A machine has an extrinsic purpose – not its own but that if the person who made it. It exists purely to achieve an and: another being’s end. By contrast, a melody has an intrinsic purpose: it’s hardly pointless, but it has no other point than itself.” – Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things

Despite the fact that we can now understand reality through the lens of complexity science, the mechanistic, materialistic model remains the dominant one. I hope that will change soon.

We are not machines. We are not “machine like”. Machines are built by someone to serve a purpose set by whoever built them. To consider a human being, or indeed, any other living creature as a machine reduces them. It dehumanises people, devitalises Life. It sets up societies where individuals are reduced to cogs in a machine, replaceable, dispensable, having value only when they deliver for whoever hires them.

We are more like music than we are machines. Every one of us sings a unique melody, the melody we instantly recognise because every individual is unique.

I often refer to how everyone has their own unique story to tell…the one which allows them to know who they are, to make sense of life, and to communicate their inner experience to others. But this passage comparing machines to melodies makes me realise that we don’t just tell unique stories, we sing our singular songs.

Think how we use metaphors such as “singing from the same hymn sheet”, or of “working in harmony”, being “in tune with each other”.

Isn’t life a performance of a beautiful composition, one which we create and share as we live, day by day, moment by moment?