Heroes Not Zombies

The poet, Gregory Orr, wrote – One of the terms we poets use in our considerable effort to avoid religious and spiritual terminology is ‘beautiful’. Of course no one can define the word, or everybody defines it differently, and yet we believe in it. Beauty is an article of faith among poets. I think many of us are trying to sidestep religion, and beauty is a word we use to do that.

What do you think about that?

I certainly think that beauty, along with goodness, truth, love and purpose are fundamental, foundational characteristics of the cosmos. They don’t develop from something else. They are the ground of Being, of the One, the All, the Divine.

I don’t say much about religion, which I tend to associate with institutions and organisations, but I do indeed find the appreciation of beauty to be a spiritual experience. It takes me deeper and takes me beyond at precisely the same moment.

I read the observation that we think more than we can say, we feel more than we can think, we live more than we can feel, and there is much more besides. (attributed to Eugene Gendlin).

I like that. I see it as a series of concentric circles of life – the smallest one in the centre being what we can say. Our words are very limited and we’re never able to articulate all our thoughts. Thoughts seem endless and unceasing, don’t they, and even in meditation we realise many of them pass on by far too quickly to be named or described.

Our thoughts though seem to emerge both top down, and bottom up, as the neuroscientists describe. Some originating within the brain but always meeting the ones coming up from the body, the probable source of most of our feelings. Remember how we use body metaphors to describe feelings…..heart ache, gut feeling, etc. We only become aware of a portion of our feelings, most of which remain in the unconscious, where they create the tidal flows and tones of each moment to moment experience.

And feelings are only a small part of the unconscious which is filled with a constant stream of signals and information from both outside and within the body, only some of which reach the level of awareness as sensations. We live more than we can feel.

And there is so much more besides….single cell organisms like viruses and bacteria, atoms and molecules of natural and manmade chemicals, a whole vast spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, and so on, constantly impacting on us, flowing through us, co-creating who we are and what we experience.

Astonishing isn’t it?

In the garden this afternoon I heard that distinctive sound and looked up in time to see a Flying V heading south to Africa for the winter. In France they are known as “grue”, and in English, “cranes”.

I love to hear and see them each year. They are such impressive birds, whether seen singly, or, more commonly, in flocks. There’s something especially mesmerising about their flight patterns, those not too rigid V shapes sometimes of just a handful of birds, but other times of hundreds.

Migration.

There are so many creatures which spend part of their lives in one part of the world, and other parts in far distant ones.

Maybe that’s why I feel so drawn to these birds….I, too, am a migrant. Having lived my first 60 years in Scotland, I’m now settled in South west France. A deliberate decision to spend part of my life in a different culture, a different environment, a different language.

Migration remains a hot topic around the world, as governments try to turn imaginary, invisible boundaries drawn on a map, into substantial, even insurmountable ones. But we humans move. We always have done. Even if you’ve never lived in any other country than the one you live in now, chances are your grandparents, or your grandparents’ grandparents, lived somewhere else.

The Right Wing myth of “blood and soil”, is an invention, something which requires a severe restriction of vision and understanding to swallow. The threads of DNA, of cell lines, of cultures and endlessly branching family trees show we all have countless connections with each other, connections which fly high above the imaginary state boundaries with just as much ease as those flying Vs of cranes.

Migration is normal.

There is nothing separate in this universe. All that exists comes into being temporarily through the creation of connections, shared events, experiences and links.

Wordsworth expressed it this way ….

…exist by mighty combinations, bound
together by a link, and with a soul
which makes all one. 

Once the number of connections increases above a certain level, we reach systems, networks and organisms which can only be described as “complex”.

Complex systems develop certain characteristics, not least certain capacities. They become adaptive, self repairing, functional wholes.

Each “whole” that we perceive is embedded in even greater wholes….what Arthur Koestler called “holons”, all nested into each other. The more complex the system the more likely we are to be able to discern its “essence”, its consciousness, even its “soul”. But some argue, convincingly in my opinion, that consciousness and/or soul exist, to some degree, in everything.

Indeed, maybe everything we call an object or an entity, is only the temporary manifestation of Consciousness, of the World Soul, the Divine.

This is my favourite stone. I keep it in my cabinet of curiosities. I don’t know what type of stone it is or how it came to look like this. It’s completely smooth and delightful to touch.

This idea of duality which is never separated into two really appeals to me and has done for most of my life. I’ve worn a Yin Yang symbol around my neck for decades.

The dualities which can never be separated include the classic yin and yang energies, but also masculine and feminine, the divine forms of both. And also light and dark, day and night, hot and cold, north and south and east and west. There isn’t a single one of those which makes any sense other than in relation to the other. They are bound, inextricably, permanently together.

It also works for the neuroscience view of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, as elucidated and developed by Iain McGilchrist. Those two ways of approaching the world, of focusing and of engaging with reality give us our unique abilities as human beings.

This symbol also represents balance of a very particular kind – dynamic, flowing, constantly moving balance. In doing so, for me, it captures the idea of the Life Force, of Life itself.

I read a lot of messages online about overwhelmed doctors and other NHS staff, and about patients struggling to access services.

It seems pretty clear there aren’t enough doctors, aren’t enough staffed beds, aren’t enough anything really. There are also similar problems in Social Care which are impacting on the Health Service, but I’ve got another question…..

…..why is there such increased “demand”, which is another way of saying, why are so many people sick?

It’s not just a Covid issue, although that surely has made the situation worse, and will continue to do so through Long Covid and cardiovascular inflammation. The population was getting sicker before Covid. More people are living with more incurable chronic diseases.

Covid reinforced something we’ve long since known…..it hit hardest amongst the poor, those living in inadequate housing, the elderly and what the French call the “precariat” (those living the most precarious lives).

The answer to the question, why are so many people sick, lies in the social, economic and political sectors. Ok, not the whole answer because there are clearly problems with the current Medical Model, of treating diseases more than patients and trying to find “a pill for every ill”.

If we want to tackle the health crisis, we have to tackle what often seems to recede so far into the background that it becomes invisible – the circumstances, the environments, in which people are trying to live.

Something clearly happened to this tree. Something catastrophic. But look how it has recovered in a completely different way.

It appears that it had a pretty substantial trunk but then fell over and broke in a storm. Either that or someone cut it down. But from the remaining stump and the deep hidden roots it began to grow upwards again. This time, not as a single trunk but three, even four. There are the twins following pretty much the same direction as their larger predecessor, but there are two others as well, one just beyond the twins and a fourth one forging an entirely different path off towards the right in this photo.

Living creatures have astonishing powers of recovery and resilience and their exact paths forward are unpredictable.

Many times patients told me stories of illness where their chances of recovery seemed slim, but they went on, not only to recover, but to develop along completely unpredicted lines. Many times a serious illness or accident brought about a complete reassessment of life and a patient would make big life changes….in relationships, work, housing, even in their most important values.

I don’t think anyone would advise a serious accident or illness as a means to a better life, but what I witnessed again and again was the emergence of a completely new way ahead for those who recovered from a major life threatening event.

As with this tree you just can’t predict how an individual is going to flourish differently.

Bang! Something hit the window! I looked up and saw a Robin sitting on the window frame. I took a photo, from a distance, then slowly moved closer taking more photos as I walked. I wanted to try and photograph him before he flew away. I needn’t have worried. He was stunned and recovering, so I sat down in an armchair right next to him and got some really nice close ups.

It took him a while to recover so we had about five minutes or so together, which is a long time so close to a wild creature. But the robin isn’t a timid bird. In fact he’s always flying down to see what I’m up to, whether it’s filling the wheelbarrow or getting the shopping out of the car.

I was willing him to recover. It was quite a bang and I could see he was sitting, just breathing, and looking, and waiting for the healing to complete. I thought, there’s a lesson here, one I learned and practiced many times but a good one to remember. That lesson is –

Healing occurs naturally. We living creatures have an ability, a power, to recover, to repair, to heal. All I ever did as a doctor was support that self healing. Even the most powerful drugs don’t heal. They contribute to healing….maybe a life saving contribution, often a hugely significant, important contribution….but repair and recovery is a natural process and “treatments” aren’t a substitute.

How did I support self healing? By being there, by caring, by making a connection, building a relationship, by listening attentively without judgement, by understanding, by meeting the other, eye to eye, heart to heart.

And that’s what I did with the robin. Sat close, made an eye to eye connection (how often was I taught the importance of eye contact in Medicine?), and maybe more than that….created a heart to heart connection through intention and care….I was willing him to recover.

There was a pane of glass between us, so I couldn’t do what we humans are able to do together…to touch, to hold….the power of laying on a hand. But nonetheless, it seemed to me, it was more than enough to make the connection, eye to eye, and heart to heart, his little breaths making brief mists on the glass.

Is there anything more special, more powerful, than the connection between two living beings, eye to eye, heart to heart, soul to soul?

And what is life? An hourglass on the run
A mist retreating from the morning sun
A busy bustling still repeated dream.
It’s length? A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought. 

John Clare’s poem, What is Life? begins with an hourglass, the image of the sands of time constantly running. You can’t help thinking “running out”. A life is short, something we humans inescapably know. We know we are mortal, and we know none of us will have an expectation of more than a couple of handfuls of decades. We try not to think about that, but maybe if we do stop and think about it, maybe because we have a brush with death, we change. We change our priorities and put procrastination off until another day.

Then he describes a dawn, the mist disappearing in the face of the rising sun, because we experience life as a series of days, one after the other. Life is rhythm, cycles, seasons.

For most of us, most of the time, we fill these days with busyness, with habits and routines, rushing from morning to night on autopilot….a bustling, still repeated dream. This is the zombie state I chose for the title of my blog. It’s too easy to miss a life because we fill it with busyness, automatic, unthinking busyness.

Is the unexamined life worth living?

Clare gives us the answer by asking the question “It’s length?” and answering by getting us to focus on “a minute’s pause, a moment’s thought”. This is the “right here, right now” advice, the call to the present, the prod to wake up and become aware, to be more consciously present in this very moment.

That’s a surprising answer to the question about the length of life, but I think it’s a good one. Because the length of a life is affected by its depth.

When we wake up from our automatic zombie state to author our own, unique story, with ourselves as the hero, the main subject, then life becomes richer, more satisfying and more meaningful.

It becomes a full life, a life of constant becoming….evolving, growing, developing into maturity, into flourishing and fruition, always experienced in a present moment.

Whatever we encounter, whatever we look at, there is always more to know, always another aspect to discover.

My work as a doctor depended on being able to understand people, and that depended on being able to hear their story.

To hear someone’s story takes time and requires attentive, non judgemental listening.

I wanted to hear what they were experiencing now, but also to hear how that experience had arisen, what were the circumstances from which this experience emerged and what sense did they, themselves, make of it all.

A very common feedback was “I’ve never told anyone what I’ve just told you. You know me better now than anyone else does”. I knew what they meant but I always thought, and often said, “I’m pleased, but we’ve only spent an hour together and one hour in a whole life is very little. I’m sure there’s a lot more to understand.”

You’re never finished understanding someone. You never have all the information or “the whole story”, because you haven’t lived the life they’ve lived. I found that even when I thought I had a good sense of someone, there was always another layer, another angle, another perspective.