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Posts Tagged ‘relationships’

And not or

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Some time ago I wrote a book called “And not or” – the idea of “and not or” came to me as a good way to approach life, and it’s since become something of a family feature. One of my grand-daughters, mentioning to a friend who queried it, said “What is “and not or” not a thing in your family?”

Essentially, I believe that “or” is divisive. It’s about “this OR that”. It divides the world into pieces, looking through binary lens. “And” on the other hand, builds bridges, forges connections. It is the link between apparently polar opposites. “And” reminds us that no particular experience or view is complete. We never know all that could be known. “Or” is more judgemental. “And” is more humble, more open to learning more.

Here’s the text of the opening chapter of my book, “And not Or” ………..

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

Is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

Is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

Well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

Own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

The bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Ubuntu – « I am because we are » 

None of us are entirely separate, neither from other people, nor from the rest of the natural world in which we live. On the other hand each of us is unique. It seems as if one of the most fundamental paradoxes in human life is a tension between belonging and uniqueness, between connections and separateness. Do we have to choose between these two options? Or is there some way to reconcile them? Many years ago I was wondering how to share my photos with other people. I looked at one option on the internet – a web service called Flickr, dedicated to storing and sharing photos. I also looked at the fairly new idea, at the time, of personal websites, or “blogs”, where I could post photos and write some descriptions of them. I could combine some creative writing with my photos by sharing some of the thoughts inspired by each image as I reflected on them. It didn’t stop there. There was also Facebook, and Twitter, and a kind of mini-blog site called Tumblr. How could I choose? Each of these options offered some features which the others didn’t, and each service seemed to have its own group of users. I knew that if I shared photos on Flickr, certain people would see them, but if I shared them on a blog, on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, then different people would see them. As I researched the different options and read reviews, I realised I wasn’t the only one finding it difficult to choose. 

Then I came across a phrase taken from the language of logic and computer programming – « and not or » – and a light bulb went on in my head. I could share my photos on more than one of these services. I didn’t have to choose only one. In fact, I discovered that there were many ways to create connections between the different services. I could write a blog post, linking it to a photo hosted on Flickr, whilst automatically sharing it one or more of the other services just by clicking a button named « publish ». 

None of us can be reduced to only one part of our character or nature. We are all multiple within ourselves. Have you ever done the thought experiment where you plan a party for everybody you know, and everybody you’ve ever known? You’d hire a large hall and invite absolutely every relative, friend, colleague, client, well, just anybody who has, or has ever had, a personal connection to you. Pretty quickly as you think about all the people who would be there, you realise that almost the only thing they would all have in common is their connection to you. Chances are you quickly realise this isn’t enough to create a cohesive group. The people you know from different contexts in your life may well not share that much in common with each other. The people you’ve known from different times in your life might not share much in common with each other either. Yes, of course, there will be common threads, common interests, values, shared histories, but their individual and even group differences will amount to more than their similarities. You can imagine that several of your guests won’t really click with each other. It turns out that whilst each of us has many different aspects to our character, which particular aspect comes to the fore is highly context sensitive. I could slip easily between my roles of husband, father, son, doctor, colleague, teacher or friend, just to name a few of the more prominent ones. I am not stuck in any single role. I should be able to behave appropriately according to the social context. 

And not or. 

This is how we live. We constantly change. We flow back and forwards between different aspects of our selves. We don’t choose one role and then attempt to live a whole life within it. 

But wait, I hear you say, we have to make choices all the time, don’t we? There are many circumstances where have to make a decision, to commit to one direction rather than another. We can’t have our cake and eat it. 

You are right. We often have to choose. In fact, we have created an entire economic system on having to choose. We have even turned choosing into one of our highest virtues. Freedom equals the freedom to choose. Choosing is based on the word « or ». You can choose this political party in the election, or that one. You can apply for this job, or different one. You can spend your money on this, or that. It is the basis of competition and a free market economy. Competition is the basis of both capitalism and our modern interpretation of Darwin’s principle of selection. Different options are set against each other. One wins, the other loses. This is just how things are. 

When I say « and not or », I’m not advocating the famous « have your cake and eat it ». Nor am I advocating indecision or indifference. The way of « or » is inextricably bound to the way of « and », just as our need to be unique and separate is bound to our need to belong and to connect. Choosing « and » neither restricts us, nor does it stop us from making decisions.

I’ve come to believe that « or » has become too dominant in our culture and in our everyday lives. I’m anxious that it is separating us from each other, setting us in opposition to each other. We seem to be living through a time when polarities and mutually exclusive identities are proliferating, and on the back of that we are witnessing more strife, more anger, and more division. We hear the rhetoric of « us not them », which stokes prejudice, hatred and suspicion. We have created a civilisation of oppositional camps, each creating their own little worlds, each speaking only to like-minded others in shared echo chambers. We talk of « winners and losers » where the winners take all and the losers are advised to « suck it up » and « move on ». There are more walls going up, more doors being closed, less bridges being built, and less agreements made. Competition and winning are seen as strong and desirable, whilst co-operation and consensus are portrayed as weak. 

I want to contribute towards a redressing of the balance. I know we have to make decisions. I know we often have to choose. But when we invest too much in « or » then things start to fall apart. « Or » divides, separates, alienates and creates dis-ease. 

It’s my contention that we need more « and » because «and» connects, creates healthy bonds, encourages sharing, and a sense of belonging. We need «and» in order to heal. 

« Or » stops thought. We choose, we separate, we finish. Why would I be interested in anything else when I’ve already made my choice? 

« And », on the other hand, pushes us towards novelty and connections. It stokes our curiosity, demands our humility, sustains our open-ness to others and to change. It can teach us how to handle uncertainty and unpredictability. It can develop our capacities for awareness, reflection, flexibility and adaptation. 

Every living organism survives and grows by making connections, by being open the flows of materials, energies and information in which we all exist. Every living organism survives and grows by responding to, and adapting to, the ever changing environments and contexts in which we all exist. 

Maybe the best way for me to explore and share this idea is to tell something of the story of my life. Maybe the best thing I can do is to share some of my experiences and to reflect on how those experiences shaped me, and shaped my life. 

This is my story. These are some of my stories. I’m writing this to help me make sense of my life. Maybe reading my story will help you make more sense of yours, too, and I’d be delighted if that were the case, but, ultimately, you will have your own stories to tell. We all do. 

You can find a Kindle version of the book here – https://amzn.eu/d/akoOnrz (or search Amazon in your own country)

A paperback version, with colour photos, is available on Blurb – https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10155078

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Categories, labels and dehumanisation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorised, no further consideration is required. But, often, it is.”

When I read this I thought of some of the writings of the General Semanticists, especially the phrase, “Judgement stops thought”.

We humans have a tendency to privilege the work of our left cerebral hemisphere which is our powerhouse for stripping out details, generalising what it encounters and applying labels, before setting its work into categories…..neat, separate, distinct, categories.

The trouble is, once we’ve done that, and once we start putting whatever we encounter into one of those categories, we stop seeing the uniqueness of “here and now”. We stop seeing the uniqueness of this particular person. We stop seeing a person at all.

There was a strong element of this in my training at Medical School, where they taught us pathologies before they taught us about people. Teachers and students would say things like “Have you seen the hepatomegaly in Ward 2”, or “Have you listened to the heart murmur in bed 14?” I first encountered cirrhosis of the liver in pathology class. It was in a perspex box filled with formalin so the diseased liver inside wouldn’t deteriorate any further. It was a good three years later before I encountered a human being suffering from cirrhosis of the liver (in Ward 2). This kind of thinking is still pretty dominant in Clinical Medicine. When I was a visiting a relative in hospital I overheard a nurse in the corridor say to a colleague “Have you taken blood from bed six yet?” (and I thought, good luck with that, getting blood out of a bed!)

I recently read an interview with a Paris-based oncologist, who was describing how he was using “Integrative Medicine”. He said he realised that all his chemotherapy, his radiotherapy and his surgical procedures were directed at pathology, but nothing he was doing was specifically directed towards patients. So, he began to explore, learn about, and use, a variety of interventions which engaged with the individual, unique patients, to hear their stories, to understand what they were experiencing in their lives, and to support their recovery and healing. This isn’t a new idea, but it still gets reported as if it is new.

The tendency to label and categorise seems to be on the rise. “Asylum seekers” become “illegal immigrants” become “immigrants” who should be denied the rights and privileges of those whose ancestors arrived in the country before them. In the apparently increasingly divided USA, billionaires, politicians, and evangelicals, talk about “Good vs Evil”. The President frequently applies the label “hard Left” to anyone who disagrees with his policies. Derogatory labels like “libtard” are thrown around. People are accused of being “woke”, although it seems nigh impossible to get anyone who uses that term to describe exactly what it means…..and so on. All of these terms, all of this way of thinking, tends to dehumanise….and that makes it easier to hate, easier to be cruel, easier to make life difficult for whoever is being targeted.

What’s the way out of this?

I suspect it will involve using our whole brain instead of only half of it.

The right hemisphere helps us to appreciate the whole, helps us to see connections and contexts. Looking for connections and contexts is a great way to punch holes in the labelled boxes. It’s a great way to make impermeable categories, leaky and permeable.

The reality is we are not all separate, living in entirely different boxes. We are unique, and that uniqueness arises from our individual complex web of connections and relationships. When we start to look for connections, we see the ways out of the separated boxes. We start to see humans again.

But it isn’t just uniqueness which emerges from these connections and relationships, it’s a discovery of what we have in common, of what we share. It’s a realisation that our similarities matter just as much as our differences, and, luckily, our brains have evolved to be able to handle such paradoxes magnificently…if only we would resort to using our whole brains and not stopping thought at labels and categories.

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Swapping souls, sharing experiences

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 18, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I watched the prequel to “Yellowstone” recently, “1883”. There’s a character in it called “Shea Brennan”, who has a monologue about death of loved ones, how we deal with grief, and how that can inform our life choices.

“An Apache scout told me once, when you love somebody, you trade souls with ‘em. They get a piece of yours, and you get a piece of theirs. But when your love dies, a little piece of you dies with ‘em. That’s why you hurt so bad. But that little piece of him is still inside you, and he can use your eyes to see the world. So, I’m takin’ my wife to the ocean, and I’m gonna sit on the beach and let her see it. That was her dream.”

I thought it was a really moving, and rather beautiful, scene. Surprisingly, I haven’t heard that idea before, the idea that when you love someone you exchange a piece of your soul for theirs. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever come across the idea that the soul can be broken up and a piece given away before. I’m more familiar with the idea that when you love someone your soul becomes entwined with theirs.

In fact, I prefer the image of the entwining, over the one of pieces being exchanged. The soul doesn’t feel a divisible concept to me, and, I’d say, my experience of life is that when you love someone you entwine your soul with theirs, and that your souls are entangled for ever after. Even if a relationship ends, through, drift, breakup, or death, the souls remain entangled.

However, let’s stay with the movie quote for now, because the other aspect of the belief he outlines, is that if your loved one has died, then they are able to experience the world through you in some way. That, too, strikes me as a beautiful thought, and, again, isn’t one I’ve really considered before. In the movie the character’s wife had a dream to see the ocean, so he decides to make his way to the coast so he can sit on the beach and she can see the ocean through him.

I think those with whom our souls are entangled, do continue to be affected by our experiences. Even as I write that, it strikes me as a radical, perhaps even crazy, idea, but there’s something there rings true. And it’s something I’ve encountered many times, in my dealings with patients and their relatives.

I follow the work of Christopher Ward on Instagram. He has something he calls “modelstrangers” where he stops people in the street and asks if he can make their portrait with his camera (he makes really wonderful portraits). As he takes photos he speaks to them, or actually, he does little interviews, and lets them do most of the talking. Recently, he encountered a young woman called “Amaal”, who said her brother, aged 20, had died last year, and she said “I have to live for both of us as he can’t enjoy it”, “so I want to enjoy everything” and she goes on to describe the beautiful, ordinary experiences of everyday life, which she nows pays close attention to, and which she enjoys. Really, it was a beautiful little interview. She’s obviously a very special person, but it’s the same sentiment…..that a loved one who is no longer with you can now only enjoy the delights of this world through you.

Whatever you believe about souls and about afterlife, I think this notion that we become entangled with others through love, and that we can consciously choose to share our daily experiences with them, wherever they are, for ever after, is a beautiful, life enhancing, deeply nourishing idea.

I’ve long believed that we should “relish the day”, that we should be “heroes not zombies”, becoming ever more aware of the beauty and mystery of this world, that we should stir our capacity to wonder as we go through an “ordinary” day, but, now I think I can take that a step further, and call to mind my loved ones, and share these daily delights with them, even if they aren’t here in my same time and place, to enjoy them for themselves. In fact, especially if they aren’t here in my same time and place, to enjoy them for themselves.

Here’s a link to the Instagram video (I don’t think you have to sign up for Instagram to watch it) – https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJraxjsoFw9/

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Empathy….too much, or too little?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I came across a term recently, “suicidal empathy”. Musk talked about it in an interview with Joe Rogan, and it seems to have originated from a man called Gaad Saad. As best I can tell he suggests that a big problem in society these days is an excess of empathy. In fact, in some pieces this concept is put forward as a big “threat to Western civilisation”.

I was pretty shocked when I read this, and explored a bit further to try and understand exactly what they were claiming. They seem to be saying that if we have “too much” empathy for certain people then we risk damaging the lives and values of the great majority. Who are these certain people? The usual suspects I’m afraid, immigrants, minority ethnic groups, trans people and, well, it seems to me, pretty much anyone they don’t actually like.

I don’t buy this. Not at all. Empathy doesn’t determine your actions. But it can, and, I believe, should, influence them. My point is that empathy does not lead inevitably to any particular strategies or policies at a societal level, and whatever an excess of it is, do we seriously believe that having empathy for a minority group actually harms the lives of the majority?

We only have individuals in life. We only have individuals in relationships. There is no “the people”, or “the majority” which has a single view of anything. The claim that there is such a thing is the path to despotism or populist fascism.

I spent an entire career over four decades where the core of my everyday was a sequence of one to one relationships with individual patients. I had empathy for every single one of them. I believe that was the only way to understand them, to really get to know them, and, so to help them. I believe that without empathy for every single person I worked with, I wouldn’t have been as good at my job as a doctor. Can you imagine a doctor who reserves their empathy for select groups of individuals? Well, actually we can imagine that, but it’s not something I’d like to support.

No, it’s not an excess of empathy, or a “misdirected” empathy, which is the biggest threat to our way of life. It’s a deficiency. We don’t care enough.

When immigrants are vilified, treated as less than human, when children are bombed, blown to pieces and killed in pursuit of “terrorists” or in an attempt by one country to grab some of the land occupied by others, then we have an empathy deficiency.

Back when 9/11 happened, the novelist, Iain McEwan, said the greatest failing of the terrorists was a lack of empathy….or did he say a lack of imagination? I’m not sure at the moment, I’ll look it up. Ah, it was both…..

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

We need MORE empathy. Not less.

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The Great Dictator Speech

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Now feels a good time to share this old clip from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” movie.

We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

This is such a positive view of humanity. Quite different from the one we are fed daily in the media. We have lost our way (maybe we were never on it?), but we can find our way now. The reality is that this is one small shared planet. Everything we do is dependent on contributions from others, past, present and future. Everything we do affects others. We are not separate, self-standing, “units”, surviving only by being stronger and more violent than anyone else.

You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural!

We are not machines. We are not machine-like. The organisations we create to educate and care for each other are not factories. They shouldn’t be run on the principles of industrial capitalism. But rather on the basis of humanity, compassion, and even, yes, even that old idea of professionalism and a “calling”.

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Dictators, and, I’ll add, “Strong men leaders”, “free themselves but they enslave the people”.

Ultimately this is a positive, hopeful rallying call to live our lives differently, and to create the political and social structures which will counter greed, hate and intolerance, structures which will promote happiness, compassion and beauty.

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Nurturing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 28, 2024| 2 Comments »

We all need to be nurtured. In fact, we humans are born exceptionally helpless. It takes many months, no years, before a newborn can acquire all the skills necessary to survive.

This photo which I took at Lake Annecy this year, shows an adult bird feeding a fish to a young bird. Watching them reminded me of watching the Hoopoes in the garden. You know what a Hoopoe looks like?

The Department where I live in France, the Charente Maritime, has the Hoopoe as its symbol, or mascot. You can see the silhouette of it on information boards and roadsigns, but before I came to live in this part of the world I’d never seen this particular species of bird. It still looks incredibly exotic to me. Often it seems African I feel, and just visiting here. I don’t know enough about its lifestyle to know if it does spend part of every year in Africa, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Anyway, these Hoopoes have long curved beaks which they use to drill down below the grass and come up with a grub or a worm. I have no idea how it does that. How on earth does it know where to dig? More than once I’ve watched a young Hoopoe hopping along near one of its parents, and every time the parent finds some food they feed it to the youngster. Then one day the youngster was there all by itself. It drilled its beak down into the grass and came up with nothing. So it tried somewhere else and still came up with nothing. This went on all morning. I began to think, oh no, how on earth is this little bird going to survive? It doesn’t know how to find food, and nobody is teaching it. A couple of days later I saw it again, and, somehow, something had clicked. Just like its parents, it would drill its beak down and come up with a grub or a worm….almost as often as one of the adults would do.

OK, so for this bird, that learning how to find food and nourish itself took a few days. How long does it take we humans?

I’ve read that it’s this long, long period of dependency which creates, or at least, develops, the human capacity for relationships. If a baby can’t form relationships which nurture them, they won’t survive. And here’s the thing. I don’t know about birds, but certainly for we humans, nurture can’t be reduced to nutrition. The mind needs to be nurtured. The heart needs to be nurtured. We need to noticed, cared for, cared about, loved. People will wither and die without nurture.

We have a tendency to think of ourselves as completely separate beings. Our current societies privilege the idea of a “self made man”, of “independence”, of “individual responsibility”. But, it’s absolutely true that “no man is an island”. We are not “sufficient unto ourselves”. We are probably THE most highly developed creatures on the planet in terms of our sociability. We can empathise, imagine what another life might be like. We can love, and care, and delight in others. We are moved by the pain and suffering of others. Indeed, when we see war, violence and abuse, we can only make sense of it by postulating a pathological inability of the aggressor to imagine the lives of the others?

How different would the world be if we never forgot that? If we could never ignore our empathic imagination? If we KNEW every single day that we only exist because of our intricate web of relationships, past, present and future? We are not completely separate. We never were.

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