Passing people by on the street in lockdown London

I don’t know why I am still so surprised at the different reactions I am getting to my approaches to those I encounter on my daily walk around the streets.  Surely, I ask myself, I should know by now that my smiles, accompanied often by a few words, will not always be welcomed.  Indeed they can often be rebuffed, which happens surprisingly often, even in these difficult days when I suppose I assume that we would all welcome friendly approaches from our fellow quarantined human beings.  I am also taken aback at how hurt I feel when I encounter blank stares as I try to engage people I pass in some kind of interaction.  They must all be aware of me, as they correctly swerve 2 metres away from me, and yet they often make not a flicker of eye contact, let alone respond to my words of thanks as I see them moving aside to let me pass.

Of course there are many exceptions, people who are happy to smile in response, even sometimes to stop and talk, and these brief encounters lighten my day and warm my heart.  As a Fire person, I suppose by now I should be aware of how much this heart of mine needs the warmth of its interactions with other people to keep it going.  But I often seem to forget this simple fact, which should act as a reminder to me that, however, much we think we know each element’s needs, particularly our own, we can never fully satisfy them.  At some level we never easily leave that one small circle which our element forms in the larger five-element circle of life.  We remain as though conditioned by who we are despite all our attempts, particularly as five element acupuncturists, to think ourselves into the circles of the other elements.  It becomes a weakness in us if we ignore this, and forget how much our element colours all we do. 

Perhaps, then, it would be a good lesson for me on my walk outside today to try simply to “walk on by”, rather than feel that I should interact in some way with each person I pass.  And I could also learn to use my experiences out in the streets as a useful way of trying to diagnose the different elements of those I meet through their reactions to my approaches.

 

A Samuel Pepys quote for today

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
(The more things change, the more they stay the same)

Every day a page of Samuel Pepys’ diary appears in my email inbox, to be read with delight at how acutely he observes human behaviour, and how his writings of 400 years ago continue to resonate so strongly now.  I have just followed him day by day through the months of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, so what he writes about how people are profiting from these disasters will be echoed by what I fear will soon be happening over here now, or maybe is already happening, as we deal with the repercussions of this terrible Covid19 virus.

From Samuel Pepys’ diary:  Sunday 5 May 1667

“Among other things (I) tell him what I hear of people being forced to sell their bills before September for 35 and 40 per cent. loss, and what is worst, that there are some courtiers that have made a knot to buy them, in hopes of some ways to get money of the King to pay them, which Sir W. Coventry is amazed at, and says we are a people made up for destruction, and will do what he can to prevent all this by getting the King to provide wherewith to pay them.”

Substitute “the Government” for the King, and you have all the people now licking their lips at the thought of buying up the thousands of failed businesses and the thousands of rented homes of those left penniless by this disaster .  After all, didn’t many of often the richest people, particularly the banks, get even richer on the ruins of the 2008 financial collapse?

Let us hope that the Government (“the King”!) will “provide wherewith to pay” all those who will be left destitute in the months and years to come.

 

 

 

None of us can escape our past

During these terrible days as COVID19 locks down the world, I have been thinking a lot about what may cause some of those in power to react in the often disturbing ways they do when faced with dealing with the pandemic decimating their countries.  These thoughts have been triggered by a comment I read today by Philippe Sands in the Guardian newspaper who was discussing his latest book, The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive.  He writes that he was at the International Court of Justice listening to Aung San Suu Kyi trying to justify the Myanmar military’s actions against the Rohingya community, and asks, “How could she not see the facts as others did?” Answering himself, he wonders whether the reason may lie in her relationship to her father, the previous ruler.  He then transfers this thought to the son of the man who was in charge of the extermination of the Jews in Poland during the war, including members of his own family, and wonders whether this son has learnt to accept his father’s appalling actions as “a way of being able to live, a means of survival”.

This made me think of Donald Trump, as I tried to apply this understanding to his inability to empathize in any way with another human being.  I then tried to relate my thoughts to my knowledge of the five elements.  I have always believed that Aung San Suu Kyi is of the Metal element, and can see that her need to maintain her father’s legacy, possibly added to the effects of years of enforced isolation, may indeed be her “way of being able to live, a means of survival” that somebody not subject to Metal’s yearning for an absent father may be unable to understand.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is, I think, of the Wood element, at the opposite point of the five element circle.  Do his words and actions show a Wood element which is pathologically out of balance?  We know that Wood is the child among the five elements, and it is significant that a speech expert described Trump’s way of talking as “oddly adolescent”.  There is definitely something frighteningly childish about him.  Perhaps this can be traced back to a childhood in which his mother apparently played little part, his brother saying that the children rarely saw their mother.  Since we know the emotion associated with the Wood element is anger, it is not surprising, therefore, that this is the emotional atmosphere in which Trump feels most at home, quite happily stoking up anger in all who surround him, like a child indulging in tantrums.  It is terrifying that somebody with more power than anybody else in the world should be the least able to exercise any self-control. 

But perhaps, like the other two examples I mentioned, Aung San Suu Kyi and the son of the prominent Nazi, this is his “only way of being able to live, a means of survival”.  And perhaps this applies to us, too, for how each of us lives our life can indeed be said to be our only way of being alive, and a means of survival, though we hope with less extreme consequences for the people around us.

Perhaps we are alone in the universe after all

The more I encountered the concept of the elements early on in my acupuncture studies, the more I became fascinated by the idea that the same energies which create the universe also created me and will continue to go on giving me life until the day I die.  As acupuncturists we are not always aware in our everyday work with the elements as we treat our patients that these elements are symbols for universal aspects of cosmic life.  I have therefore always been intrigued to realise how much this understanding of the work I do forces me to confront the deepest of life’s mysteries.  This has led me to the belief that each of us can be seen as a tiny thought in the mind of whatever god or universal force we believe ultimately created the universe.

I am therefore always thrilled when a little more light is shed into the deepest of life’s mysteries, where science tries to make sense of how human life appeared and, even more mysteriously, why it appeared in the form it has done.  So here is a further offering to my curiosity from the Guardian a few days ago with the headline: “Perhaps we are alone in the universe after all”.  The article describes a paper written by three Oxford University philosophers in which they surmise that “the probability (is) that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps in the universe…. There is quite probably no one out there to rescue or to care about us.  What happens to our species is in our hands alone.  We had better get on with it.”

This has prompted me to look up some other quotations I had collected over the years on much the same subject.  Some are by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, in which he says, in lovely poetic language:

 

“We are composed of the language of the universe”
“I think it’s only life which gives the universe any meaning.”

 

And, most memorably:

 

“Perhaps it could be said that the universe was made for Man”.

 

Finally, in an article about Leonardo da Vinci, the writer, an art historian, said the following:

 “I once heard a scientist remark that perhaps the principal function of mankind was to bear witness to the universe, to be here precisely to see in the night sky the light of long dead stars, and in so doing to give completion and meaning.”

 

All these are profound thoughts for us all to ponder on.  But I don’t think we can understand the potential power of what we do as we harness the energies of the elements through our needles to help our patients if we ignore the deeper implications of our practice.

 

We appear always to be dissatisfied with our lot

There appears to be something in human nature that strives constantly after change. It seems that we can never be satisfied with what we have, and always want more. This niggling sense of dissatisfaction can express itself in many ways, and in different ways in different cultures and at different times, but what all these feelings have in common is some level of discontent with a current situation and a desire to change it in some way.  We seem to long for things beyond our reach which we stretch out our hands to try and grasp.  We therefore never appear to be content with the status quo, each of us in our own often tiny and insignificant way trying to reach a little further out into the world beyond us.   

Viewed from a five element perspective, our individual element defines the direction of this search for the new and the unexplored, and shapes its terms.  It is therefore no coincidence that I should have found myself gradually moving towards a calling which feeds my Fire element’s need to relate to people, particularly on the one-to-one-basis I enjoy with my patients.  Nor is it by chance that I so much like helping others share in my delight through my teaching at what an understanding of the elements has added to my life. 

I have just returned from what I think is my 12^th visit to China.  I hope that the 150 or more practitioners and students at our seminars will also emerge from our time with us stimulated into changing something in their lives through what they have learnt, and may well dare to venture into areas their newly invigorated knowledge of the elements points them towards.  All will have received some five element treatment, and once an element has been stirred into life in this way, it cannot rest until it has set in motion some of those individual changes all of us need to make if we are to fulfil whatever destiny our life has laid down for us.

A new world order perhaps?

I find it exhilarating – both fascinating and appalling – to be a witness to the enormous events of the past few months, now culminating in Trump’s triumph.  These events are called seismic, because, like earthquakes, they burst out and demolished much of the old political order.  First we had Brexit, and now we have Trump (Brexit, Brexit plus plus as he himself said).  Brexit was bad enough to deal with, and many of us, me included, are still unable properly to deal with it (which is why I now wear a badger proudly proclaiming “Brexit does not mean Brexit”, to be obtained from Joy Gerrard at www.visibleanger@gmail.com, who very kindly designed this at my request).

Being appalled by what is happening in this country and the US is, in my view, easy – but to see this as forming part of some kind of important trend in the history of the world is much harder to envisage.  This only became possible for me after I heard Madeleine Albright, the US Senator and former Secretary of State, giving a very illuminating talk on the BBC Today programme yesterday.  Among other things, she said that “the social contract has been broken.  People are talking to their government with 21st century technology,  the government hears them with 20th century technology, and answers them with 19th century technology.”  I interpret this as meaning that there is a huge disconnect between how we are now governed and how we need to be governed in this new world of ours.  And what can be seen as the protest votes of all those who supported Jeremy Corbyn or voted for Brexit or have sent Trump to the White House are all signs of this huge disconnect.

Perhaps we are now seeing the last dying struggles of the old order, in which the money and power of the elite 1% has dominated over the feelings of inadequacy and abandonment of the remaining 99%.  Seen from this viewpoint, the triumphs of Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexiteers and Trump represent a powerful uprising of those who feel dispossessed and marginalized against an established order which has so far always favoured the advantaged, a sad symbol of this being the mantra of “austerity” imposed for many years upon the disadvantaged in many countries from Greece to this country.

Maybe, then, what we are seeing happening now are the death throes of one world order and the inevitable birth pangs of another hopefully more enlightened one.  It may be fanciful of me to hope that this is so, but hope is what we need when what has seemed to be a dark pall of despair has hung over us for so long.  We need now to hope for a breakthrough to a better world which will build itself slowly on the ruins of the breakdown we are witnessing today.

This is why I like to read the blog written by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister., to be found at https://yanisvaroufakis.eu, because he and those working with him throughout the world are endeavouring to make the case for a new world order.  This gives me hope that there are enough people out there not content just to complain about the state of the world but to do something about it. ,

Designer bicycles

We seem to have entered the age of the “designer” everything.  There are, I am told, designer prams, much admired and sought after by the rich, with names such as a Ferrari or a Mercedes pram, and thus presumably designed by these car manufacturers like racing cars.  Not only these, but today I noticed a snazzy bike at the front of the shop window of an upmarket handbag shop.  Presumably designer bikes will soon be, or are already, the next must-have for those with too much money to spend.

I remember the days when we wheeled our children in easy-foldable pushchairs which did not clutter up shops or buses as today’s indecently cumbersome prams with their large wheels do.  This was before the time when prams, and now bicycles apparently, demanded the attention of special designers to attract customers.  I don’t always think back nostalgically to the old days, but some things really did feel simpler then.  Perhaps we were still so shell-shocked from the war that we were delighted just with the simple possessions available after a time of great deprivation.  We certainly felt it was wrong to spend money on useless luxuries, even if these were available to us.  It is these that now fill our shops.

Each of our lives should make a difference

I love coming across inspiring words.  The ones I have just read are from an interview with Bianca Jagger in today’s Guardian newspaper.  And if you want a good example of the Metal element, then you can also learn more about this element by looking at her photo (and presumably catch up with her on Youtube).

She has always been a great fighter against injustices wherever she finds them, a woman really to be admired.  The article finishes with these words from her:  “”Sometimes I say I work too much, I travel too much, I need a rest.  But I’m glad that I’m doing this.  I don’t think I would be happy to have a life of leisure.”

The interviewer then asks her what she hopes her legacy will be.  When she speaks, her eyes start to well up.  “I hope I was able to make a difference.  That’s all we can hope for.  That I can look back and say I tried.”

We should all emulate Bianca Jagger in ensuring that some aspect of our life “has made a difference”.  This does not mean it has to make a huge, or a public difference, as her life has done in many areas.  The importance is for each life to have had its own moments of significance, of having made some slight difference to the world, of having changed something, however small, for the better.  This is what I hope from my own life.

 

 

Worrying the well

I have just watched an excellent and important programme on BBC TV (BBC2, 12 August 2015: Dr Michael Mosley: Are Health Tests Really a Good Idea?), which you can catch up with on BBC i-Player.  As its title indicates, it looked in depth at the value of some of the many tests well people undergo, and queried how far many of these were necessary.  Importantly, in view of the enormous costs of providing health care for an increasingly aging population, it asked whether the vast amount of money allocated to these tests, which are overwhelmingly directed at the still well, would better be spent on treating the already ill.  The conclusion by two very eminent physicians, one from the United States and the other from Britain, summed it all up beautifully.  Surely, they said, it is better to direct resources at where help is needed, which is when a condition has actually revealed itself, and not spend so much on recommending tests for the well whose results are often uncertain, if not downright misleading.  The case of mammograms, in particular, was examined here.  It was pointed out that they often lead to needless, harmful and unnecessary interventions (a figure of 9 out of 10 mis-diagnoses was given).

This is when I heard the very telling and hard-hitting phrase, which underlines exactly what I think is the wrong direction in which the machinery of health is heading, and that is that “we are worrying the well”.  Once we are given the slightest indication that there is a slight query about any test result, none of us will be able to forget this, and it will continue to haunt us.  As I said in my book, The Keepers of the Soul, “One of the many areas to be re-assessed is the Western reliance on statistics. The trouble with statistics is that they are illusory.  They appear to be based on scientific fact, and offer scientific validity, but they have no meaning whatsoever in the individual case.  If a test is said to offer a 60% probability of establishing that a person is likely to suffer a heart-attack, am I in the 60% category of the sick or in the 40% category of the well?  No-one can tell me this, but human nature being as it is, all 100% of us are unlikely to sleep easily at night with such a statistic hovering over our heads.  And yet we may never fall ill.”

And again, “Once in hospital hands, we often find they never let us go, for one test or another, imperfect as all tests must be, may surprisingly often yield a slightly ambiguous result which demands a different test or a further check-up later on, leaving us forever waiting for what we anticipate may be a dreaded result, as though shackled to a permanent pathological prognosis.  This is a depressingly frequent occurrence, for no doctor appears to dare sign us off for fear of future repercussions.”

I will leave it to the lovely British doctor in the programme to confirm what I so deeply believe in.  “We are frightening well people”, she said.  And what I particularly liked was her conclusion.  “We are seeking technological solutions to existential solutions.  We all have to get old, we all have to die, we all have to lose people we love.  We are devoting resources to worrying the well”.   It is rare for anybody in what I call this medicalized society, particularly a medical practitioner, to state this so clearly and so baldly.  Modern society is in danger of adopting a mind-set which devotes too much time to searching for pathological symptoms instead of concentrating upon nurturing the valuable aspects of our life, and accepting the natural course of life, which may or may not include illness, but will inevitably conclude in death.

 

We are all discoverers of hidden truth

I have just come across the phrase “the discovery of hidden truths” in a video of Liu Lihong, my host in China, on the website www.classicalchinesemedicine.org .  Once he was introduced to five element acupuncture, Liu Lihong very quickly recognized that here was a hidden truth which he wanted me, as an inheritor of this lineage of acupuncture, to return to China, where up to this moment he felt it lay buried.

I love the expression “the discovery of hidden truths”, because I think it reflects something very fundamental about human nature.  We can all be said to be discoverers of hidden truths, those which lie hidden within each one of us.  The older I get, the more aware I become of these layers of hidden truths within me, and constantly surprise myself by the fresh discoveries about myself which life forces me to make even after all the many years of living which I trail behind me.

Today, for instance, this phrase stimulated another thought.  Could all our lives be said to be lifelong attempts to discover more and more who we really are, where the “hidden truth” of ourselves really is?  Can we, indeed, ever say that we know ourselves completely?  Here another quotation, this time from the Bible, springs to my mind:  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Perhaps, indeed, we always peer "through a glass darkly" at life, with only occasional glimpses of all that lies within us, all these hidden truths which age reveals only slowly to us.

 

  

 

 

“The lost art of exchanging glances”

I am delighted to have found myself only yesterday in very exalted company, with none other than the historian Simon Schama as my companion.  In an article in the Guardian as part of the launch of a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery here in London, called The Face of Britain, he says:  “…society would be a better place if people, perhaps on their daily commute, actually looked at the faces of strangers”.  Anybody who has read my blogs of 24 February and 1 March will know how warmly I support what he says.

He is also very scathing about the craze for those instant self-portraits we know of as selfies (horrible word, I always think).  He says, “What we love about selfies and phones is that it’s of the moment, but the true object of art is endurance….”  “The meteorite shower of images that we contribute to and come to us every single day in every medium, especially social media, is the equivalent of white noise, and great portraits deliver the music.”

It is very comforting that I am not alone in thinking thoughts such as these.

Beckham's beard

I find it fascinating to observe the influence certain famous people can have upon a whole generation.  This is so in the case of David Beckham and his beard.  I remember a time, now shrouded in the mists of quite a few years, when only a dedicated few wore beards, and certainly not footballers.  And then along comes David Beckham, a style icon if ever there was one, sporting one kind of beard after another, first just a discreet growth on the chin, followed by other kinds of adornments, and finally a thick bushy beard which certainly did him no favours.  This has now been trimmed back to the kind of beard everybody is now wearing, in mimicry of him.

Once Beckham was seen with a beard I noticed that they gradually started to sprout everywhere, until, now, particularly among footballers, it is almost odd to see a beardless face.  And not just in this country, but throughout the world.

I wonder how far each bearded person thinks his type of beard suits him.  To my eyes some definitely do whilst others definitely do not.  I think here of Gary Lineker on BBC TV, whose face appears to have shrunk behind his rather wispy beard, whilst others’ beards suit them better.

I wonder, too, how far the women in these bearded men’s lives like this new fashion.   I know of one young man whose relationship has foundered on his girlfriend’s insistence that he shave off his beard, and a wife who hated her husband’s.  They are, after all, really prickly!

And there is also the case of Beckham's tattoos, another fashion many footballers have followed!

I am now waiting for Beckham to shave off his beard to see whether the fashion will change again.  I think the tattoos are here to stay.

 

2015 New Year's Wish

As 2014 draws to a close, signalling the end of another year of my life, I am made increasingly aware of the steady passing of time, like the annual tick-tock of the clock of my life, a form of countdown to its end.  I don’t find this a morbid thought – quite the reverse.  It just sets me thinking about what I still have to do, and gives it additional urgency.  This is becoming all the more pressing since my body is finally admitting to its increasing age, with the gradual diminution of all kinds of faculties I have so far taken for granted, foremost among them my hearing.  This has always been a problem and is beginning now to affect my social life to the extent that I have to consider before joining others how far my struggle to hear what people are saying will affect my enjoyment of their company, and no doubt their enjoyment of mine, as I have to ask them to repeat what they have said.  And then there are my creaking knees, about which the less said the better.

But, and here is the flipside to this, all these physical problems which are after all minor compared with what many people are forced to suffer, persuade me that I have in a way to hurry up and do all that I feel I have to do before my body compels me to a full stop.  Certainly my mind appears to be more active than ever (at least nobody has so far dared tell me if this is not true!), though as all of us notice as we grow older, our memory, particularly of names but certainly not of faces, begins to suffer.  My sister, two years older than me, told me recently that she wanted to pack in as much travelling as she could “whilst I still can”, and I, too, want to do as much as I can whilst I still can.  But the big question is not travelling, which I am continuing to do quite happily (off to China again in April for my 7^th visit), but what to write!

The book of my blogs, to be called “On being a five element acupuncturist”, will appear in bookshops in January, and I want to organize a book launch for it, as a way of celebrating its completion but also as a good pretext for inviting many people from my days as Principal of the School of Five element Acupuncture with whom I have lost contact in the years since I closed the school.  I hope the reception room at our Harley Street clinic will be large enough to hold everybody.  But after that, what?

I feel bereft without the project of another book to work on.  Blogs such as the one I am writing now certainly help me formulate my thoughts, but I ask myself whether I have anything left to say about five element acupuncture, or is it more about life that I need to write?  (And as I ask this question there flashes through my mind an odd thought about the way the Fire element walks which was stimulated by watching Rory McIlroy, the golfer, in a re-run of some of the highlights of the Ryder Cup this year on TV.  Remembering this is prompting me to write another blog about the elements.)

At midnight on New Year’s Eve each year I make a pledge to try and complete a further aim which I set for myself for the coming year.  I now only have about three days between now and the end of the year to discover what this year’s wish will be.  Will I manage to do this this year or not?

The Seven Ages of Man (and Woman)

I have always liked to see the five elements as each embodying one of what are known as the Seven Ages of Man (though two of those ages are shared between the five elements).  If we think of human life as circling in stages from birth to death, each life forms a similar progression to that of the elements, as it passes from its beginnings in Water on to Wood, to Fire, to Earth, to Metal and finally back to Water again.  As Shakespeare puts it in Jacques‘ famous soliloquy in As you like it:


“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant…..

And finishing with:

………………Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

I see each phase of this circle of life as imparting its own quality to that life, each adding the quality of the element which it represents to those whose guardian element it is.  There will therefore always be something of the child in a person with Wood as their guardian element, as there will be something of the exuberant joyfulness of the young adult emerging into the wider world of the adult in all Fire people, whatever their age.  Each Earth person will show something of the mature adult throughout their life, as will a young Metal  person show something of the wisdom of those approaching old age even in childhood.  Water, always the most mysterious of all elements, the beginning and end of all things, will show both the naivety of the child which Wood always shows and the age-old wisdom of those living at the end of their days, which Metal hints at.

If a five element practitioner is unsure which element dominates in one of their patients, and they are unable to get enough information from their five senses to point towards one element, an attempt to see their patients in terms of how they appear in relation to the kind of stage of life they represent is a further way of helping our diagnosis.  In my book Keepers of the Soul  I gave the example of my mother, definitely of the Wood element, as showing a childlike enjoyment of life at nearly 90 years of age, and I have a Metal son who I turn to to put me right about decisions in my life which my Fire element does not appear mature enough to make.

In this context, it is interesting to note the emotional ages of the friends we choose.  I have always chosen those who are further along the cycle of the elements than me, predominantly the Metal element.  I notice, too, that other people’s choices of friends reflect something about the need for their own element to receive sustenance often from an element not their own which stimulates them.

I have never made a statistical survey of people’s elements compared with the elements of their friends;  this would indeed prove an almost impossible task, given that we need to treat a person for some time before really being sure of their element.  But I suspect that many of us choose friends from amongst elements other than our own.  I have always certainly done so, because, I have decided, I do not wish to have to observe in my friends the weaknesses I see in myself.

We are becoming obsessed with ourselves

I am trying to understand why people seem to feel such an increasing need to take photos of themselves, “selfies”, wherever they are, particularly with famous people.  And I am also aware of how often people walking along the street turn towards shop windows to look at themselves.  And not only look at themselves briefly to see whether they are looking alright, but repeatedly looking into window after window as they walk along the street.  Sitting in the bus recently I amused myself by watching how often those passing by on the street or standing at the bus-stop looked at themselves in the bus window behind which I was sitting. 


It seems as though the world has become a mirror in which everybody searches for their own reflection.  Is this self-obsession with their own images a way of convincing themselves that they exist?  And constantly taking photos of ourselves and looking at ourselves whenever we glimpse a reflection of ourselves is certainly a form of obsession.  It can’t be healthy to spend so long in observing oneself, rather than interacting with the world around us in a more fruitful, less selfish, way.  We are beginning to lose our awareness of others in looking so much at ourselves, as though we are living in isolation from one another.


I think back some years and realise that streets were usually lined with buildings which had smaller windows placed higher up the walls.  You would be lucky if you could see yourself at all, and certainly not the whole of yourself.  This craze for observing ourselves is therefore made much easier by the huge plate-glass windows all modern buildings now have, which show us from the crown of our head to the tips of our toes.   


So mobile phones which overwhelm us with their noise and their insistent demands to be answered immediately wherever we are, as though the messages they send out are more important than any communication with those we are actually talking to, have blighted us in yet another way, by providing the cameras through which we can observe ourselves uninterruptedly all day long for as long as we want to.  It seems we are beginning to prefer images of ourselves to our real selves.

 

 

Never assume that we know how others feel

We make all sorts of assumptions about other people, since we usually see them from our own perspective.  It requires great insight and humility to try to step out from under the shadows each of us cast around ourselves and move into the sphere of another person.  Unfortunately we often delude ourselves that we understand another’s viewpoint whereas we are simply using our own viewpoint from which to judge theirs.


We must learn never to assume that we know anything about anybody else until we have proof from them that they are as we think they are.  This is the secret of being a good therapist, and also, of course, of being a good parent, partner or friend. 

A lovely Picasso saying

I have just come across something which Pablo Picasso apparently said:  “One starts to get young at the age of 60.”


I love that.  I am many years older than Picasso was when he said that, but I quite understand the feeling.  And it sends me off to China today very young in heart, if slightly creaky in body.

The stresses caused by inequality

I am reading a very interesting book at the moment, The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.  It has made me think a lot about the particular stresses of modern life, and whether different countries are subject to different stresses.  Since I am off to China again in a couple of weeks, it has become particularly relevant for me to look at what stresses we in this country are exposed to compared with those of the Chinese.


I am fascinated by the main message of the book which is how much extreme financial inequalities, such as those now experienced in this country, affect everybody, not just the poorest.  I was interested to see, for example that it was noticeable how local communities reacted in different ways in New Orleans in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in contrast to the Chinese response to its devastating earthquake in 2008.  In the much more settled local communities in China there was much greater cooperation and help for the survivors than in New Orleans, with its very deprived communities, where looting and violence were the norm.  Sadly, of course, as China, too, becomes an increasingly unequal society, with the rich now becoming the super-rich, the support of a local community is becoming as rare as in this country, where the rich are now holed up in their large houses behind barriers, and the poor hammer at the gates with rage. 


All this increases the stresses of modern life in terms of mental health, alcoholism, obesity, infant mortality, the crime rate and much more, but equally affects those living behind those barred gates to a surprising degree.  This is a terrible downward spiral, encapsulated for me in the headline yesterday in the Guardian newspaper which states baldly “Divided Britain:  Five families own more than poorest 20%:  Handful of super-rich are wealthier than 12.6m Britons put together”.  Such enormous discrepancies in wealth, the authors of this book say, are the direct cause of some of the most complex types of modern illness, called, somewhat wittily, “anxiety disorders”, “affluenza virus” or “luxury fevers”, as the status anxieties that a consumer society fosters in everybody cause increasing levels of stress, unknown by me as a child during and after the second world war, when we didn’t go shopping for ever more tantalizing goods because the shops were empty.


Nor did we feel the lack of this at all.  I remember quite happily listening again and again to the few gramophone records we had, and reading again and again the few children’s books we had, and not feeling deprived at all – rather the reverse.


The message obviously is that where there is satisfaction with our lives, whether we are poor or rich, the healthier and happier we will be.  And the more status stress we cause ourselves by trying to emulate all the acquisitive habits of the rich (their clothes, their homes, their furnishings), the more illnesses we will suffer from.  There is a lesson here for acupuncturists, since our aim must surely be to help our patients live as peaceful and as fulfilled a life as possible.


Do read this book.  It opened my eyes to many reasons for the increasingly stressful environments we live in now, and made me understand why the enormous inequalities we see in the world today inevitably lead to increased ill-health.  We need to strive for greater equality for the sake of the health of all, not just of the poor.


This reminds me again of what my Indian friend, Lotika, asked me:  “Why do you in the West want to be happy?  We just accept.”  And this is what even the poorest Indians sleeping on the streets do, as I observed them as they smilingly made way for me on the pavements, and pointed out helpfully where I had to go as I stood waiting for a taxi at Delhi station.  I learnt a lot from that.  I could not imagine the same thing happening in this country now.  It is more likely that, in the same situation, far from being offered help, my handbag would be snatched from me.

Encroaching upon the space of others

I am increasingly aware of how people appear to have less and less respect for the space of others.  I am sure this must somehow be related to the increasing immersion in mobile phones as people walk around, which cocoons them in a private world.  In the last few days I have noticed how often people walking towards me in the street, talking on their phones, or, worse still, texting with the undivided attention this requires, have often been so oblivious of my approach that they have bumped into me, or simply expected me to move out of the way.  This is particularly noticeable when it rains, and umbrellas are added to the mix. I then not only have to take avoiding action but have to duck under the outstretched umbrellas of those so unaware of me.


With mobile phones there is increasing interaction with people far away from us and increasingly less with those who are a mere few feet away from us.  This must surely impact upon human relationships, as it does upon the pleasure I take in a simple walk along the street.

 

 

 

 

 

Two new thoughts

Maturity is accepting that we have done the best we could and forgiving ourselves for what we now see we have done wrong.

We can’t alter the past, but we can alter our approach to the past.