I actually think that he may have done a clever thing – written a book about a book with layers, which contains its own layers.

Obviously I’m not going to touch on the plot, I just wanted to share some of the ideas I took from it. He makes the point about how religion places the emphasis for our creation on an external force, and he makes you think about how differently we approach life when we think of ourselves as the creator of our life, not the created. After all, if we are the creator, nothing external can ‘make us’ anything – like feel stupid, ugly or unloved. All of a sudden we are in control of who we are and the world we live in.

He suggests that this was the true quest within alchemy; it wasn’t about changing lead to gold – that was a metaphor; it was about transforming yourself.

He quotes from the writings of the followers of Hermes Trismegistus “Know ye not that ye are gods?”, Buddha “You are god yourself” and Jesus “The works I do, you can do…and greater.” to make the point that the idea of us all having a divine spark within us is in the sense that we design our own reality; we each create a personal universe.

This message really sits at the heart of what I teach; that success in life comes from having an internal, not an external, locus of control:
You act on the world, not wait for it to act on you.
You make things happen, not hope things will happen.
You make yourself the writer of your story, not a character in someone elses.
It was a lesson it took me a long time to learn, but it was the lesson that has led to everything that’s good in my life.

Even his use of a phrase that appears on the Great Seal of the United States, ‘Annuit Coeptis’ made me do a double take. It means “God favours our undertaking.”

How many countries, religions and special interest groups have claimed that one? I think it’s because we assume ‘undertaking’ to be a noun. Notice how different it becomes if you make it a verb. God favours us when we undertake (and we are our own God). How pleased do I feel that the mantra that changed my life is ‘Take Action’?

Of course, I’ve gone deep, and the Lost Symbol might just be a page turner. But I guess in my universe it is what I create it to be. Buy it and decide for yourself.

Anyway, one of the defining moments of the holiday was a trip to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner for 18 years. The tour begins deceptively, taking you on a coach tour of the island, showing you the village where the guards lived, with its school, and church and post office, and the house where Robert Sobukwe, another leader of the anti-Apartheid struggle, was kept. The engaging guide kept up a dialogue that just began to suck you in. She made us aware that nobody on the bus had heard of him, yet he was a pivotal figure, and how he was kept in isolation; the only way he could communicate with fellow prisoners was through gestures and hand signals, including them picking up a handful of dirt to signify they were all part of the same land.

And then we came to the limestone quarry where Mandela and many others toiled. The light reflects so badly in the quarry that most were left with damaged eyes. In the quarry is a cave, which doubled as a toilet, but also secretly as a classroom. Whenever the opportunity arose they would teach each other. They were lawyers, and doctors, and teachers, and farmers. each had something to give. And the phrase they used was the title of this blog; ‘each one teach one’. We were sucked in further.

I thought that a fantastic sentiment. Can you imagine sitting on the floor with a hammer, spending the day making rocks into smaller rocks? Can you imagine spending 18 years of such days? And in the midst of this attempt to destroy their spirit and degrade their humanity their suffering only served to concentrate it.

We were then passed onto a guide who was a prisoner there for 8 years. We sat in his old dormitory as he eloquently told us of the prisoner’s experience. The ’sucking in’ was complete. All were silent, and many were in tears. He spoke of how black prisoners were given 100 grams less meat than asian or ‘coloured’ prisoners, who also got jam, but how the prisoners shared it equally between them. How they were only called by their number, not their name – Mandela is 46664 – and how they were cut off from contact with the world to make them feel forgotten.

He walked us past Mandela’s 6′x6′ cell – too small for him to lay full length – and the yard where he sat and broke rocks. In the corner of this yard is a vine that Mandela tended. I found it a moving example of how, when other choices and freedoms are taken from you, there are still opportunities to make other choices. I willed for a leaf to fall as a momento, but things that survive Robben Island give nothing up easily.

And at the end our guide told a little of himself, of his torture and suffering, but spoke most about reconciliation and the need for people to come together in unity.

So the experience for me was about the power of sharing; our knowledge, our time, our care and our humanity. And we all have something to give.

If you have a completely different stomach every month, why (and how) does it manage to keep your IBS?
If the brain that stored your childhood trauma is no longer your brain, how come the memory is still around?

But this morning I had a different thought about this. I’m 49. That means that in my lifetime there have been 5.5 versions of me. Enough atoms to make 4.5 versions of me are now somewhere else (actually it’s a lot more ‘me’s’ because things like skin are replaced every few weeks, and my maths isn’t good enough to begin to make a guess). As I thought of this I got a vague sense of the universe being this constant ebb and flow of energy becoming matter, and then returning to being energy. My physical presence is part of this flow; I’m never completely matter, or energy, but moving in-between, and my sense of self just gives the illusion of being a fixed point moving through a physical realm. I wish it wasn’t so vague, but the immenseness of the thought makes it feel like trying to hold smoke in my hand, and my brain just isn’t big enough to hold it for long.

One of the upshots of this thought, that my wife Rebecca liked, is that these other 4.5 me’s are somewhere. Some atoms have returned to the foodchain, so there is a good chance Rebecca, and my dog Barney, and the birds in my garden, and the grass in my lawn contain some of me, and me them. And maybe some of my atoms are Wayne Rooney, and maybe some atoms have escaped the world and are making their way through space. With this in mind I can imagine myself involved in anything and everything!

As an atheist, it’s about as spiritual as I feel able to get, and it’s all the immortality that I need. Of course, the downside is there’s a chance that some of me is George Bush…

It has stayed in my mind since. I remember once being given the advice that, as a presenter, if you show your vulnerability, people never attack you. It’s been great advice, and I thought this was an example of it. I think LaMontagne’s vulnerability resonated with every vulnerable person in the audience. In my opinion, that’s everyone in the audience, because, to some extent, in one area of life or another, aren’t we all strugglers? Does anybody find life easy? Personal development has certainly left me better equipped to thrive, but I still feel very much a work in progress. A common concern I hear from my students is “how can I see clients when I still need work myself?” My answer is that if we wait until we’re perfect, we’ll never start. And it misses the point of the therapeutic relationship. Freud refused to submit to psychoanalysis with Jung because he feared it would subvert his authority. He clearly saw the position of therapist as being the source of the solution; the expert. I don’t.

I want to meet a client as an equal; where we recognise that we both have a set of skills which can unite for the task of moving them towards their outcome, not where I am the source of their salvation. The solution comes from them. One of my skills is to help them find their own answer, not to find it for them – and certainly not from within me. I also think that the acknowledgment that I too am a struggler, that I sometimes have to work on unconscious processes that seem to work against my desire, and sometimes win, adds to the trust and rapport that is the truly essential ingredient for a therapeutic alliance.

Another common concern with new therapists is whether they are doing well enough. They build their esteem from their successes, and their confidence leaches in the face of resistance. This is because they’re holding onto the idea that it’s they who are responsible for the client’s progress. They are not; most of the therapeutic alliance is through a meeting of two unconscious minds. You worrying about whether what you are doing is working, and what will the client or other people think if it doesn’t, is making the therapy about you – hardly fair when you’re charging them – and the very thing that will be a block to your work.

You should go and watch a great performer like Ray LaMontagne. He stands in the dark, struggling with his sense of self, with his fears and anxieties, with his doubts and demons. But when he hits the first note of the song, that Ray disappears, and all that is left is his talent. The ancients called this aspect of ourself ‘a genius’, a family spirit that inhabits us and gives us our unique gift. Our role is to feed it, with training and practice, knowledge and experience. And then we have to get out of its way and free it. When therapy begins, you should disappear, and give your genius free rein. Obviously this develops over time; Malcolm Gladwell suggests it takes 10,000 hours to create this genius, but leaving your self at your office door can be started early.

The great Gil Boyne said that he became a better person by watching himself on film working with clients during his training courses. He said he saw the best of himself in those moments, and worked to be ‘that person’ more often outside of the therapy room. I hope the same thing happens to Ray LaMontagne; that the more he observes the purity of his talent, the less his limitations will feel true. And I wish the same for my students, and myself. The more we sacrifice the position of expert for that of fellow struggler, the more quickly we’ll feel the unconscious connection with a client that augurs the beginning of great work. And from that connection will emerge a sense of our own self-development. The more you don’t need your client’s approval in order to like yourself, or need their improvement to validate you, the more they’ll improve, and you along with it.

You can’t become a therapist to improve your self-esteem, anymore than you can become a great singer by needing the audience to love you; both situations will be just another place to beat yourself up in. Improve your confidence by not attaching it to the work you do, get out of your own way, and just let the work do itself.

When we moved home 4 years ago we joined a gym in Newmarket. We like to train early and, every morning as regular as clockwork, one of the people through the door with us would be a man called Bill. He’s 76, and always buzzed with life and energy. To be honest he was an inspiration, because when I’m that age I hope to still be training as well as he was – and to look as fit.

Like many things, Bill became a small part of the fabric of our life. We’d exchange brief words about football, or he’d try to encourage me to watch Strictly Come Dancing (he’s a big Brucie fan), but mainly it was just a friendly wave as we got on with the business of training.

In May of this year he stopped appearing, and word came from the receptionists that he had cancer. I remember our shock at this tear in the fabric, the sense of unfairness for someone so vital to be struck down in this way. We hoped for the best but somehow reconciled ourselves to the worst – after all, he’s 76… A card was organised from all his friends at the gym; I guess for many of us a desire to do something, but with the ridiculous British reserve that made us feel we didn’t know him well enough to impose ourselves more.

This morning, a cold December morning, I was on the running machine. It overlooks the weights area, and I suddenly noticed an old man on the leg extension. It was Bill. Looking older, more frail, but still Bill. I watched that man for the next twenty minutes, moving from machine to machine, so slowly and carefully, obviously in pain, but so obviously determined. I felt humbled by his effort and I’m not ashamed to say that my vision became increasingly blurry. That’s a British way of saying that I was in tears.

I found him in the dumbbell room sitting on a bench. Tired as he so obviously was his face still split wide in a grin. I was so overwhelmed to see him that I hugged him, sweaty as I was. He took it in good part.

Bill is dying. He’s had the operations, but, from as much detail as he wanted to go into, it’s a question of time. Yet what he wanted to talk about was how he appreciated the card we sent, “those little things really matter”; he was so amazingly grateful for such a small effort, and returned to it several times. He wanted to know about my wife and I, how our life was; and when I mentioned that Bex has been dragging a virus around for a couple of months now he was concerned. I felt ridiculous for bringing it up, but his interest was so genuine it came out as part of a natural flow in an unnatural moment.

So the man is dying and he still puts his tracksuit on and brings his pain to the gym. Why? “You’ve got to live while you’re living, haven’t you, son?” He said. “I’m going to keep on doing what I want to do, while I want to do it. And I want to do this.”

I left him hanging on for Pat, a young professional boxer who is fighting this weekend in London. Bill wants a ticket, in case he has the energy to go, but partly I think he just wants Pat to know that he cares.

I teach and preach positive psychology. I routinely talk about how it’s not what happens to us but our response to it that dictates who we are. I quote Victor Frankl when he said that man’s last freedom is his attitude to his situation. But rarely have these things leapt from a page and into my life in the way they did today. Bill continues to inspire me, and now I know he always will. But not just to keep fit, but to appreciate the small things I can do for others that matter, and the things that others do for me that remind me that I matter too.

We thought it was too good to deprive the wider world of:

Imagine you stand by the side of a road and take a picture of speeding car with a very high-speed camera. You get a very clear picture of the car and you know its position exactly. But from that picture you know nothing about its speed. In Quantum mechanical terms the car is behaving like a point or particle with a definite location in space: think photon, proton, neutron or crouton.

Now imagine you use a much longer exposure. This time you get a very blurry picture of the car but can work out the speed by the length of the blur. But where was the car exactly when the photo was taken? It’s impossible to say, you only know it was in a given region during the time you took the photograph. Now the car is behaving like a wave, like an over-long omnibus edition of The Archers (will it ever end?).

Quantum mechanics is founded on this “wave/particle duality”. Now, Schrodinger learned of all this from one of his drinking mates; an uncertain chap by the name of Heisenberg. Heisenberg himself could simultaneously display a wave-like steady gait or erratic particle-like behaviour depending on the number of pints he consumed on one of their nights out. After one particularly erratic stagger home, they agreed to name this phenomena after him and it became known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

So quantum mechanics says that fundamental particles are simultaneously both waves and particles: they can occupy all possible positions and states at the same time. Think of the car reflected in a thousand mirrors up and down the road so that you can’t tell where it is or whether it is moving or not. It’s only when you make a specific observation, like taking the photograph, that you can tell where the car is, or how fast it is going, but not both at the same time.

This is completely different to the world we are used to where apples fall gently on our heads rather than buzz them blurrily, trains are either on time or late and not smeared a wave-like probability function both up and down the line, and the tannoy absolutely never proclaims: “The train which may or may not be standing at platform 4, 6 and 9 is the delayed on-time departure to all destinations”.

Many people, including Schrodinger, disapproved. After all, how could something be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, happening and not happening? This was marvellously beer-swillingly outlandish stuff. Newton would be spinning in his grave, assuming he wasn’t simultaneously standing still, and also playing pool on the next table.

So, to show how ridiculous this all sounded when you brought it onto the everyday scale, Schrodinger proposed an experiment of his own. He said: “Suppose I took my moggy, and locked her in a sealed lead-lined box with a geiger counter connected to a hammer balanced over a flask of poison.” Clearly, he’d been on Heisenberg’s favourite double-strength ale that night. “At some point the geiger counter will detect radiation (a quantum event), the hammer will be triggered and the the poison will be released, killing the cat. Now: before I open the box, is the cat dead or alive?”.

Quantum mechanics predicts that all probabilistic states can co-exist before the observation is made. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive, and in all possible intermediate states at the same time, right up until we open the box. Once the box is opened (i.e. we observe it), the cat will either be alive, dead or dying.

Schrodinger thought this idea was a humdinger and would point out how contradictory and incomplete quantum theory was; by creating the paradox of a blurry quantum event coupled with the distinctly unblurry macroscopic world.

Unfortunately for him, it just motivated Heisenberg and his other mates to move on to a different pub with even stronger beer, where they proceeded to come up with ever more wild notions and particles to put into their soup, and they even left it to him to pick up their tab.

Tom.

Thanks Tom, and remember, Nil Bohr said “If you understand Quantum Physics and are not truly appalled by it… you haven’t had enough to drink”. Or something like that.

“Reality is the most persistent illusion.”
 

That’s been rattling round in my head ever since. Then, on Springwatch (I don’t watch that much TV really, honest) the host, Bill Oddie, said how many people who say they’ve seen a ghost when walking down a twilight country lane have actually seen a Barn Owl. By coincidence we saw a Barn Owl near our house a few days later, and his words came back to me. We did sight it in broad daylight, but still it seemed amazing that a Barn Owl could be construed as being anything else; particularly something as unlikely as a ghost.

My Nan went to her grave swearing she’d seen a ghost, down a country lane, funnily enough. Did she really see a Barn Owl? I’d say ‘probably’ because I’ll take something that exists over something we haven’t proven exists most times, but that wouldn’t matter to my Nan. Her reality that ghosts exist remained a persistent belief, steadfast in the face of my scepticism.

Now, I fully accept I could be wrong, and my belief that ghosts don’t exist is actually the illusion here, but I’d like to leave that argument for another day. What I’m more interested in is the Barn Owl effect on our daily lives.

Just suppose that what my Nan saw that night was a Barn Owl. What happened to convert it to a ghost – and what was the effect over time of her doing so?

Here’s what neuroscience suggests happened:

Nan’s walking along, mind probably on not very much. Her attention is grabbed by a blur of movement in the twilight. Our brain receives something like 2 million ‘packets’ of information from our five senses every second. Most of this information (overwhelmingly most) doesn’t ever come to our awareness – although we can respond to it without realising we are. This information is processed unconsciously for meaning, initially around survival needs; ‘is there anything in my surroundings that could harm me?’ Processing cascades down from there to other survival needs such as sex and food, and onwards to other levels of meaning such as ‘for what use is that object in front of me?’ Most will be left in the background of our awareness, but some will be brought to the foreground – things that you will consciously pay attention to. Again, what we pay attention to is the result of an unconscious calculation by our brain, usually not a free choice of our own (there may actually be no such thing as free will, but, again, I’ll leave that to another day).

So, for Nan, her brain has refined the mass of information from her senses and brought to the foreground the information that is the Barn Owl, probably because it failed to identify it and so it hasn’t been scanned out as a possible threat. It’s likely that in the context of her situation – lone woman, walking somewhere isolated at night – her unconscious is on a higher level of alert, so the appearance of something unidentified would lead to a release of adrenalin, the classic fight or flight response.

Our state influences our interpretation of information – with adrenalin running around her system her mental reference system is primed to look for a meaning for the information related to fight or flight. My Nan came from a family steeped in country lore where the existence of the supernatural was pretty much a given, so her reference system, looking for the meaning of the current situation by looking for something to compare it to from her past, would have come to ‘it’s a ghost’ pretty quickly. As John Lubbock once said, “We see what we expect to see.” Bill Oddie would have seen an owl (even if it was a ghost), someone else might have seen an alien, someone else a party balloon.

Because of the high emotional content of this moment in Nan’s life, it’s likely to be stored by her brain as what we call a ‘Significant Emotional Event’ (SEE). Memories such as these tend to be central to how we view what happens to us in our life subsequently. SEE’s are used by the brain as prime reference experiences when it looks back to find understanding for what the present means. At the heart of most of our core beliefs are SEE’s that led us to conclude something about ourselves or the world. In Nan’s case that evening began or consolidated a belief in the supernatural. The belief lasted her entire life.

Now, if we retrace our steps just a little, and assume the Barn Owl wasn’t a ghost. When the brain decided that it was a ghost it projected onto the object flying past her the characteristics that would create the appearance of it as a ghost. Her brain hallucinated something utterly compelling. Doctor Leonard Orr developed a useful model I always refer to as Orr’s Law. Imagine your mind has two parts, the Thinker and the Prover. The maxim is, ‘what the Thinker thinks the Prover proves.’ In other words, if you have a belief, then your mind will only bring information to your attention that supports the belief, and will distort or delete anything that goes against it. You’ve probably had experiences yourself when somebody is presented with an incontrovertible proof that goes against something they hold to be true, and they still refuse to accept it and may offer wild reasons why it can’t be true. That’s the Thinker/Prover for you. So with my Nan, once the belief is safely embedded in her neurology, it will affect any future event that her brain matches to it. Her moment in the twilight becomes something her brain will compare similar events to in order to assess a threat, or to provide evidence to maintain her belief – so every time her smarty pants Grandson derides her belief in ghosts, or provides evidence against their likelihood, her brain does a search, finds her ‘ghost moment’, and maintains her stance with total conviction.

Here is the crux. My Nan believed utterly in ghosts owing to an illusion presented to her by her brain in a country lane. Something that lasted seconds persisted for a lifetime.

Remember Einstein?

“Reality is the most persistent illusion.”

How many Barn Owls do you have in your past?

How many do I?

Take a client who came to see me with a belief that she’s stupid. This belief has led her to a career that is substantially below her potential and the provider of great anxiety whenever she tries to further herself. When I regressed her back to the SEE that first created the belief that she’s stupid she remembered a time when she was about 8 years old and her Dad was shouting at her. He’d been trying to help her with her maths and she wasn’t getting it. He was tired from a day at work, and he lost his temper, shouting that if she didn’t work hard she’d never make anything of herself, blah blah, I suspect we’ve all been on both sides of that kind of moment.

One of the scariest things for a child is the prospect of a parent withdrawing their approval or love of you. In fact I think it comes top. So this could easily qualify as a Significant Emotional Event and be stored in this little girls head as a piece of learning to be used to keep her from danger in the future. For any of us in this situation the consequence is usually avoidance of any situation that could reveal us as stupid – because stupid = not loved. The way we respond to danger is the good old fight or flight response, so as any event that could make her look stupid gets closer, such as offering an opinion, an exam or job interview, she gets more and more panicky. The trouble is, as Joseph LeDoux is apt to say, “Strong emotion makes you stupid”, so she arrives at the event in a complete emotional mess and lives up to her expectation (remember we get the future we expect?). So the survival mechanism that evolved to protect us actually perpetuates the problem. Something I named the Therapeutic Paradox.

When she comes to see me she’s in her mid-thirties and has suffered the consequences of her illusion since the age of 8. Why an illusion? Well, did her father mean that she was stupid? Was his intention to create in his child a fear of succeeding that would persist throughout her life? Of course not, he wanted the exact opposite. That’s how it often works with children. Their brain relates everything to their need for love and safety and will adapt their behaviour to keep in the glow of their parent’s approval. They’ll do more of what they think will be rewarded, and less of what they think will bring disapproval (obviously I’m not talking about teenagers here!). Her brain made a processing error. His shouting caused a strong emotion in her – fear – which narrowed the parameters of meaning the situation could have to her (as it did with my Nan when she saw the blurred movement). Like trying to be happy at a wedding when you’ve just been dumped, your emotional state will influence your interpretation of what’s happening. In my client’s case, him shouting scared her; that emotional state guided her mind’s interpretation away from ‘I’m loved’, towards ‘I’m not loved’. And if you’re a parent I bet it’s just sparked some memories of when you’ve done a similar thing.

So the illusion that’s she’s stupid persists through her life and becomes her reality. Her Thinker/Prover keeps her away from any situation that might make her look stupid (anything she could fail at) because it’s linked to a childhood fear of losing her father’s love. Even though it’s really just a Barn Owl.

I think we all have examples of such processing errors in our past; and most of us live with the limitations they bring us to this day. But Joseph Le Doux has demonstrated with his Reconsolidation theory that memories are plastic and can always be altered, indeed I find this a core activity of Cognitive Hypnotherapy – giving the brain a second chance to interpret experiences so that by changing ghosts back into Barn Owls the brain has something new in its past to use to calculate a more positive future. Where reinterpretation of old events isn’t appropriate – some events really were as bad as they seemed – other techniques are available to change the code the memory is written in (I mean that as a computer metaphor, not literally), to delete the emotional content of it.

The past is never over for us, so we should make it the best one we can get our brains to believe. How much better would your life be if the most persistent illusion your brain maintained was of you as a loved, competent being living in a generous universe? I think my Nan would have liked that.

Uncle Bill was a wonderfully warm part of my childhood. He was always looking for the humour in situations and seemed, I don’t know.. ‘light’ about things, nothing mattered too much; so different to most other adults I knew. Like my Grandfather he was an encouraging influence on me, and, although a small man, he always filled a room with the joy he took from life. If you’re British and I say the person he most reminds me of is Del Trotter from Only Fools and Horses, you’ll know what I mean.

At the service yesterday a highlight was his brother David telling us some stories about him, one of which particularly illustrates his way. Bill often helped David with house clearances and removals. One day they were moving a big sofa out of a posh house and, as they went through the door, the sofa caught a shelf and an antique vase fell to the floor and smashed. Quick as a flash Bill said to the shocked woman, “Was that new?” “No,” she managed to reply, “it’s really, really old.” “Thanks goodness for that!” exclaimed Bill and kept on going. They didn’t get any repeat business…

I was surprised how his stories brought the Bill of my childhood so strongly to mind, and being British I fought tremendously hard to limit my tears (how ridiculous are we in that regard?). Luckily his favourite hymn All things bright and beautiful gave me an opportunity to recover – as I listened to the words I caught myself wondering if the author had ever heard of Darwinism. “The Lord God made them all”, really? “He made their glowing colours, he made their tiny wings”. What about natural selection? That internal rant helped, as did the sermon. I find priests, nice as they are, tend to take the opportunity to preach to a captive audience, which gave me more time to let my mind wander and recover its poise, but I wish there’d been less of the preaching and more of the remembering. The church was standing room only, and I’m sure many there had similar stories that would have continued the laughter from David’s stories and which seemed the most appropriate way of commemorating Bill.

Outside afterwards, I went with my brothers and sister to look at the small plaque to my Nan and Granddad that decorates a rose border in the grounds of the crematorium. I learned that these little plaques are rented and when the rent lapses they’re removed. What a weird job that must be, holding the chisel that consigns someone to oblivion. Which is one reason for posting this today; somehow cyberspace seems a better place to commemorate a life than a communal rose bed.

It struck me that Bill was like a vast number of people; people who live a quiet life, leave the world not much worse than they found it and along the way do a lot of quiet good. His son Kevin told me how his dog walks often took three hours because of the number of people who’d stop him to talk, and to have 150 people at your wake, in a small village, is a telling verdict on the value of your life. People like Bill are lost to history, but the ripples they spread are no less valuable than someone who gets a Times obituary.

So, by reading this, you’ve kept a quiet life remembered, and I thank you for taking the time, as I thank him for taking his time with me. Adulthood often separates us physically from our childhood heroes – I probably only saw him three times in the last 15 years – but their influence continues.

While I have you here, this is a poem I wrote at my Grandfather’s passing, which I realised yesterday, reading his plague, was 25 years ago. Another quiet life. It contradicts everything I believe about the afterlife, but sits perfectly with my choosing to believe whatever helps me most in the moment. All you need to know to understand it is that a Panther is an old make of motorcycle., and the ‘fleet were our local football team.

Granddad

Young boy sat on gate, getting late,
Listening for the Panther, ears-a-strain
Hoping for its echo in the lane.
At last it brings you home, hungry for the hearth
But still you sit me on the tank
And roar me up the garden path.

Change-jangling, flat capped, scarf wrapped,
Cheering on the ‘fleet amongst the crowd
Young boy growing up, old boy growing old,
Our hands your greatcoat pockets share,
Cosy caves against the terrace cold.

Tune-whistling, sweat soaked, dust choked,
With fork and cut down spade we turn the allotment soil
Then plant the seedlings ordered row on row.
Joined by blood, joined by toil,
Our bond beside the carrots grow.

An evening, both sit, firelit,
Resting chin on palm, elbow on a knee,
Pondering over Knight to Bishop Three.
Another seedling coaxed to grow.
Granddad, how I loved our moments,
But did I ever think to let you know?

Time moves a boy to man,
An older man to dust.
Life and time just move apart
As eventually we must.
A lesson for me in pain to come,
A chance to learn to grieve,
But though I know that you have gone,
I’ve never felt you leave.

So here, maybe in addition to catharsis, is the reason I felt I wanted to write something. It’s just a suggestion, but take some time to sit and think of people from your past you’re grateful to.

In Positive Psychology they suggest you write them a letter and, if you want it to help boost your self-esteem, ask yourself what it was about you that caused them to do what you’re grateful for?
What did they see in you?

If you don’t feel that need, just remember them and be grateful. It keeps the ripple rippling.

In a clever experiment they got apes to watch a person and see how they responded when the experimenter looked up and to the sides, either moving their head only, their eyes only, or both. They discovered that apes responded much more to the movement of the head in terms of it causing them to look in the same direction, then to the eyes. When the experiment was repeated with a child the result was the opposite, the child followed the experimenters gaze much more, and placed less importance on the movement of the head.

It might be that, being communal hunters, being able to see a comrades eyes and follow their direction at a distance enabled prey to be hunted more effectively. In apes, other apes being able to see where you were looking could cost you food.

But it also might have significance in other areas of social cooperation. In NLP the idea of eyes looking in certain directions for different kinds of internal thought processes has been around for many years. I know it’s disputed in many quarters, and I don’t think it’s as simple as the basic model suggests, but I do believe that eye direction is often connected to the context or structure of a current thought, and I think that unconsciously we read such connections all the time; ever wondered why we describe someone who is unhappy as ‘looking down’, why someone is a ‘down right liar’, why we suggest to people that ‘things will look up’.

Perhaps the whiteness of our eyes has something to do with our ability to read people as well as we do?