Tag: society

Life saver

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

In Spring of last year, on the 28th of May, in fact [the significance of which we’ll come to], I happened to save someone’s life, and I’ve only ever told a couple of people about it. It’s a bit of a hard one to slip into a conversation if I’m honest, certainly without a great deal of tangential segueing anyway. And the longer ago it gets, day by day by day, the less relevant it seems to bring up, or the less likely I would be to get away with bringing it up with at least a passing glance at nonchalance.

And also, it seems like such a weird experience – so heightened, so very vivid and memorable, yet at the same time so ephemeral and unbelievable and isolated from the rest of my life – that now it almost feel like a dream I once had.

The couple of times that I did bring it up, it felt weird too. I knew once I started I would have to get to the end, but I also knew that it did all seem like a dream and there are few things more boring in life than listening to someone else’s dream [I always have an overwhelming urge to interrupt and scream “NONE OF THIS HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE” at the top of my voice] but of course this wasn’t a dream and I know because I was there.

So let’s get to it shall we? I’ll give you a run down of what happened and then I’ll tell you what it’s left me with.

I will warn you at this stage that a lot happened in a short space of time so if you think I’m going to “cut to the chase” you’re in for a disappointment. This is the director’s cut. So if you were also thinking of reading this then making a nice cup of tea, I’d suggest making the tea before you start.

Right, we ready? Lovely.

Now come with me, if you will, back to the end of May.

It’s a lovely sunny Saturday, and we have my wife’s cousin and his family visiting us in Kent from their home in Cardiff in South Wales. Cousin, wife, ridiculously cute baby of almost exactly 18 months, and a big shaggy dog [a Canadian Duck Tolling Retriever, for the caninophiles amongst you] all descend and because it’s a lovely day and we have a dog too we decide to head down to the seaside in Rye, East Sussex, which is just down the road.

This is the actual dog mentioned above. He’s called Dougie.

We decide to go to Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, and once there, after stopping to get an ice-cream for the kids, we head off along the path towards the beach.

This walk takes us alongside the River Rother which has wound its merry way for 35 miles through Sussex and Kent and is now looking forward to fulfilling its destiny of spilling out into the English Channel.

Who knows, in a few weeks the water herein could be enjoying a nice weekend as waves lapping against the beach of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the French coast, closer to where we are walking than London as the crow flies. Or any bird actually. But for the moment it is trapped in by high brick walls on either side, designed to stop the tides completely flooding the unspoilt salt marshes of the nature reserve on one side and totally spoilt members of Rye Golf Club on the other.

About halfway towards the beach, my younger son (8 years old at the time) decides he had a stone in his shoe. I say “decides” because he doesn’t have a stone in his shoe at all: he’s just a bit tired and being a bit of a pain in the arse. I love him with all my heart, but he does have “pain in the arse” in his locker and trust me, he will pull it out whenever he feels the need.

So there I am, sitting on a bench, taking his shoe off for the third time and considering whether I can get away with just leaving him here forever. My wife and elder son have carried on walking with our dog and the visiting Welsh folk. If you look at the pic below, I’m at point 1. [Yes that’s correct, dear reader: I have done a bloody diagram. You are most welcome.]

Then there is a commotion. Something is going down. This is a quiet, peaceful place, and yet someone is shouting. A ruckus! I’m instantly titillated. This has potential for drama, and who doesn’t like a bit of drama, eh? So I’m half listening to my son’s whining and half trying to work out what’s happening when I hear a woman shout out with the unmistakable timbre of fear in her voice.:

Somebody help, please!

I’m not sure what happens in my mind at this point, but before I know what I’m doing, I’m ushering my youngster to run over to mum and I’m running towards the lady and her two young kids, and over towards where she’s pointing. Another shout as I come towards her:

My dog has fallen into the river

I’ll be honest, at this point I’m a little less urgent all of a sudden. I mean, I have a dog, and I love dogs, but surely the dog just swims to the edge and gets out, right?

When I get to the edge, I realise that isn’t going to happen.

The woman’s husband is lying face down on the ground, right on the edge of the river [point 2 on our diagram]. The tide is going out so it’s a good four feet down to the water, and he can’t reach the small black dog, who’s desperately swimming against the river flowing out through the narrow channel, the tide pulling it along towards its French holiday destination.

The current is really, really strong. The dog is getting tired. The kids are crying, and the woman is shouting at the man:

He’s getting tired. You’ll have to jump in and get him

To which the man shouts back:

If I go in there I’ll fucking drown.

I’m glad he says that, because I think he’s right. This is like one of those news reports you hear on the radio where someone has gone into a river or a lake or the sea to save their dog or climbed onto the roof to save their cat and they end up dead and the animal ends up fine. Let’s not do that, eh mate?

But the woman is right, too. The little dog is getting very tired.

At this point the woman runs off back towards the café which has just opened [point 3 on the diagram which you’re now glad you were supplied] to “call for help”. As she does this I’m wondering what kind of help that might be. No one is going to send a chopper out for a little dog.

And the little dog is getting very, very tired.

I shout to one of our group to hand me my dog’s lead, and for a few extremely unsuccessful seconds the man tries to lasso the little dog’s head with the lead. We both then try to encourage the little dog to bite onto the end of the lead. But the little dog doesn’t understand what we’re shouting at him to do because he speaks dog and we’re shouting at him in English. A couple of times he drifts downstream a few inches and pushes himself to swim back to us.

The little dog is really fucking tired now.

The man looks at me and says:

I’m going to have to go in.

I’ve never met this bloke before but it’s very clear I’m in this with him now. If he’s going to have to go in, I’m going to have to help him get out.

I have the dog’s lead in my hand and in the split second I have to think, I tell him to hold one end and I’ll hold onto the other and help him out.

I’ve got you mate. I won’t let you go.

So he quickly takes off his jacket and shoes, holds onto the other end of the lead to the one that I’m holding, and jumps into the dark, fast-flowing water.

He goes completely under for a moment, and when he comes up I can see the panic in his eyes. The water is so cold it’s taken his breath away completely. And the current is stronger than either of us could tell, and immediately I’m straining to hold him where he is. That little dog’s done bloody well against this unrelenting flow.

In another moment, the man catches his breath, grabs his dog and shoves it upwards out of the water, where a set of hands snatch it up. The little dog has been saved. But as I think you’ll probably have guessed, that isn’t the life I’m talking about,

So what next? A grown man is in a fast-flowing tidal current, four feet below the ground. I’m holding on to him but I’m starting to slip in the mud at the edge.

I start to pull him up but as I pull, the back of his hands, gripping the rope of the dog lead, are getting cut to ribbons against the barnacles on the side of the brick wall designed to hold the sea tides at bay. It’s too painful to continue.

I’m slipping more and more. I grab onto a rusty metal pole that is sticking out of the ground to steady myself.

It’s now that I realise I’ve got the end of the dog lead which has a slip on it, designed to stop the dog pulling. What it’s doing now is pulling tighter and tighter and cutting into my wrist and pulling my shoulder. I’m attached to this man and I’m the only thing that’s stopping him from floating off into the sea. And we all know how that news story ends, right?

Don’t get the bottom bit stuck around your wrist

I’m not going to be able to pull him out. I can’t let him go even if I wanted to, and in any case I don’t want to. I decide that I’m going to take him along the edge of the river wall towards the sea and just hope, hope that something comes up which means I don’t end up in the water with the man.

It’s the only option. And it’s just hope. And whilst we all know that hope is not a strategy, right now I don’t have anything else.

But as I let go of the pole and start walking along, I’m slipping more and more. My cherished Adidas Nite Joggers (other cool-ass trainers are available) are great for wandering along a path but they’re not great for trying to grip in a grey mixture of sea mud and sand. A couple of times I slip forward, leaning back so my body weight holds me until my Adidas get a grip.

At this point I’m kind of thinking I’m going to end up in the water unless something happens pretty soon, and then both me and this bloke are in trouble. In deep water, you may say.

I shout for help, and my wife’s cousin (who up to this point had his toddler strapped to his chest) runs down the beach and grabs onto my hand. Another, older man turns up and suddenly it’s not just me and the man, and now I think we’re going to be okay.

And then the universe decides that we need a break here, and out of nowhere there’s a set of steps cut into the wall a few yards away. I keep hold of the man and kind of lead him along to the steps, pulling him through the water like I’m trying to land a massive fish. At the steps, I and the other people help him out.

The next bits are quite strange as the world that was always all around comes back into focus. I see my wife looking after the man’s small children who are both crying. Her cousin’s wife has the tiny, shivering little dog wrapped up in her jacket to warm it up. My younger son is crying because he’s been watching the whole thing and has been scared for my safety.

And the man is more embarrassed than anything. He’s trying to say everything’s fine and thanks for your help and is the dog okay and where’s my wife, and everyone is telling him to just take a minute, and helping him on with his jacket.

He’s bleeding quite a lot from where his hands scraped on the wall and he’s shivering a lot too. I ask him to hold on while I gently clean the blood off his hands with a spare tissue I got from the ice cream van [ONLY ABOUT FOUR MINUTES AGO] and see that his cuts aren’t too bad. I tell him I’m a first aider and then hear myself say:

I don’t think you need any further medical attention

Which sounds weird as it comes out as it’s not a phrase I’ve used before or probably will ever use again. How very formal.

We walk up across the rough ground and pebbles towards the path, and I see my elder son running back down the path from the café. I later found out that he was told to run to the café but when he got there wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, or say, or get, so just ran back.

The man is telling his kids that he’s fine and the dog is fine and when we get to the path we see the woman running back down from the café too, and we all wave and say everything’s okay. She runs up and thanks everyone and gets the dog and holds it to her chest under her coat and tells the kids that everything is fine.

And I hug both my sons, and my wife. I’ve cut my leg and my hand and they’re wet so the blood is running a bit and makes everything look worse than it is, and my wrist has a nasty rope burn on it. But I tell them everything is fine, because in the grand scheme of things, it really is.

As the metaphorical dust settles, my wife and I offer to help the man, the woman, the little dog and the two kids back to the car park. It seems necessary because there’s a lot happened and the man is almost certainly in shock. So we say we’ll catch up with our own family and we’re walking just in front carrying a bag and a kids tricycle and telling the people no honestly it’s no trouble.

It’s only at this point that the woman asks the man why he’s so wet and I realise she doesn’t even know he went in the water because she was up at the café the whole time. So he tells her he went in the water and she asks how he got out, and he gestures at me and says:

That man saved my life.

Which is not something you ever expect to hear someone saying about you.

A few yards on and now the man and the woman have calmed a bit and around about the same time it starts to seem a bit odd to all of us that my wife and I are just carrying their stuff for no clear reason, so they say they will be fine from here and we say are you sure and they say yes.

The man and I face each other for the first time properly, and he notices that I’m wearing a Nike sweatshirt where instead of NIKE it says YNWA in big letters, denoting “You’ll Never Walk Alone”: the anthem of Liverpool Football Club, who are playing in the European Champions League Final that very evening. Which of course is how I know the date.

The man asks me if I’m a Liverpool fan, and I tell him I am, and he says that he is too. And I say:

You’ll never walk alone, mate

Which felt a little cheesy at the time and still does in retrospect but it was an emotional moment so I’ll let myself off.

And then we hug each other with real meaning, knowing we would, in all probability, never see each other again, but that for a few moments on this Saturday lunchtime we were connected in a way that neither of us will ever forget.

Then the woman says that they are on holiday and they ended up in hospital the day before because the little boy had hurt himself, and then this today, and “bad things always come in threes” and we all laugh and say we hope not and we all go our separate ways.

And unbeknown to either of us, she will be proved right when our beloved Liverpool lose 1-0 to Real Madrid just a few hours later.

And as we walk away my wife holds my hand and squeezes it and says:

Are you okay?

And, of course, I start to cry because I am okay but also that was about as hectic as things get and all a bit overwhelming and I could do with a hug. Which, of course, I duly get.

And that’s it. Every tiny detail of something that lasted maybe 5 minutes in total from start to finish.

And, of course, that’s the first thing that intrigues me about this: a reaffirmation of my belief that time just has to be relative [as mentioned in these pages before here] to your own personal experience. This was 5 minutes of my life which felt like so much more, with time to take in the detail of every single moment like I was rewinding it and watching it again and again.

Details burnt into my brain. The look in the man’s eyes as he came up from under the water. My foot slipping forward through the mud and catching on a brick at the top of the wall. The little black dog shivering as he was shoved up out of the river. Time stood still, as of course it would.

The next thing is about my instinctive reaction.

If you’d asked me beforehand if I were the type of person who runs towards a commotion and then puts himself in danger in order to help, I think I would have said ‘no’. But as it turns out, I am. I’m not sure what you call that? Brave or brainless? Courageous or crazy? Heroic or hasty? Probably a bit of all of these. But an interesting thing to learn about oneself, that’s for sure.

There’s also a “what if” element to it all too. What if we hadn’t stopped for an ice cream? What if my son hadn’t started complaining of a stone in his shoe? We would have been up the path by the beach. So many things aligned to make all this happen. I don’t believe in fate any more than I believe in luck. But I do like considering the magic of coincidence in our life experiences.

And the last thing that sticks with me about this is [it’s me, so of course it’s going to be…] all about how people connect.

Author and speaker Brené Brown [yes you’re right I do mention her quite a bit] has done more research into vulnerability than probably anyone in the world, and her work has come to the conclusion that vulnerability is made of three things: uncertainty, a degree of risk, and emotional exposure. You don’t know how things are going to go. There’s a chance that things might go wrong. This could be emotionally difficult. But you do it anyway. That’s vulnerability.

I can’t think of any better description of what the man and I experienced together. Uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. And because you know this stuff, you don’t need me to tell you that vulnerability is the irreplaceable, elemental, catalytic basis of human connection.

I will never, ever, forget the man I met that day. Never. And he won’t ever forget me, either. What we experienced, together, was so intense, so short-lived but so unforgettable, and so totally, totally vulnerable that we’re connected forever.

If I could change one thing – just one part of the whole experience – it’s that he could have had another bit of bad luck in the afternoon (nothing big: a seagull pooing on his head or something) to satisfy the “bad things happen in threes” rule. Then the man and I could have been further connected by the shared enjoyment of winning the footy that evening…

YNWA friends. Go safely… and keep your dog on the lead near water yeah?

P.S. Apologies for such a long post – in the words of French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in his 1657 work “Lettres Provinciales”: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte”, or as you or I might have it: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” Except of course I did have time, I just decided to spend it elsewhere.

What have I done?

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Though it was still early in the morning, it was already becoming hot in the Jornado de Muerto desert, about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. On this day, the sixteenth day of July, 1945, the world was about to change forever.

At 05:29, the United States Army detonated the first ever nuclear weapon. As huge sunlight flash subsided and the mushroom cloud rose into the air, amongst the 425 people in attendance was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb had been designed, Dr J Robert Oppenheimer. He later said that the sight of the explosion brought to mind words from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita:

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

June 16th, 1945.

Developing the technology behind such a device had been his life’s work, and within days of that morning in the desert the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August the 6th and 9th respectively, effectively ended the Second World War. The only nuclear bombs to have been used in combat, they killed between 90,000 and 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000 and 80,000 people in Nagasaki, with roughly half of those dying on the first day. 95% of those who died were civilians.

There’s no knowing how long the war might have continued without those bombs of course, or at what cost in terms of lives. History changed course at that point, leaving those stark figures as the epitaph to the largest war the world has ever known.

Oppenheimer’s moral conscience about his place in this history as “the Father of the Atom Bomb” was complex and nuanced. Two years after the bombs had extinguished both life and war at the same time, he would tell his peers that they had “dramatised so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war”, and connected science to the idea of sin like never before.

Yet when asked to reflect later in his life, he claimed to carry “no weight on my conscience”, seeing the scientist’s role as distinct and detached from the governments who decided to use their work. Scientists do science. Governments do war.

I’m not sure I could disconnect myself from the responsibility for my actions quite like that. But then I’ve never been indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in a flash. Perhaps that would be the only way to live with it.

And here we are, a month under 67 years later, and the mere threat of those same bombs that Dr Oppenheimer came up with allows a country to invade another and no one can do anything to stop them, just in case.

Oppenheimer never could have imagined. At the very first, it was all about the science. As Jeff Goldblum’s character memorably says in the first Jurassic Park movie:

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

It makes me wonder about all the other people who started out with good or decent intentions, and ended up making the world worse.

The people behind Twitter is an obvious one. Created as a way to connect people all over the world, it’s ended up being a place where the positive connections and sharing and love is vastly outnumbered by the division and demarcation and disunion. Where people can anonymously shout and threaten without consequence, and conflicting interested parties can choose to create and curate hatred and vitriol.

Google was set up to “democratise information’. Now they sell our personal data to whomever wants it so they can convince us to buy shit we don’t need, with money we don’t have. They could, and didn’t stop to think if they should.

Facebook was set up by pretty grim people for pretty grim original reasons, and then morphed into something that was nice for a bit but now is as bad if not worse as Twitter. For every local community group, there are ten more sowing dangerous lies, giving legitimacy to lies which in times gone by would have died on the edges of society. Connect enough crackpots and they’ll convince each other they’re all right.

[There’s no question this extreme online discourse has leaked into society as a whole. If you haven’t seen David Baddiel’s excellent documentary on the BBC then check it out in iPlayer here.]

There’s an old cliché that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”, but it’s a cliché because it’s true, of course. And on much smaller levels we all have it in our own lives.

As I say, I’ve never invented an atomic bomb, but I have been so desparate to avoid having to make people redundant that I ended up making things worse in the long run. I have allowed loyalty and hope to cloud my judgment. I have had times when the utopian working environment I was aiming for looked more like a sweatshop. I have tried to make someone laugh with a joke that actually made them cry. I have tried to hold everyhing together for everyone else and ended up forgetting myself. It”s no bomb, but I can learn from my “what have I done?” moments anyway.

You’re not Dr Oppenheimer either. But imagine for a second that you could undo the thing you did that’s put you in the situation you never planned for and don’t want to be in right now. Compare that to inventing the atomic bomb. One thing can’t be undone, but I wonder if the thing you’re thinking of can?

If it can, fix it. It doesn’t matter how, although I can give you some tips on a good sorry I wrote earlier here.

If you can’t, then don’t push it away and deny it, like the good doctor. But don’t carry it with you either like a stone in your shoe. We all make mistakes, even when the intentions are good. Instead just acknowledge, learn, and move forward.

It’s not about what you’ve done. Because there isn’t a damn thing you can do about that. It’s about what you’re going to do next which makes things better.

So go. Do that.

The interconnectedness of all things (via a pint of water).

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Okay, you’re going to need to stick with me on this one. It’s been one of those ideas that has rattled around in the back of my brain for as long as I can remember, and over the years I keep coming back to it and trying to explain it to people a bit and then getting a bit self-conscious about it and letting it tail off. 

Thankfully, in the last couple of years I’ve found a couple of willing (by which I mean captive) listeners who have kind of got into it… or at least pretended to because a) I’m driving and they’re in the passenger seat and can’t escape, and b) they know that by humouring me they may get to stay up a bit later than usual. [Clever boys!] Of course I’m very aware that you’re not one of my children, so if at any point you want to hit the figurative ‘eject button’ then feel free. But I do think there’s something in all this, somewhere.

With all that said, I’ll give you the overall theme and see how we go from there. It is, quite simply:

WATER.

Still with me? Great. You’re already doing better than some people.

Some water

On a macro level, we really have no concept of water – or only a very, very basic understanding which really isn’t all that connected to anything we actually get.

For a moment let’s set aside the metric vs imperial measurements – whether we’re talking about a teaspoon or a half a pint or half a litre is less relevant than an idea. And because I was born in the 70s in the UK, I dance happily between the two without really noticing, like a bumblebee flitting from lily flower to lilac flower without ever really getting the difference. Or something like that.

So here’s the thing. I know what a pint* of water looks like, and I know what it feels like to drink one. It’s not an unusual thing. Yet what never fails to be shocking is just how very wet you can be when what looks like a relatively small amount of water is knocked into your lap by one of the aforementioned passengers. You’re totally soaked. Like, ‘ruined meal’ soaked. Trust me on that. If I had a pound etc etc…

A pint* of water

So let’s take it up a notch from there. How many pints in a sink full of water? Depends on the sink, obviously, but you could probably have a guess, right? Maybe 20, or 30? But it’s already pretty vague. Now imagine a nice, steaming hot bath. How many in that? 100? 150? One hundred and fifty times the thing that gets you totally soaked and ruins the meal? Maybe double that??

Get to a garden pond, let alone a swimming pool, and unless you happen to know then you’re just guessing. How many pints in an Olympic swimming pool? A million? A billion??*

The point where this always gets me is when I go to the seaside. I’m lucky enough to live only 40 minutes’ drive or so from the beach, and we’re often drawn there of a weekend. And looking out at that huge expanse, as far as the eye can see, creating the very horizon, I can’t help thinking the following:

It doesn’t just go unimaginably far… it also goes down.

A lot of water

As far as the eye can see. And down further than the highest mountain. And I can’t work out how much there is in a pond. It’s a level of incomprehensibility that frankly I find hard to comprehend.

We have a strong connection with water which we also don’t really understand. Countless studies have shown that being close to water increases the levels of hormones that make us feel motivated (dopamine) or calm and safe (oxytocin) whilst reducing our stress hormone (cortisol) [If you’re interested in this bit then check out the book Blue Mind available here and at all non-globally monopolistic bookshops.]

Who knew that “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside” was actually a tune about hormonal balance and psychological welfare?

We humans are about 60% water. Our brains are more like 80%. Perhaps there’s something in that? That we feel connected to water because… well… we actually are connected. At a molecular level?

[Right, this is where I’m going to go for it. Strap in compadre]

From the macro of the depth of the sea, the micro of our molecular structure then drags me inexorably into my own mind.

Our planet, the place we call Earth, is effectively a closed system. Stuff just moves around within it. So every molecule of water that has ever existed, and will ever exist, is on Earth right now as you read this.

More water, this time really really small and close up

Some of it is in you. Some of it is in me. Some of it is in the tree just outside. A decent chunk of it is in the seas and oceans of course. If you look up, you can see some of it in the sky, tiny drops condensed into clouds, which will continue to grow until they can’t float any more and fall out of the sky as rain.

You know when you go outside in the winter and you can see your breath? What you’re seeing there is water. The water coming out of your body as a vapour which cools and forms little droplets of water. You are making a personal cloud of your very own.

Your own little cloud.

So come with me on this little journey…

Imagine you go outside on a crisp winter’s morning, and your breath pours out as this little cloud. As you watch it drifts up and dissipates and you think no more of it. In time one of those little water molecules in the air drifts up and become part of a bigger cloud, high up in the sky, buffeted by the wind. This molecule travels in the wind for hundreds of miles, over land and sea and eventually over to Spain, where it falls on a lemon grove. Taken up by the lemon tree, it travels through the roots and the trunk and the branch to end up in a lemon.

Don’t ask me how, but by incredible coincidence, 6 months down the line I’m sitting with my wife after a long day considering the universe, and we decide that we deserve a little gin with a little tonic. A couple of pieces of ice and we’re ready to chink glasses and go. But no! We are not heathens after all, and we know that a drop or two of lemon will turn good into great. So I reach for the lemon we bought at the weekend, cut out a couple of chunks and with a squeeze there we have it.

You and me

Yes, my wife and I are living the dream. But also yes – a molecule that was once part of you is now part of me.

We are connected in a way that neither of us can ever really comprehend, but trust me: this is as real as the hand at the end of your arm. It’s not an idea, or an ideal. This is science, and the great thing about science is that it’ll be as true in a thousand years as it is today.

If you’re still with me all this way down into my psyche [and bless you for your perseverance if you are] then you’ll be glad that we’ve arrived at the point.

On a molecular level we are, subjectively and scientifically speaking, all one.

You, me, them. Us. Every person on Earth, every animal, every plant and flower. The people you love and the people you don’t even like. The fish in the ocean, the birds in the sky. Insects in the garden and every blade of grass. Like it or not, you could have a bit of Piers Morgan in you right now and not know anything about it apart from a vague sense of nausea.

Once you get into that, suddenly the interconnectedness of all living things isn’t just some kind of spiritual, sitting on a mountain top, crystals and horoscopes level of bullshit: it’s biochemistry.

And once it’s true, and real, and scientifically accurate that we are all connected like this, then surely the idea of selfishness or conflict or division just disappears, just like your breath on that cold day?

I know, I know: I have just massively overcomplicated the concept of a body of water, and then followed that up by just massively oversimplifying the solution for world peace. Not bad for a couple of pages eh?

But there we have it. All the stuff that goes on in my brain to do with water. My brain which is, lest we forget, basically a load of water held together by the odd bit of something else.

Now we’ve come all this way together, through macro and micro, I think that rather than leave you hanging, I should probably leave you with a couple of suggestions…

First, get yourself down by some water in the next few days. Doesn’t need to be the coast – a lake or pond or even the “dirty old river” Thames will do. And stop for a moment, to consider how you feel when you’re doing it. Perhaps you might get a little boost of the ‘feel good’ hormones and a bit less of the stress one if you’re lucky.

And second… just take a moment to look around at the people and things around you – the water going into your morning cuppa; the tree you always go past on your commute; that bloke on the train – and consider how that maybe one day a little piece of that might be a little piece of you. It might just give you that little feeling of connectedness, or the idea of it, if only for a second.

And lastly, just forget about that thing I mentioned about Piers Morgan – I’m not sure any of us need to think too much about that.

[Incidentally, Buddhist teaching came up with the interconnectedness of all things thousands of years before anyone had heard of a molecule – if you want to learn more about that then I’ll share the book I read a while back which, alongside a modern understanding of psychology, discusses Why Buddhism Is True with a good dose of common sense and wit along the way]

*In doing the “research” [pushing it a bit there] for this, I found out that a pint is different in the US than in the UK***. For our purposes here, I am specifically thinking of an “imperial” pint of 568ml, not the freakish and frankly unnecessary US version which comes in at a paltry 473ml.

**In case you won’t be able to sleep for wondering, an Olympic swimming pool contains almost 4.5 million (UK) pints of water. 2.5 million litres to be precise.

***I also found out that the US have more than one kind of pint for liquids and dry stuff. From the website Britannica: “a U.S. dry pint is 33.6 cubic inches (550.6 cubic cm), while a U.S. liquid pint is 28.9 cubic inches (473.2 cubic cm)”. I know, right? No wonder they can’t make their mind up about gun laws.

Three lessons from a Zen Taxi Driver.

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Driving in London isn’t fun. Sometimes it’s bearable, but most of the time it’s crap. Too many cars, too many vans, too many bikes, too many humans. Unending lines of traffic, all trying to get from A to B, perhaps via C and D; all in their own heads and all wishing all the other people would just disappear and leave the roads to them and them alone.

In one of the opening scenes of Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie classic 28 Days Later, the main character walks across a deserted Westminster Bridge and around a London without a single vehicle. It’s meant to seem like some unreal and eerie waking dystopian nightmare, but for anyone who’s driven or worked around London much it’s an exquisite daydream.

Looks bloody perfect

I drove the streets of London myself for a while in the late 1990s, working as a medical sales rep. Every day I would hammer around the North West of the city trying to speak to doctors about some drug or other. They gave me five minutes of their time; I’d give them some branded tissues, or a car-care kit, or a pen.

I hated it, to be honest. I wasn’t very good at it for a start, because the whole thing – for me at least – seemed so fake. I pretended to be cheerful and chirpy [I know, not really my vibe] to the receptionists who pretended (sometimes) not to hate everything I stood for, hoping eventually that I might be allowed a few moments with doctors who were only after the branded foldable halogen desk lamp. Sometimes they pretended that they would try the drug I was talking about if they got the chance, and I’d pretend to believe them. I was talking to people all day, but not one conversation was authentic. I don’t think I’ve ever been so lonely in my life, and it ended up being quite depressing really – ironic as I had a load of sample anti-depressants in the boot of the Vauxhall Vectra 1.8 16v LS [that’s correct, I had the wheels to match the vibe]

Oh yeah, and the traffic.

On top of everything else, I had to pick my way around Kilburn and Camden, Neasden and North Farm, Holloway and Hampstead, Edgeware and Islington. Traffic everywhere. Every main road blocked, every back road full of people like me, desparately trying to balance a map on their knee as they checked the road signs. For this was a time before Sat Nav or GPS – I had a paper copy of the London A to Z, thumbed to death, covered in the fluff from Wotsits mixed with my own hot, despairing tears.

Okay the late 1990s wasn’t that long ago but this was the same tech

And I guess for a long time I carried that frustration with me whenever I drove around London, the tension I held in my shoulders and chest making my neck ache and my head pound. And I assumed everyone else did too.

And then, one evening, I met a man who changed all that. I met the Zen Taxi Driver.

It was a few years back now, not long after I’d joined CDM. After a long day of authentic and open leadership, I got a taxi back from the office – a car company taxi rather than a black cab – and struck up a conversation with the driver that has stuck with me ever since.

It started when he stopped for a young couple at a zebra crossing, and they moved like aged tortoises actually getting across the road, without acknowledging or even seeming to notice the fact that he had stopped to wait for them. I remarked that this kind of thing must be frustrating for someone driving all day, and rather than giving me the (probably expected) low energy agreement, he disagreed, for three very clear reasons. You may even consider them lessons, if you like…

This is a zebra crossing

The first lesson the driver talked of was about empathy, and honestly I felt a bit embarrassed that he had to point out the very obvious to me: that I had no idea what was going on in the lives of that couple, or the driver who was desperately trying to overtake in those one way, two lane roads through Hammersmith, the lady dithering about whether to turn right, or anyone else you could mention.

Maybe the couple had just had bad news about someone in their family.
Maybe the guy in a hurry was trying to get to his wife who’d gone into labour.
Maybe the lady was trying to remember the road where she had lived during the war.

Or maybe none of those big things. Maybe they just weren’t having the best few minutes, or hour, or day.

Whatever it was, none of them even realised that for that fleeting moment your lives intersected, and you were never relevant to any of them, any more than they should really be relevant to you. You have no right to judge them, nor should you feel the need to do so.

Which led on to the next lesson. My guide had hundreds, perhaps thousands of these micro-meetings every day… ephemeral encounters between people who may well never, ever cross paths again. And his philosophy on this was simple – that none of these people should willingly be given the power to influence your mood or feelings. You have it in yourself to decide what you will allow to affect you and what you will not. So have some respect for yourself, and don’t be so keen to give every passing person access to your emotions and the ability to affect your day. They have no right to affect you, any more than you have any right to judge them.

The third lesson that our teacher talked to me about was the individual experience of time. The way he put it was simplicity itself: “everyone walks to a different beat”. Some people’s internal metronome runs really fast – you’ve seen them doing a walk-jog-walk-jog thing down the pavement just to be half an hour early to work; you’ve seen them frustrated when things are ‘derailed’ or not going fast enough for them. And other people move at a much slower pace. Strolling rather than marching; always time for a ‘by the way’. Everyone has their own pace, one no better or worse than the other: just… different. Except for you, of course: just perfect in the middle, right? Hmm. Perhaps the truth is that to some people you seem incredibly impatient, and to others you’re glacially slow?

Empathy, and acceptance. People walk to a different beat. It’s not for you to judge.

By the time I got back home, I’d had one of the most in depth, introspective and interesting conversations I’d ever had. There was nothing I didn’t already know, as such, but damn if it didn’t make me consider how I was moving through the world.

I won’t say it was an epiphany, because there were so many other things happening in my life at that time which had such a profound effect on me too – new job, new baby, newly without a mum, to name but three [those and many others are in some of the blogs here too, somewhere, if you care to have a look around].

But here I am, probably seven years on, and I’ve decided to sit and write about that man, and the zen-like wisdom that he patiently and clearly articulated like it was all so very simple.

Lessons of self-control, self-respect. Of acceptance, of humility, of empathy. Crucial lessons for a life lived well, and I don’t know about you but I’ll take those with sincere gratitude from wherever I can get them.

In that spirit, I’ll leave you with a couple of thoughts which I’ve carried with me from that moment and likely will continue to carry with me for as long as I wander (and wonder) around this planet of ours.

First, I still have to catch myself sometimes, so I let myself off about that. We are all in our own minds, our own worlds, and so it’s human nature (literally and figuratively) to be wrapped up in what we’re doing and where we are going. We are all the lead actors in our own biopic, and those people whose paths we cross are the extras [and given special effects techonology nowadays they could actually all be CGI and you probably wouldn’t notice]. But still, I make the effort to catch myself; to remind myself that they are in their own world too, that their fleeting actions shouldn’t influence my emotions, and that my beat (at that moment) is different to theirs.

And it’s a simple, kind of daft thing… but since that day, I’ve never said that “I’m in traffic”. Because I’m not in traffic, I am traffic. Okay, it’s not life-changing. But I promise you, it does change one’s attitude to all the other cars around. They’re not deliberately in your way, making you late, any more than you are deliberately in theirs. You’re together, at this moment, just trying to get somewhere.

And here’s the [probably quite obvious to you, dear reader] next bit… none of this is really just about traffic. I don’t think I got that at first, so I make no apologies for holding your hand through it.

Because the truth is that we are all traffic, of course. Human traffic, thrown together into lives that we often don’t really understand and certainly aren’t evolved to be able to manage. But together, fellow travellers, all just trying to get somewhere. Along the way you try to surround yourself with the people and situations that help you along and give you energy, and avoid those which drain you or bring you down. And thus you make your own way, making it up as you go sometimes, but hopefully with some broad idea of where you’re heading, and you criss-cross with other people doing the same. We are all traffic.

Who knows, we might need to ask one another for directions one day. In the meantime, safe travels. Make sure you text me when you get there, okay?

We are all animals

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Imagine the situation – you’re in a whimsical conversation with a group of people, and someone asks “If you were an animal, what animal would you be?”. It’s a classic question. What’s your answer? A bear, because you’re strong but cuddly? An eagle, because you’d like to float over the world seeing things from on high? A sloth, because you’re incurably lazy and haven’t cut your fingernails for a year?

Well when I’m asked this question, I’ve developed a habit of saying “I’d be a 40-something male human”.

Partly I give this answer because I’m a clever-dick/smart ass [delete as appropriate for your geography] and take a kind of weird pleasure in being pedantic and low-level irritating [a trait I inherited from my old man along with various other things including gout – thanks so much Dad!], but partly I give it because it reveals a simple, irrefutable truth that we often choose to forget about ourselves:

We are animals.

And that’s what our current crazy situation has reminded me. That when you strip it all away, in a way that we tend not to do, you land on perhaps the plainest truth of all.

We are all just animals.

We are strategically shaved monkeys, and despite everything we have built up around ourselves over the last few thousand years we’re at the whim of a miniscule little virus. We can’t see it, we can’t fight it.

We have little computers in our pocket which can tell us any fact on earth within a minute or two [just think about that for a second – it really is incredible isn’t it?] and we’ve developed a society where we all know where to stand on the escalator and how to order a very, very particular kind of coffee with a particular kind of milk and even a particular way to make that milk hot and put it in the coffee.

But all of that means nothing in the face of that fact that we are the same animals we always were, just as vulnerable to a tiny little virus as our ancestors were thousands of years ago. As our descendants will be in thousands of years to come.

And as animals – simple, needs-driven animals – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tell us we first need food and shelter, then safety (personal, economic, psychological) and so on.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs | Simply Psychology
Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A theory of human motivation”. Psychological Review. 50(4): 370–96.

But in a developed country today the lower levels are, for most at least, all ticked off. Not only do we have “shelter”, we have spare rooms, underfloor heating, an app to turn on the heating before we get home.

So we create a new world of needs around us. We convince ourselves that we ‘need’ a pizza with cheese in the crust, a haircut, that new pair of Nikes, a phone with a better camera. Faster wifi, better holidays, a bigger house.

And then it’s all stripped away, by a tiny little invisible virus that closes our society down within a matter of weeks. Can’t get the pizza delivered. No point in the new Nikes if there’s nowhere to go and no one to show.

If this weird time has done anything for us, it’s taken us back to basics, exposing the real needs in our lives.

The need to get out of our homes, if only for an hour a day, to get our fix of fresh air, exercise, nature.

The need to connect with friends or families, virtually as we can’t do it in person.

The need to show our support for each other, be that through clapping into the quiet night air or by singing across balconies or by picking up medicines for those who can’t get out.

Think about these – they’re all, in their own way, a little rebellion against the feeling of having our freedom curtailed. Like any animal, we’re not happy in a cage – even an imaginary cage made of social responsibility and societal peer pressure which is protecting us from potential danger.

As animals, there’s no question that we’ve got too big for our boots. Drugged by the intoxicating idea that we are special – as individuals and as a species – and have some kind of right to have whatever we want.

So this is a unique time to reassess what is really valuable to us, and re-evaluate how we’ve been living our lives. To really establish what our true needs are, as communal animals. Because we’ve been shown that we only function as part of a wider society.

And we all need that society. In its true sense: the word comes from the Latin ‘socius’ meaning companion. Companionship, togetherness, collaborative association with others.

Surely we can come out of this with more balance than we came into it, right?

Less hubris, more humility. Less ‘me’, more ‘we’.

Yes we are all animals. Yes, individually we are vulnerable, weak, susceptible. But together, we have shown we can love and protect each other and build civilisations the like of which our ancestors could never have imagined.

And what we build from here? Well, that’s down to us to decide from this point on. Let’s not forget what feels important to us right now.

Take care. Be safe. Stay inside. Stop touching your face.

Going viral

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Last week as a birthday treat to myself [yeah, last Friday actually – not too late to send me a thoughtful yet expensive gift – I also accept PayPal] I got the new book The Rules of Contagion which has (totally coincidentally) just come out. It’s about how viruses spread. I know, right?

[In fact, it’s such a perfect time to publish a book like this that you can’t help wondering if it’s either a) someone very very quickly cashing in on a global pandemic/panic or b) that they actually started coronavirus in order to ensure people bought their book. But apparently neither are the case.]

Anyway, the book focuses around the concept of the R value, standing for the ‘reproductive value’, which basically mean the number of people that a single person with an infection will subsequently infect. Once the R value is below 1 – so that each infected person infects less than one other person (on average) – the virus starts to disappear.

For our new chum the coronavirus, that number is apparently somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5, the lower end of which is about the same as our normal seasonal flu. One seems to be that people can have mild (or even, as in the case of Idris Elba, pretty much no) symptoms which makes it more likely to get about, and old or infirm people get it really bad. But all in all, 1.5-3.5 is where it lands. There is a massive impact in the difference between those numbers, but that’s for another time…

[It does make me wonder about that guy who managed to infect 28 other people in New York – what was he doing, licking their eyes right after playing with his pet bat?]

The other part of the book – the part that gets really interesting for a behavioural scientist like me [posh name for a Psychology degree but hey, it’s my blog, right?] is that it’s not just a virus itself that will spread through contagion. So can information (or misinformation) about that virus can too, just in the same way, this time not through handshakes but through our “social” connections online, leading to worry and panic and eventually supermarkets being stripped clear of toilet paper like a corn field after a plague of locusts.

This got me thinking about the “super-spreader” of harmful misinformation that is Andrew Wakefield the ex-Etonian [really, again? What do they teach in that bloody place??] now disgraced and struck-off doctor who published a paper in 1998 claiming a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism.

It’s now claimed the whole thing was a money-making scam (he allegedly had his own patent for a ‘rival vaccine’) but regardless of his motives his research has been totally discredited and outside of a weird anti-vax bubble he’s a pariah… and yet the anti-vax movement is still raging, 22 years later, with overall vaccination rates (which need to be at 95% to protect us from outbreaks) down to 90.3% in 2018-19 in the UK. In some communities – more middle class and supposedly educated – it’s way lower. And guess what? Yep, measles is back. Measles can leave kids blind. It can kill. For immunosuppressed adults, it’s bloody dangerous. Well done dickhead.

Disinformation is a virus.

So is hate, abuse, division. And now our “social” networks spread these just as a handshake might spread coronavirus.

Look at Twitter (and Facebook to some degree, but as it’s less anonymous it’s less poisonous) and you’ll see the viruses being spread. They infect our world based on someone’s R value.

Which is why the Donald’s and Piers’ of this world are super-spreaders too. In their own selfish little way.

But wait…

If these “social” places do spread these negative feelings like viruses… couldn’t they also be used to spread something positive?

Over the last few days, Facebook has been full of people looking out for each other, setting up groups to offer help to strangers, sharing links to resources. As well as the cesspool which will always be full of shite on Twitter, there are pockets of love and kindness and connection between people who’ve never met.

This is community. This is society. There’s no time for division when we’re under attack from something we can’t see.

So let’s connect more, care more, include more than we ever have before. Isolate, sure, but do it with open arms and big hearts. Build bridges. Build connections. Seek to understand, to empathise.

See how compassionate you dare to be today.

What’s your R value? Go, spread love.

This too shall pass

~ Phil Bartlett ~ 2 Comments

Since Tuesday of last week, I’ve been in “self-isolation”. It started with having a high temperature on Tuesday morning, followed by generally feeling pretty crap for the next few days, including an annoying [dare I say “persistent”?!] cough for a couple of days too as well as feeling ridiculously tired all the time. It went from just ‘having a cold’ to “being in self-isolation” on about Thursday when the advice from the UK government around coronavirus changed…

So, have I had coronavirus?

Honestly, I haven’t a clue. If I had to put money on it I’d say ‘no’ because I really don’t think I’ve been that ill. But if this new virus chum of ours isn’t that bad for [relatively!] fit and healthy people under 60 then maybe I have. But I reckon probably not.

But suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we’re in the middle of a disaster movie from the mid-noughties, where things seem to be changing so quickly and really no one knows what the hell is going to happen.

Suddenly it doesn’t matter who you are or where you live. It doesn’t matter how much hand sanitizer you haven’t got or how much toilet paper you have. It doesn’t matter whether you think this is all going to go away like bird flu or smash through us like Spanish flu, because you’re going to be on the receiving end of what happens. Just like me, just like everyone.

[I’m sorely tempted to go down a rabbit hole where I point out that the virus doesn’t discriminate between gender, race, sexual preference, etc etc and that this show’s we’re all fundamentally just people, but I think that could end up with me celebrating a killer virus for its inclusivity credentials and whilst somewhat entertaining and whimsical I’m not sure that’s helpful for anyone…]

Okay, before I get too nihilistic, let’s consider something else, shall we?

The very first of the three Universal Truths in Buddhist teaching* is that everything is impermanent and ever-changing. To me, that seems pretty irrefutable for every possible subject: societal, social, biological, ecological, intellectual. Everything is changing, and will always change. Nothing is permanent.

Yet we wander through this world like we’re the end of evolution; like this society we’ve created around us represents civilisation is at its peak.

We’re not. And it’s not.

In evolutionary terms, our wonderful, fascinating, challenging civilisation doesn’t even register.

One day all the cities we’ve built will be found by the archaeologists of the future. Don’t believe me? Ask the Pharaohs, or the Greeks, or the Aztecs.

In fifty years the idea of social media will be laughable. I mean, we already raise a smile about MySpace or AskJeeves and they were only a few years back.

And next year we’ll look back at coronavirus, or COVID19 [sounds scarier but less interesting to me] and say “that was crazy, wasn’t it”.

“So what’s the point of all this Bartlett”, I hear you cry, “are you saying all life is ultimately futile because we’re all just dust in the wind?”

No. No I’m not.

I’m saying that whatever difficulties lie ahead – and difficulties there will be, of that we can be certain – you should just remember that impermanence, summed up so beautifully by one simple old Middle Eastern saying:

This too shall pass

This too shall pass – in Persian [apparently – blame Google if this isn’t right]

There will be a day when we look back at all this.

Perhaps we’ll sigh and say “remember all the fuss and nonsense about how it was going to end the world?”. Perhaps we’ll say “do you remember when we thought we’d be starting up sporting events in just a few weeks?”. And there will definitely be people who say “we’re never going to get through all this toilet paper”.

But until that day comes all we can do is remember to look out for each other, trust each other, care about each other. It’s how we’ve all got to where we are, and it’s how we’ll get from here to wherever the hell we’re going from here.

Take care x

*If you’re interested in learning a bit about Buddhism, you couldn’t do much better in my view than reading the fascinating book Why Buddism Is True by Robert Wright. It’s all about how ancient Buddhist teachings about the idea of ‘self’ align with modern neuroscience and psychology, and gave me an interesting perspective that’s allowed me to let go of a little of my personal angst along the way. Yes, this is the kind of shit I read for fun. Yes I know that’s a bit weird.