Jul 07

2025

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Helen Whitten

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Lessons for life from beyond the grave

I’m reaching that age where friends and family are getting sick and dying. Illness can come upon us very suddenly, unbidden and with no forewarning. The words spoken at the ever-increasing number of memorial services I am attending are food for thought, and all this is a chilling reminder that none of us is immortal, and our day will come.

My mother used to say to me, aged 81, “I feel so young inside”.  This is a common feeling among us all as we get older.  The body fades but the spirit doesn’t have to.

“It’s just a number,” people say as another birthday is celebrated.  To some extent that is true, yet it is a number that is taking us each day closer to our ending. And that is a salutary thought. For it brings home to us the question of how we are going to spend these next years on this earth, and it also draws us into reflecting on how we have lived the previous years. What we can be proud of, what we regret, what we choose not to repeat.

None of us is perfect and my Mum requested that we not paint her as such when it came to the eulogy at her own funeral. “I’ve listened to too many descriptions of ‘angels’ who were far from it!” she told me.  And so we did indeed mention a few of her ‘quirks’ at her funeral because they were a part of her and we loved her as she was, for her humanity, not in some imagined perfection.

So I am going to share the lessons I have learnt from life and the poignant words I have heard at memorials I have attended over recent years:

  1. Stop, reflect and think about the legacy you wish to leave behind. Life is busy when we’re young and yet taking a moment, and sometimes that is all it takes, to consider the actions and behaviours that will leave a legacy of how you wish to be remembered by family and friends can help you live life today.  Training workshops occasionally used to ask participants to write down the words they would like people to say at their funeral, but this can push the question too far into the distance really, especially when you are young.  Perhaps better to imagine what you would like people – partners, children, parents, colleagues, clients, friends (for you are tad different with each person with whom you interact) – to say about you at your birthday next year?  And then, if you would like them to use those words, stop and identify what actions it requires that you take in order to inspire such comments.
  2. Show your love. “All we are is how we make people feel,” was a phrase I took away from a recent memorial and it became clear that this person had been very generous with his love, both to family and to friends.  A recent research study showed that it is often the small things we do for others that demonstrates our love – it doesn’t have to be big gestures, or flowers, or holidays in exotic places. It can be as simple as making cup of tea, rubbing an aching back, phoning to have a chat, giving a hug, offering a G&T! The love shown in small things. Letting go of bitterness and resentment for what has gone before also clears the energy we bring into a room. How much happier we can be if we learn the lesson and then focus on more positive and constructive things rather than dwelling on the past. How much happier it is to be around someone who brings a loving energy into a room.
  3. Enjoy each day, each moment. This can be a decision we make.  It doesn’t mean to say we can’t acknowledge that we feel sad or angry or tired but we can allow ourselves to try to find things to enjoy each day despite that.  Reading about anyone who has had a serious illness, accident or traumatic event in their life, there is a repeated sense that this enables them to look for and enjoy what life has to bring and see each day as a blessing.
  4. Realize that family life is precious but complex and goes through many iterations. I remember imagining that once one hit adulthood one had life sussed, that one could put away study and didn’t have anything more to learn.  How stupid and naïve I was! Here I am still learning, still growing, still making endless mistakes and learning more.  Family life is always changing. Each person within it is going through endless stages of development and transition and each person is an individual who often needs a different approach to others. As one stage gives way to the next every member of the family is having to reconsider who they are, what they care about, what they choose to give attention to, how they need to behave in order to reflect their values. All parents make mistakes but if our children feel loved, and that we are there for them, then hopefully they will forgive us our humanity and fallibility.  As my 9-year-old grandson said to me recently “Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to recognise and acknowledge them.”  From the mouths of babes …
  5. Give your best at work. Many of us have some of our best moments at work, a sense of purpose, fulfilment, teamwork. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming but the concept of “quiet quitting” is anathema to me.  We owe it to ourselves and those with and for whom we work to give it our best, whatever we do.  We gain so much more if we do, and learn so much more in the process.
  6. Keep your passions and interests going. Life keeps moving on. I remember the holiday when my teenage sons came back from school. I had put the summer aside to be with them but they were off with their friends. It happens again when they finally leave home, the empty nest, then when they marry or find a partner.  One makes a brief come-back in their lives if and when children arrive but once again when those children become teenage one is forced back onto one’s own path. It’s totally healthy and natural and yet can be challenging. So I have learnt that it is essential to keep one’s own career or interests, voluntary or paid, going so as not to feel too bereft when those stages occur for I think there were many of my mother’s generation, especially women who did not work, who had breakdowns when the children left home, for what was life all about after that. It doesn’t have to be like that now.
  7. Be generous of spirit, open to opportunity and to all the blessings life brings us. Old age can be quite a lonely time as one’s children are busy, just as we were at their age.  We are so fortunate these days to have endless clubs, courses and classes open to us, as well as continuing to work or offering ourselves up for volunteering should we choose. The brain enjoys challenge and if we allow ourselves to get into too much of a rut of routine it will stagnate, so finding new things to interest us or maintaining those interests we enjoy, be it writing, painting, hiking, yoga or whatever, keeps us young.  I remember my mother, aged 82, telling me “I’m just driving the old people down to the Autumn Club today, darling.”  She didn’t include herself in that term ‘old people’ despite her age.

The words I have heard spoken at memorials are good reminders of how to live and shape a good life for ourselves. They shed a light on life itself and on how love, courage, appreciation of beauty, family, creativity and work help us to live our lives day to day and find meaning. Such words are inspired by actions of love and friendship and so one takes away from these occasions more than the memory of the person lost. One takes away an invitation to remember how sacred life is, day by ordinary day, and how there is beauty to be seen whenever we look for it.

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Jun 12

2025

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Helen Whitten

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Imagining the Unimaginable

Two conflicting images have come my way recently.  Firstly, with my book club I read a book called The Anomaly. It’s about a flight that takes place first in March and then in June. Exactly the same flight, same people, same pilot, lands again three months later.  And so, once the US Government have fiddled about with logistics within a very unique situation, people start to meet their doppelganger – eg the March ones meet the June ones.  One is looking and talking to oneself. Quite a weird thought. After all, I guess we often feel interested in how other people see us versus how we see ourselves and so this presents just that opportunity.  But would one really want that? To meet oneself?

The second image came when we had a school reunion of Cranborne Chase, Class of 1967, and there was a friend I hadn’t seen for 58 years but enjoyed talking to.  I was also flattered that she had brought a copy of my novel No Lemons in Moscow for me to sign for her. We shared experiences of the last years since we left school. And then a few days later she died.  And so all of a sudden I was presented with another image – of not existing.

So those two strange images of firstly meeting myself and secondly non-existence made me horribly aware of both the strangeness and fragility of life and also of the limitations of one’s imagination.

There are many moments in life that are hard to imagine – one can never truly understand what it is to be a parent until one is one.  One has these ludicrous ideas that it isn’t going to change one’s life, that one will be able to continue as a loving and functioning partner or spouse, carry on one’s work or career just as efficiently … and then one’s life is turned completely upside down by this demanding little creature that stimulates a love so strong that one could never have imagined it until it happened.

I think people who become ill with a life-threatening illness also meet a crossroads where their sense of self is turned upside down.

And all of this makes one wonder at life, wonder at what it means to be alive for these years one exists… and then doesn’t.  And people talk of an afterlife but we have as yet been unable to prove that there is one. And so one bumbles along trying to make the most of it all, though as we get older and experience illness and death in those around us, we have to develop a resilience and an acceptance that it could be us next.  This is the nature of life – looking forward to being grown up when we are children, being too busy to think whilst in middle life, and then longing for things to slow down as we live with that shadow hanging over us wondering ‘what is next’ and yet not being able to imagine it exactly.

One prepares for illness, a little, but one likes to imagine it won’t happen to oneself. One prepares for death but one really can’t imagine it other than wishing that it will be speedy and without pain.

Our minds are creative. They can imagine much but there are certain things that defy one and are, in truth, unimaginable. One is to meet oneself and the other is to be no more.

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May 18

2025

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Helen Whitten

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Appreciating the wonders around us

A friend and I were sharing our frustration at the way our beautiful city of London is becoming defaced by endless graffiti.  We were travelling on the tube and passing by mile after mile of graffiti on walls, buildings and even private houses.  It feels threatening and indeed probably is, as it is intended to be so. Much of it is a method of communicating the territorial areas of drug gangs. 

How to manage not to feel utterly depressed about this, we asked ourselves?  “Looking up,” my friend said to me, “has changed my perspective. Instead of getting depressed by the shabbiness of today’s Richmond I looked up one day and saw beautiful buildings and porticos, stained glass and statues, artwork and craftsmanship and suddenly I felt better.”

I know exactly what she means.  It is too easy these days to get drawn down into the gutter rather than looking at the stars.  Our news outlets headline all the ghastly tragedies and threats of our world. The television channels, streaming or terrestrial, show us all the darkest sides of human nature with violence and death.  How I have been longing for something uplifting.  Then I found it – rewatching the series Civilisation presented by Sir Kenneth Clark, which is, thank heaven, streaming on BBC iPlayer. I watched it with my parents, way back around 1970, and it was a weekly family ritual of appreciation of his knowledge, wisdom and perception and the incredible creativity of humankind.

Watching this series again has reminded me how important it is to seek the beauty in life and the beauty in human nature.  In today’s world we get bombarded by misery and I have become increasingly aware of how the focus on wonder, art, beautiful music, craft and harmony is something we need to actively decide to focus on.  We can’t be passive about this. It has to be a deliberate act and we may even need to plan it in our diaries in order to change habits and focus on what we personally find uplifting.

For it is such things that are indeed the ingredients of our civilisation. Watching Clark talk simply to camera about the beautiful artefacts he is discussing takes one into another world, out of the humdrum and into the transcendent. And it is all around us in this city as it is everywhere, and in nature. Even as I walk around Kew, I notice every Victorian terraced house has some beauty – maybe a stained-glass window, ceramic tiles around the front door, or intricate carving on a porch.  In central London we have outstanding architecture, stunning churches and tranquil squares.  Every city has something that has been crafted by human imagination and skill. We just have to remember to notice this!

This doesn’t take away completely my frustration at the way the graffiti is a reminder of the disrespect of our environment, nor that it must involve trespass and costs councils a fortune to clean it off, only for it to appear again the next night.  And I wonder why it is that with so much CCTV these vandals can get away with it – for these are no Banksy-style artists. I still worry that there is a lack of respect for authority and basically far too many people, gangs and shoplifters, are sticking two fingers up at the police and politicians alike.  But taking time out from all this refreshes mind, body and spirit.

So may I suggest you take a trip into the series Civilisation, or simply look up at the stars, or at what mankind has created with our endless ingenuity.  Perhaps remind yourself of some exquisite music that lifts your spirit, visit a gallery or cathedral, or just sit quietly watching a sunset. There’s no need to do more than look and listen.

The philosophers of ancient times and the Renaissance knew that creating civilised individuals who contribute to the culture and society in which they live takes education. It seldom happens without a teacher or parent to open the eyes of a child to beauty, to open their ears to music and harmony, to demonstrate the art of civilised conversation and discussion, to develop good manners.  I was shocked to read of secondary school pupils in Ipswich and beyond throwing scissors and chairs at their teachers, refusing to attend class and walking around in intimidating gangs. If young adults and children are left to learn how to behave by watching violent thrillers, tweeting, gaming or interacting on social media, it is not surprising that they are not learning these finer qualities of how we humans can interact with one another and the world in which we live. Who knows, there might be a Michelangelo, Mozart or Shakespeare among them if given the right inspiration.

I’m not pretending to have all this right myself – I get hooked into the negativity of the current state of our world and my surroundings like many of us do.  But I just wanted to share how restorative I have found it to spend a few moments with Sir Kenneth Clark, to be reminded that we humans have created some extraordinarily beautiful works of art, music and craft and that our day is enhanced by noticing the beauty around us.  Of course, we can’t do this unless we appreciate what there is that has been created, and value it.  We have this amazing legacy that we can now access in person or online and I thank those who had the skill and talent to create these wonders, and the patrons who have made this possible.  A world of beauty, buildings, music, art. 

When life gets depressing, take a moment. Look up. Or find the series on iPlayer. We can still ask the police and politicians to act and yet know individually how to soothe our nerves, so it doesn’t all become too much!

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Apr 25

2025

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Helen Whitten

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Have we lost the spirit of enquiry that leads to creativity?

I just had an interesting conversation with Chat GPT.  I asked it a question about the state of the world, expecting it to come back with answers.  It did come back with some answers but actually also wanted to know what I thought, what solutions I felt might work, as well as sharing some of its own solutions. I guess it all goes into its database of knowledge.

The interchange was quite challenging.  The questions it asked made me think deeper about what my own opinions were, and why I had come to those conclusions.  I came to the conversation in the spirit of enquiry, wanting to understand opposite facts and perspectives. I came out of it with some broader knowledge but also with a deeper understanding of my own views. It can take another person, or means, to shed light on one’s thought processes.

I realized later that this kind of exchange has become quite a novel experience in real life, human to human, so to speak. People seem to have lost the curiosity to ask what another person thinks – particularly if that person tends to have an opinion opposite to their own. I notice also that people can often assume that everyone present has the same view as they do, and show no interest in discovering whether this is true. It’s as if people are fearful that if they do open up to new perspectives, the ground will fall beneath their feet, rather than that they may arrive at a better understanding of a situation, even if they continue to hold onto their original belief about it.

Equally there is a helpless-hopeless mood afoot, whereby we just complain about all the world’s problems rather than seeking to share or create solutions. Yet we need to have these conversations, as we need all the knowledge and ideas people have in their heads if we are indeed to arrive at the much-needed answers to the problems we currently face.

If we avoid discussing the knotty problems, no-one gains any broader knowledge or insight. We learn nothing. Listening to podcasts does not challenge our thinking in the way a conversation with another human being does, especially as most people listen to podcasts that just reinforce their own views.

Yet, as Einstein said, we can’t solve a problem from the same state of mind in which it was created.  We have to look at things differently, and this can take two. Challenging oneself may well not be enough. We need the workings of more minds than our own. Without that deeper conversation, each one makes an assumption, often faulty, about what the other is thinking, and why they are thinking that way, without actually asking and it takes everyone involved precisely nowhere.

In Agnes Callard’s book Open Socrates a key message is how it takes another person’s questions and opinions in order to truly shape one’s own.  A challenge to our opinion enables us “to explore the thoroughly familiar territory” of oneself, “as though one was in an uncharted land.”  And the person asking or disputing also learns more, so as to sharpen their own thought-process.

This is what happens in a coaching or therapeutic environment. The coach or therapist questions and checks one’s thoughts and beliefs and helps one to gain insights as to why one has ended up in a situation, or why one has developed certain perspectives and, specifically, whether they are useful and relevant to one now.

It also happens in innovation and in any entrepreneurial venture.  Someone has an idea, another person checks, analyses and challenges that idea, and in that process the idea is either ditched as unworkable, or becomes stronger.  It takes time, reflection, listening with a mind open to being challenged and changed. It also takes the humility to realise that we could be wrong about certain things and that none of us has all the answers.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, is reporting how smart phones are reducing our ability to think and concentrate. How will future generations get on in a meeting full of different opinions, or having to read and analyse a long business report I wonder? More to the point, how shall they develop the new ways of thinking required to change the world if they do not allow for that creative process of sharing and discussing ideas with others, followed by analysis, reflection, and finally, hopefully, innovation?

Some Gen Zs, I read this week, are receiving education in how to have social contact with others as they enter the workplace, as they are so used to interacting with their screens. They have not learnt to interact confidently with other human beings. The screen-based reason for this is new but needing to break through shyness and awkwardness as young adults is not new. Throughout our history we have had to teach the art of conversation, debate, listening and articulating an argument.  It doesn’t come naturally. It takes practice, skill, and some courage. It isn’t necessarily about winning points. It’s about connecting with others and in this we may be able to find ways to improve situations or just make the most of life.

Despite all the talk of welcoming diversity and neurodiversity, there is very little enquiry or solution focus in what I see or read in the media. It’s polarised, as if politicians and commentators alike prefer to stick with dystopian speculation or simply blame others. What we need is creativity.  In this exploration we may discover that we share more aims and values than we had imagined and be able to work together to create change. 

As people seem so unwilling to have a quiet, reasoned debate where they seek to learn more about a subject, or at least why their friend or colleague has come to their conclusions, perhaps in future the only option for such conversations will, indeed, be with Chat GPT.  A rather depressing thought. On the other hand, if we open up to the habit of listening to others plus interacting with Chat GPT, we shall, as my grandson reassures me, have the means by which to solve the world’s problems. Let’s hope he’s right!

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Mar 16

2025

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Helen Whitten

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Moral Decay: what might we do about it?

Hanif Kureishi recently wrote about moral decay in his blog The Kureishi Chronicles. It rang a bell for me. In the last month I watched a shoplifter in Tesco shovel a whole load of confectionary into their backpack.  Nobody batted an eyelid. I watched another openly count the chocolate bars they had obviously stolen, in front of us all on the tube – and then push their way through the barrier without paying. I have read this week that a journalist spotted 62 fare-dodgers at Stratford tube station in the space of 90 minutes, and that shoplifting has increased by 48% and pickpocketing by 38% in London in the last year.  A friend saw 3 mobile phones stolen on Oxford Street within the space of a shopping trip. The fare-dodgers alone are costing us around £240 million pounds a year across the UK. So, what do we do about it?

The question I found myself asking was do these people not feel guilty, just a tad at least? Watching a BBC interview with a fentanyl dealer on the US/Mexican border, he said yes but if it wasn’t him someone else would do it.  Is that really answering the question? He seems to imply that his guilt is meaningless. But guilt isn’t meaningless, is it? It eats away at us somewhere, I believe. When we tell a lie we know we have lied, and it undermines our sense of ourselves in subtle ways. I think it was Aristotle who said, “The man who acts unjustly does injustice to himself.”  The implication here is that an act against another harms the victim but also corrupts the perpetrator.  Kahlil Gibran wrote something similar in The Prophet –

“It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.”

If the perpetrators don’t feel guilty, how can one encourage them to have some kind of empathy or sense of responsibility for those around them? We seem to be living in a world of everyone for themselves and yet we can’t live happily in this way.  A sense of community, of safety, a sense of belonging, is fundamental to human happiness and contentment.

Call me old-fashioned (I may well be) but I feel that a sense of responsibility to those around us is key to a healthy society.  Perhaps on a basic level we are talking about good manners.  I have lived in London since 1968, and in that time people would always wait for those to exit before trying to get on a tube. In the last few years people push onto the tube while others of us are trying to get off.  There’s no logic to it any more than there are good manners. As children we were taught to stand up for adults, to give older people our seats as a sign of respect and consideration.  Well, so much for that one!

Sadly, we don’t have great role models do we, these days, with statesmen who lie to us and behave badly, religious leaders abusive, with some celebrities who make their reputation by being disruptive, . So, in an increasingly secular environment where stabbings are becoming a tragic but weekly norm, how do we help our young work out that to treat others badly will take its toll on them too?

Of course, in previous times we had to placate the Gods.  We have just been reading Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa for our book club.  Here we read of sacrifices made, children killed in order to placate and appease the Gods and mountain spirits.  Well, we certainly don’t want to go back to those times.  We now understand what causes thunderstorms, bad harvest and sickness so we have no need to return to witch hunts but who holds the power to influence our worst judgements in a world where few are standing up for what is ethically right?

Surely philosophy could be an answer.  The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said.  Teaching philosophy can help us consider the balances and drives of good and evil, can help us identify our personal values and those that support a functioning society, can consider what systems of law and order best suit a community.  Alongside that, Socratic questions, as applied in Cognitive-Behavioural therapy, can also provide models for self-examination.

I personally still look to the Christian Church for spiritual sustenance and find choral evensong a particularly poignant moment for self-reflection. Yet my life changed when I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying about 30 years ago.  What I took from it was the practice of taking a moment at the end of each day to reflect on what one has done or said in that 24 hours and reflect whether one can answer to oneself, or to our God if we believe in one.  If we can, then we can sleep well and feel at ease with ourselves. If we cannot, and we are all fallible, then we can identify what adjustments we need to make in order to do so in future.

As I walk around London, I am aware that, much as I still love it, this City has changed almost beyond recognition to the one I moved to in 1968.  Lime bikes strewn everywhere, scary-looking masked men on electric bikes and a feeling that our leaders, of church and state, have lost their own moral compass.  I hope they spend a little more time in self-reflection in the future to give us the role models and ethical guidance that is needed to bring us back together, wherever we have come from, into a sense of belonging and pride in our City, pride in our country, and responsibility for how we behave towards others.

Yet ultimately, however many President Trumps or Putins there are in the world, we have to answer to ourselves. We alone can make sure that we act in a way that supports our values and helps us feel a sense of contentment with how we have acted each day.

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Feb 26

2025

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Helen Whitten

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Use it or Lose it: Sensory Deprivation changes the Brain

I frequently sit on the tube aware that I am almost the only person in the carriage who does not wear Airpods, or noise-cancelling earphones, and is not looking at my screen.  I notice how people are all in their own worlds. Indeed, when there was a safety alarm broadcast over the tannoy at Earl’s Court the other day telling us all to leave the station, no one moved.  They didn’t hear it.  There is, inevitably, a safety implication to shutting yourself off from what is happening in the world around you. But there may be other implications for our eyes and ears that we need to take into consideration, and I have just become aware of a couple, so I thought I would share these with you.

Yesterday, I heard in a conversation with a friend that her ophthalmologist explained to her how the addiction to screen time was impacting people’s eyesight.  That when we stare at our screens we blink less, our eyes become dry, and we can experience some temporary blurred vision. More concerningly, there is also research that is showing that if young people with developing brains spend too much time on a screen their eyes can lose the ability to adjust from close to distant vision, and that this can cause longer-term problems.  My friend’s specialist recommended that people make time to get outside, preferably into nature, where their eyes have to adapt to different visual stimuli, moving from close to medium to distant vision and that this is good for our eyesight, especially in the case of children.

Exposure to natural daylight is, of course, good for us in so many ways and critical to developing eyes, as well as to our general physiology and ability to source Vitamin D.  Too many hours of close-focus vision is going to change how our eyes see but also the speed at which our brain picks up information and makes sense of it. So exercises to train our eyes to adjust between close to distant vision are good for both eyes and brain, facilitating the understanding of what we are seeing.

In relation to our hearing, we know that playing music too loud can damage our ears. Now there is another concern, about the recent trend of wearing noise-cancelling headphones or Airpods.   There is some recent research that shows that when we block out the ambient sounds around us, our brain finds it difficult to make sense of sounds.  This is now called Auditory Processing Disorder – yet another thing for us to worry about in this strange new world of ours!

The research, which is in its early stages, suggests that the brain begins to find it difficult to tell where sound is coming from, who is talking, or distinguish between different tones of voice. Sometimes people find it difficult to understand what the sounds are or even understand spoken words.  Again, inevitably, the young are more at risk, as their brains are still developing and the neural pathways sending signals from the ear to the brain may not develop as well as they should. Equally they learn less about human relationships, don’t pick up random conversations going on within a family or at school that could give them some vital information, or just  help them learn how to express themselves.

I am not a scientist, audiologist or ophthalmologist but it does occur to me that all these new habits of ours are creating people who live in splendid isolation.  Yet in the long-term, isolation is not splendid and does not make us happy, especially if it means that a child’s sight and hearing do not develop in a way that is useful to them.  Too much screentime can potentially result in more cases of near-sightedness.  Too much time cancelling out the sounds around can result in a child not developing the ability to recognise sounds or pick up clues in a tone of voice, for example.

When we go out and about, we generally hear a multitude of sounds, particularly in a city.  I sit here now in Kew and can hear the planes going overhead to land at Heathrow, the District Line shunting along from Kew Gardens station, neighbours having a random conversation outside, my neighbour laughing at a television programme, the washing machine spinning, and my cat complaining that I haven’t fed him. I have, but that’s cats for you.

Our senses create our knowledge and understanding of the human race and the environment in which we operate.  Our sight and hearing can help us develop intuition, to pick up clues in the body language of someone on the street, or on the train, that signals that they may be drunk or have malign intentions.  The tone of a voice tells us whether someone is genuine or telling a lie, whether someone is sad even though they say they are happy, and vice versa. If we are glued to our screen while we eat, we lose the ability to truly taste the food we are eating. Without touch people wither. The scent our grandmother wore can stay with us for years. We need our senses to prepare ourselves for life, to protect us and to help us develop relationships with those around us who can help us achieve our goals, or protect us from harm, and to distinguish between those who make us happy and those who don’t.  It is a fine-tuning process that goes on throughout our lives and it certainly takes all the senses.

As a writer I am endlessly curious, always interested in what I learn about people and life as I sit in crowded places.  I watch the school children on their way home, chattering away yet often looking at their screens as they talk, or a couple in conversation and observe whether they are in love. I watch families and notice which sibling is more dominant, or whether the parent is on their phone and the child is sitting there looking bored or ignored. Similarly, by being aware of others around us, whether in a café or on a train, we can detect which person might need some help or need to know which station to exit, or whether someone needs your seat.  Those who are absorbed on their screens and shut out from the sounds around them don’t hear or notice any of these subtle details of life.

It’s the same when I am walking in Kew Gardens.  There are those who walk around, even with a friend, with their earphones on. They could miss hearing the birdsong nearby or the rustling of wind in the trees. When you try to have a conversation with someone with headphones you can end up feeling a nuisance as they don’t hear your question or statement and then have to remove the headphones in order to do so.  It’s easy to get the message that they would rather be in their own world, and it isn’t conducive to building deeper relationships.

There are many great things happening on screens, and headphones can relax us and help us manage this noisy world, but if we participate too much in either habit the chances are that it will change our ability both to see and hear.  As I am now a grandmother perhaps I can say “everything in moderation” works best?! It’s about attention and about reminding oneself that there is a choice in managing all this amazing technology, and that is to switch it off occasionally in order to keep our mind and our senses stimulated.

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/a63816503/noise-cancelling-headphones-brain-health-risk

https://www.chop.edu/news/health-tip/how-too-much-screen-time-affects-kids-eyes#:~:text=The%20eyes%20can%20also%20get,but%20also%20for%20their%20eyes.%E2%80%9D

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