Archive: MF newsletter

Week 36, 2023

Weekly round-up

Insight

Here´s a stream of thought on life. 

It´s un-edited, and rather incoherent. But I promised myself to post monthly, so I´ll try to keep my promise. Who gives a crap.

How rare is it to have been born and to be in existence, right here and now? It is, in fact, such an extreme rarity, that it might be the most incomprehensible fact of them all. 

But now we´re here. 

I´m not about to dive into a religious ontological discussion. I´m simply trying to acknowledge the fact that we´re here, and now that we´re here: How can we fully appreciate our existence, for real? 

An existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre, might jump in here and say (imagine French accent here): "It doesn´t really matter. The fact of the matter is that we´re destined to live. This life is full of choices, and we´ll have coming-and-going responsibilities. Sartre said that it is, in fact, a good thing to "..make every [person] aware of what he (or she) is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him (or her)." This is a quote from Sartre´s Existentialism and Human Emotions.

That sounds like a heavy burden, though. Don´t we have enough worries in life as is? 

A seemingly demanding task, like taking responsibility for one´s own existence, needn´t be perfect, nor could it ever be. Most of the people in our world won´t even hear of existentialism, I guess, or have the privileged position to take time to reflect on what really gives their life meaning. Nevertheless, it might start with one simple choice: the choice to pursue a meaningful life that may make you happy (I know it sounds cliché). It´s maing choices in light of insecurity. Life isn´t a promise of one happy moment after another, nor is happiness obtained by "thinking positively". Life isn´t all bad, nor all good, but it is really interesting. 

Matthieu Ricard (the supposed happiest man on Earth) once said that we really all want to be happy, even Masochists do.

One one side it´s so cliché, but at the same time it´s so simple and profound. To be happy is, I think, to live meaningfully (on your terms) and to acknowledge life for what it is, without expecting it to be different.

To appreciate life is perhaps to choose to live imperfectly in a fast-paced world with a lot of expectations and imperatives.

Don´t we all have an obligation to make an effort to appreciate the fact of life? Human connection is, as is shown over and over again, an important source of happiness. To meet others in our highly individualized world is extremely important. We are made to be with others in what some call "the meeting of the minds".

At the same time, however, I can´t ignore the importance the very thing we offer in meeting others - our minds in terms of our presence and attention to others. I keep coming back to Buddhist's claim which says that we must see the mind for what it really is and to develop it. I agree that it is a profound project which can make our lives better. At the same time, as it made its way into Western culture, I´m annoyed by the Westernization of it.

One can think of the mind developing as the mixture of genetic predisposition and the culmination of events we´re exposed to in our environment. I take this recommendation to heart, but have to make two important emphases here. The first one is that I do not know how it is to be another person and that it´s very important to acknowledge another person´s subjective experience of life´s problems. How can one claim to develop the mind and to be present with family and friends, when a person feels like they have no time at all for themselves? Take a single parent, struggling to make ends meet? Is the whole "developing the mind-project" in the West simply an elitist provocation to show off their privileged position? I´m afraid that the original Buddhist claim to develop mindfulness has been contaminated by this fact. Yes, there is indeed a lot of privileged people who, with perhaps a naive understanding, simply monetize the original Buddhist messages. 

The second emphasis is related to the first one; It takes a larger critical perspective on modern societal healthcare norms, however, in that it goes against the "make yourself perfect" project. In our modern world, we have created a pathological tendency to improve our health - both mentally and physically - which goes beyond common sense. If one pretends like one´s fully responsible for their own health, while disregarding the biggest source of unhealthy  (simple chance and time that passes), we will suffer. Health imperatives come to us in many forms, and we can´t take them too literally. It makes common sense to adjust health advice in our lives to a certain extent, but not to the point of disillusion. Taking insulin while diabetic makes sense. Spending time to train, to walk in nature, and to eat healthy meals makes sense. It makes sense to not do this all the time. We can´t feel fully responsible for our health outcomes because we cannot and should not want to control every factor in our lives. We ought to work on accepting the fact that we can´t control everything, that one day we will encounter ageing and perhaps sickness, and that we must simply try our best to make it work. This is, of course, not the same as giving up.

In claiming that it is helpful to try and understand our minds, which may contribute to living mindfully and meaningfully, I want to underline that this will never be a perfect project and that you can´t expect it to be. It also doesn´t come from a place of the Western new health-norms of living a perfect life. Yes, we live as conscious beings which in itself represents an odds-defying fact. We are all pulled to stressors every single day, I certainly feel the stress of it every single day. My problems feel like they´re the biggest in the world, but they´re really not. But yes, they feel so important

 How many of us actually realize that we live in a time-limited, awareness limited life with full potential to be present with our 

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Medical:

That´s it for this week, guys.

Hope you have a wonderful day!

Tim

Week 34, 2023

Weekly round-up

I´m not sure about you, but life can feel like a hamster race toward accomplishing daily tasks - sending off work-related e-mails, cleaning the house, calling your mum and reading a chapter of that book you´ve been given during Christmas 2019. This general feeling of business is dehumanizing in a way since it makes life about external projects and goals. We are not engaged in the process - or god forbid enjoying the process of living - but we´re all about finishing tasks. We are dehumanized, I would argue, in our age since many of us life for the outcomes of tasks in life and not life´s process itself. It´s a bit like Alan Watt´s remark (for many years ago) that the purpose of a song is not to finish it as fast as possible. Otherwise, musicians would play their songs immensely fast. The summation of Mozart´s compositions comprises about 200 hours of listening played at normal speed. We could hurry our way through all of this, firing up Spotify and playing everything at twice, triple the speed. We can say that we have listened to all of Mozart´s music. But could we say that we´ve really listened, at all?

I´m not at all saying something new here. I´m not trying to be imperative here, suggesting that everyone should live more fully and “in the moment”. I´m simply saying that I the notion of “feeling busy”, feeling overwhelmed, feeling burned-out, is not unfamiliar, and should be up for discussion. 

Now that I´m done with my little “weekly complaint” section I go on to my weekly update:

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Just simply knowing what we understand by culture is somethings hard to grasp. I came across a one-sentence description that, by itself isn´t life-chaning, but it´s a nice little summary of what culture is: 

"..kultur er et annet navn for normer, idealer, forestillinger, institusjoner og hovrdan vi organiserer sosiale møter og intimitet" 

..which translates to 

“Culture is another name for our norms, ideals, conceptualizations, institutions and how we organize social meetings and intimacy”. 

Medical:

This week I´ve been reading about lung physiology. A question arose:

How do people adjust to low levels of oxygen at high altitudes? 

It´s a rather complicated process, but let´s try to simplify it. 

Say you´re living your life at sea-level in the middle of Nice, France (approx sea-level). We assume therefore that you´re used to “normal” Barometric air pressure. This is simply the pressure that exists at sea level and which is the summation of the major gasses in the air: Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2, and a couple more. Oxygen makes up about 21% of this Barometric pressure. 

Following a wild dream, you find yourself flying off to the Alps to become a ski-instructore. Wow! Besides the snowy hills, the apres ski, and the language barrier, you find yourself in another struggle: adapting to the new Barometrics air pressure! At your ski-resort, the Barometics pressure is suddenly much lower. There are, to put it simply, less air molecules in the air. If you would have taken a 1m x 1m box in your hometown in France and compare it to a 1m x 1m box at your ski-resort in the Alps, the latter box would (simply put) contain less air molecules and therefore would exert less pressure in the box. The “density” of air descreases. Therefore, you need to adjust to fewer Oxygen molecules as well. So when you breath in air, you have less Oxygen to travel from your alveoli into your blood (arterial blood eventually). This creates a form of mild hypoxia because you have less oxygen in your arteries which supply your organs of fresh and delicious O2. 

During your first few days at the resort (depending on how high it is), you can experience a bit of fuzzy thinking, nausea and fatigue. This doesn´t really need treatment. It simply needs time and some clever physiological reactions! Indeed, you will feel better after a few days. One adaptive mechanism increases the procution of certain molecules (2,3-DPG) in your blood. Oxygen floats freely in your blood, but there are also plenty of “carriers” (hemoglobin) that are proficient at “grabbing oxygen molecules”. They´re indeed quite greedy! We sort of want to make them less greedy in a way and let oxygen float more freely in the blood (but we still want them there): Simply put, 2,3-DPG reduces the ability to “grab” oxygen molecules (they have a loose grip), which makes “free” oxygen more readily available for your tissues and organs that are so desperately asking for oxygen! The “carriers” are still available to grab oxygen, but they are a bit less greedy. In addition to producing 2,3-DPG, we can also increase the amount of carriers in our blood in total (via synthesis of erythropoietin).

That´s it for this week, guys.

Hope you have a wonderful day!

Tim

Week 33, 2023

20/08 2023

1. Recommended book

Doctoring is an art - it certainly is in the most demanding places like a warzone. We follow David in this story about his journeys abroad with organizations like MSF and the Syrian Refugee Relief. It tells the tale of a surgeon amidst the worst humanitarian crises. I picked up this book just days ago, but I skimmed through it faster than Verstappen´s fastest lap in Spain. 

War Doctor - David Nott

2. Quote of the week

"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."

- Albert Camus

3. Art this week

This time, Chinese poetry: Kishotenketsu, which describes a certain structure and form to a poetic tradition itself. It´s the basis for the classic four-act structure.

Here´s an example:

Farewell, by Wang Wei (699-759)

After a farewell in the mountains,
Dusk falls, and I shut my firewood-made gate.
When the spring is green next year,
I wonder if my friend will return.

Week 32, 2023

New article out 
on the power of mentalizing, published today!

Peace of art
Danielle Navarro´s generative art! Found at https://art.djnavarro.net/


Quote I wish to share
"“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage…”– Lao Tzu"