Mental and Emotional Wellbeing — Reflect, Refract and Diffract: being Transparent in your thinking.
Another take on physics and being a better person with reflections refracted through bright sunshine of semi-arid lands
Travelling in the arid Horn of Africa, where people have experienced life atop an edge far more difficult to balance than most of us ever have to contemplate, what are the main takeaways for any of us to do?
Reflect on what we have and want, looking back at ourselves to sense what can happen.
Be Transparent in our thinking — no excuses for why we are not doing what we want to do. See through the marketing and the empty rhetoric. Ask the ‘so what…..’ question.
Refract and Diffract, placing ourselves in other situations to ‘see how the light of wisdom comes through’. Look and listen to the reflections and unpick whether things are as they seem. Be honest with yourself. Ask others you trust to offer fresh perspectives, interfering with the stereotypes and challenging the reflections and transparencies, keeping the status quo.
Returning to Somaliland, the unrecognised state to the north and east of Ethiopia, neighbouring Djibouti, abutting the Red Sea, is always an experience to challenge the straight lines of light and perceived wisdom. Seeing how the places and people have recouped from the violence of two, or even in some places, three civil wars is always stimulating in terms of knowing we, as people, rebuild given the opportunity and proper resources. Studies undertaken a decade ago showed psychosis[1]was endemic with populations in certain towns having one in every four people showing the signs of psychosis.
How do you live in an unrecognised country?
You value yourself and others as people — neighbours, friends, family, rivals, and maybe even enemies- but always as people.
But do we rebuild to ensure history does not see another set of such conflicts as others manipulating memory, or the lack thereof, as new tensions build around fresh identity challenges?
Identity is regularly invoked when looking at the purpose of people. But usually as a collective — I am British, I am English. Rarely do we look at how we define ourselves as individuals, particularly in post-traumatic settings where open conflict has taken place and the realities of family and support networks have been strained beyond breaking point — witness the Middle East, The Levant, as the fallout from the latest battles continues to reverberate.
Leaders are appealing for people to wrap themselves in flags, calling for challenges to others who, they say, are contesting their people’s liberties. It is a clarion call to the broader population as leaders use symbolism to foment their own biased opinions and regularly deflect from their failings in political and economic development. Failings to recognise the stresses placed across generations forestalling people from knowing, let alone realising, their full potential. Regularly, people are cast as passive beneficiaries and recipients of international largesse. Politicians seem only to hark back to repeating points about old enmities and do not look forward to what people want for a better future. No real reflecting, plenty of diffracting and the misuse of transparency as people do see through politics as there appears little accountability stopping with leaderships.
Questions emerge for any of us:-
How do I define myself?
Name, sex, family, and a more comprehensive network of friends or ethnic cultural groups?
Think again, defining yourself by what is inside your head and body. What you contribute to those around you.
Apparent is how we act and react when emotional points are touched. We have become emotionally detached from the consequences of social interaction in general and conflict in particular, feeling the adrenaline flow as calls to conflict are raised. This may simply be pulling on the Premier League football team shirt and shouting at the TV screen. But it is there: the need for a sense of being social, with the animosities coming with arguing which team is better.
Are you being marketed to? Is someone selling you a sense of belonging? For what purpose? What do you and those you care about gain?
Be prepared to avoid sides. See competition and conflict as a globe where you can roll around and see, hear, and sense all perspectives. Reflect, refract, diffract and be transparent in your thought creation.
Now, of a mind to always ask individuals whether they would get themselves killed simply because of their heritage? History is littered with examples of men going off to do their patriotic duty; history has also brought forward much of this patriotism as the basis of the inequity and inequality we now suffer.
When there is no mass emancipation and the capability to have rights enshrined concerning the rule of law, we need collective identity. But, sadly, examples abound of abhorrent behaviour being practised because it was socially accepted. Wife beating, women as chattels, and child labour all cause heads to shake, but all are still apparent in different societies. We have come a long way. Nonetheless, personal identity is still not universal; individual suffering rose during Covid-19 as figures of domestic violence in virtually all countries testify with a seeming inability to send a message to stop this behaviour — huge rise in domestic abuse cases being dropped in England.
Many will question: Do we have respect for the rule of law? Do we have respect for each other?
Given events in recent times, as people seem to have placed themselves above the law, the social disparities are causing angst among people across the UK, Europe, and North America. Not the traumas of war less than a generation ago, but a sense of what-will-be-will-be pervades, leading to desperation among the many — Britain: deaths of despair, once an American phenomenon, now haunt Britain . Destruction and death have come closer to people in Europe as, this time, the wars are televised (with apologies to Gil Scott Heron — Revolution Will Not be Televised ) in Ukraine, now Gaza and Lebanon. Sudanese People’s suffering seems lost and Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria are but sources of migrants we would rather not deal with.
The manner we reflect on living and death continues to change with how close so many of us came during the Covid-19 pandemic? Please think of how the Grenfell Tower fire aftermath seems to have been consumed by political posturing far better than the flames were smothered during the fire itself. More insidious actions are apparent, the seemingly regular school killings of the USA where internal angst and inability to be able to vent leads to an explosion of violence — Why? Mass killings across the USA bring forward the standard rhetoric, but with what actions?
My ears are hearing, but my mind is not listening. Talking about the closeness to death when travelling in the Horn of Africa, it is regularly met with embarrassment and forced hilarity. Why? To cover embarrassment? As a reaction to the inability to think more deeply about the emotional capital invested in being murdered just because you were of this or that ethnic group? Dying because you were to be taken advantage of by landlords turning a profit and the government not insisting on exacting standards for the health, safety and well-being of people? Talk to the Black Lives Matter movement to show it is how we live and act together. Or not together because of segregation in my mind and physically.
Because we have not built the collective beyond it being a means to exercise power, taking away from people, taking away life itself, and traumatising many more in numerous examples.
In many cases, the positives of collective reciprocity have gone. Building support and offering the opportunity to collectively grant individuals the capability to be individuals and define themselves within their everyday lives while seeking deeper meaning for themselves and the next generation.
Could we have sanitised the life cycle far too much in Europe and North America?
Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, as cultural practices celebrate the cycle of life, but, in the main, we have become displaced from death. Even the slaughter of animals to become the meat on our plates is removed. A survey showed how people could not tell cuts of meat apart, and even some mixed the animal source of some pieces of meat.
The sanitisation of life has led to an inability to appreciate our inner self and how we feel toward the life of ourselves and those around us.
We are removed from nature. How often do we talk about how we are because of who we are?
Looking at our mental, emotional, and spiritual energy sources, we can see how they are shaped so much by the superficiality of the environments we now tend to occupy. These environments are regularly dominated by short-termism, the here and now, over the longer-term building of strong networks and more profound beliefs in what brings meaning to our lives and livelihoods.
How do culture and social norms condition us? Norms constantly being manipulated as our individual insecurity requires us to find a sense of belonging. Atop of this comes the superficiality of social media setting a consciousness driven by mass marketing and selling over relationships of substance?
How about trying this process:-
Be alone.
Reflect — Look inside and write down about, or draw pictures or mind maps of, yourself — Not yourself but Yourself.
Refract and diffract — How what is inside you projects outward to others.
Transparency, since so fewer things can be seen through than looked at — How the outer influences impact the inner self.
Put it away and return to it at intervals — a month, every season, as trees shed their leaves and the blue sky changes to grey. Then again, when fluffy white clouds float by, new shoots appear.
Reflect — Challenge yourself not to be left-to-right, linear in thinking and expression — draw, write backwards, start at the bottom, and build upward to a goal — a purpose and a meaning.
Refract and Diffract — Change the perspective and sense of your well-being and how it is changing, being changed, by what factors and how? Listen to others. Watch and sense how others act and react — with and without their knowledge of your interaction with them.
Transparency — See-through situations, listen and watch and feel how your conditioning causes you to act and react.
Be open to expressing yourself in situations where words may fail you, but your body language will cause messages to be sent.
Through the physics of light: reflect, refract, diffract and transparency, you will experience the capability to transition between states and material situations. You are changing and challenging the inner self, being open inside yourself, opening to a close circle of real friends, challenging yourself in how you perceive others around you, and preconditioning toward well-being and mental health.
[1]NHS mental health/psychosis
Psychosis is a mental health problem causing people to perceive or interpret things differently from those around them. This might involve hallucinations or delusions.
