Making your world bigger
More Good Days newsletter Issue 14
We all have our own habits, the things we like to do, which we keep doing, the places we like to eat, or go for a coffee, which we visit regularly. The routes we take to work every morning.
There’s a comfort in habits. There’s something pleasant about the familiar.
In fact, I think we all need habits and routines. They create a kind of scaffolding around which we can build a life.
There’s an ease which comes with certainty and the expected.
But there’s also a danger. Maybe even more than one danger. The scaffolding constructed out of habits can become a cage. They can fence us in, closing us off from opportunities and inhibiting our development and growth.
The other big danger that comes from habits is that they ease us into zombie mode, switching on our autopilot so we drift through life unconsciously, unaware of the present moments, as they fly by, another day gone. “Metro, bulot, dodo” was the old ’68 slogan chanted in the streets of Paris - capturing that sense of a hamster wheel of “commuting, working and sleeping” which seemed to keep on spinning, driven by the demands of capitalism to be busy and productive.
We are in visitor season here in France, where family and friends come to stay a few days with us for their holidays. Everyone has their food habits, which can make meal planning and preparation a little tricky at times…..after all, other people probably don’t have the exact same habits we do.
It’s pretty common for little children to be quite fussy eaters. Lots of them would eat the same narrow range of meals every day if they could get away with it.
We’ve been encouraging one of our visiting grandchildren to try some different foods while he’s here with us in France on his holidays. He has that common childhood default when presented with something different - “No thanks, I don’t like that” (even, or especially, if it’s something he’s never had before)
A phrase one of us came up with has worked well - “make your world bigger”.
We told him that when he refuses to try something new, he’s keeping his world small, and when he does try something new, we praise him for “making his world bigger”.
So now, sometimes, when he tries something different, and finds he actually quite likes it, he says “I’m making my world bigger!”
At the end of my career in Medicine, I emigrated to France. We’d taken many holidays in France over the years and really enjoyed the landscapes, the food and wine, the culture and the language. Emigrating was a deliberate act with the intention of spending part of our lives in a different country, a country very different from the one we’d been born in and had lived in for sixty years. It’s been a great move. We have a traditional, old stone, house in the countryside of the Charente Maritime, a part of France which has the second most hours of sunshine a year outside of Provence. I’ve had to learn the language pretty much from scratch, having only had school French until I moved here. It’s a work in progress, a work which will never be finished! But at least I can have conversations with neighbours, and I even receive compliments from locals who say I speak very good French (don’t think it’s very good actually but I’m delighted to get such great feedback). I read French a lot, and a lot more easily than I can speak it, but I thoroughly enjoy French magazines, newspapers and books. The stories which hit the headlines in France are very different from the ones in the UK, and they come mainly from the Francophone world, which isn’t covered much in the Anglophone one. The seasonal, local foods are quite different from what I’d buy and eat back in Scotland, and in many ways coming to live here has “made my world bigger”!
There’s a French phrase which I learned early on….”l’emerveillement du quotidien” - one of those phrases which is hard to translate directly back into English but which pretty much means the “wonder of the everyday”. That idea, along with the teachings of the old Classical Philosophers about approaching each experience as if it’s for the first and the last time, has made my every day richer. It’s partly why I started my “More Good Days” podcast and newsletter…to share my experience of “making my world bigger”.
Then, in addition, I learned from Iain McGilchrist that what our right hemisphere does so well is notice whatever is new….it’s primed to spot change, movement, and novelty. (Whereas the left sticks with what it already knows and classifies it). So, although I hadn’t really thought of it that way, developing the use of our underused right hemisphere is a good way of “making the world bigger”.
A couple of years ago I was watching “La Vuelta” on TV and the cyclists were riding through northern Spain past a town called Comillas and the sequoia forest nearby. A sequoia forest in northern Spain? Who knew? 800 sequoia trees! I then discovered that Comillas was only just over six and half hours drive from here so we set off and spent a few days there. The sequoia forest was incredible. Especially just after sunrise when the rays of the sun pierced the dark forest of huge sequoias. And Comillas turned out to have a house designed by Gaudi which we could visit. I’ve never seen, or been into, a house like that before. All in all, another great experience of “making the world bigger”.
I bring the same approach to music, enjoying my vinyl collection built up in my teens and twenties, but also, enjoying new music, new genres, new artists. Music is a great way of “making the world bigger”.
So, here’s my recommendation for this week - try something new, go somewhere different, take a different route when you go to work, be on the lookout for whatever you’ve never noticed before.
What a combination - having more good days, and making your world bigger!
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