#88: How does your garden grow?
Happy Friday!
And greetings from Thessaloniki. If ever you feel that life isn't quite lining up, or that your blood isn't quite circulating as it should, or that you haven't seen or smelt or heard anything different in a while, take a trip out of your front door and ask strangers how you can help.
That's what I've been doing this past week. My trip has been nicely complemented by my reading - but isn't it always? The meaning-seeking brain will always find a way to pair the sensory input from the world around us with the abstract input from the books we read. On this trip, I've already written a long piece on what reading Anna Karenina taught me about how to live a good life.
Turning from fiction to non-fiction, Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made is one of those books that picks you up and turns you around, showing you yourself from a new angle, making new sense of the corners and curves.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett teaches us that our brain does not passively receive our experience of the world, but in fact creates it, on the fly, in every moment.
It performs this wizardry by seamlessly piecing together our concepts of what the world is like, to offer predictions about how we should feel or behave.
Lisa Feldman Barrett's lab has shown that we don't experience a Platonic Form or essence of 'happiness', but rather make a prediction of 'happiness' based on the context of the external environment and what's going on inside our body.
'Happiness' is our brain's best guess for how we should feel when, say, our friends throw us a surprise party. If we had no concept of 'friends', 'surprise' and 'party', then the brain would be unable to make a working prediction of 'happiness' and we would feel... something else. Confusion, perhaps.
Sometimes we have to correct our concepts and predictions after bumping into falsifying sensory feedback from the world (and even then sometimes we don't correct, hence cognitive biases).
How do we encode these concepts if they aren't innate? Through our culture. Some concepts we are taught (Look, there's a tree!), some we learn through observation of others (Never make eye contact with strangers on the Underground) and some we pick up through our own experience (Concrete is really hard).
These concepts are the brain's shorthand for experiencing the world. There is simply too much incoming data to function without such concepts.
Imagine that every time you looked out of your window you saw with naive eyes all the angles, colours, and textures of just a single tree. You'd be fascinated by the thousands of rustling leaves, each one unique, by the way the light bounces off each swaying branch and by the blue sky that hides and reveals itself behind.
Far easier to build up a concept of 'tree', label the scene and get on with your day.
Our experience of the world, then, entirely depends on the concepts we learn. New concepts deepen our experience of life. Only when we learn and accept the concepts of, say, watermelon, patience and gardening are we able to identify and include them in our world.
And what better way of learning new concepts than by travelling to a place you've never been before, by experiencing an entirely new culture, with entirely new concepts of what it means to be a human in an entirely new concept of society?
This is why travel works.
This is a photograph of me planting a watermelon plant in the garden of the CERST Language Centre.
Every day, refugees and volunteers come together to water the plants, pluck out the weeds, and gradually turn the scorched earth into an oasis refuge from the overcrowded tumult of the Vial Refugee Camp.
During my time on Chios, CERST learnt that the 1,800 refugees in Vial were only given 1 (one) bottle of water per day. This in daily temperatures of 32-34 degrees.
Luckily, CERST were able to dig into their reserve funds and get 7 tonnes of drinking water delivered to the camp every other day.
I'm not sure which is more staggering: that the local authorities would allow such a drought to become a matter of life and death, or that there are volunteer organisations with the capacity to fill the humanitarian holes.
On Wednesday, I cycled a long way. NOTE: A 5.34km 8% climb is not what you want to find 150km and 11 hours into your workout.
Witness the fitness on your choice of Strava or Ride With GPS.
>> INPUT
You aren't at the mercy of your emotions - your brain creates them. A good TED talk introduction to Lisa Feldman Barrett's work.
A man unicycling around the world. After my experience of wrestling a bike onto trains around Europe, I'd love to travel with just one wheel.
Make Rojava Green Again. "What is it about the social structures of Rojava that so inspires the fierce loyalty of its defenders and its people?" No idea. Only 3 days left to support this excellent project and get your copy of a fabulous book and the answers therein.
How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour by Quincy Larson (thanks to @documentally for the link)
Improving my emotional granularity with this word list.
OUTPUT >>
From Chios to Crisis (July)
Sunset on Strefi (July)
...COMING UP...
I'm off to one of the refugee camps around Thessaloniki this afternoon. More on that next week, no doubt.
Did I mention? Series 2 of Foiled is broadcast on Monday!
And I'm heading to Sofia on Wednesday and through to Ljubljana for the start of Thighs of Steel next weekend.
Monday 18:30 BST on BBC iPlayer Radio
Now On: The Victor Frankl 5-a-day Book Club!
Membership Criteria: Read 5 pages a day of Man's Search for Meaning to complete the whole darn text in only 28 days. I'll be tootling through the text at just 5 pages a week, so you've got plenty of time to catch up.
Day 14
In today's pages (p74-78), Victor Frankl sets out the first principles of his theory of logotherapy: addressing directly the question of man's search for meaning.
Following his description of the psychological trials of the camp inmate, Frankl asks whether or not the 'human being is completely and unavoidably influenced by his surroundings'.
Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors - be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? ... [D]o the prisoners' reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings?
Frankl's answer is categorical: 'man does have a choice of action'. His proof is the spiritual independence and heroism of those who gave away their last piece of bread to comfort other prisoners.
They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
This idea is familiar to us in the ancient schools of Stoicism or Buddhism, but strikes us afresh from the modern context of the Holocaust.
It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Frankl outlines three ways in which a human being can find meaning in life. The first two are obvious to most people: the active life of creative work and the passive enjoyment of beauty, art and nature. But the third is less clear: we can find meaning through the way we bear our suffering.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. ... The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails ... gives him ample opportunity ... to add a deeper meaning to his life.
[He] may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.
Even in our dying moments, we can rise above our suffering and reach some kind of inner peace and happiness. A young woman prisoner, who knew she would soon die, said to Frankl: "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard ... In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishment seriously."
She found solace in talking to the tree outside her hut, and was cheerful, despite her suffering.
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We continue next week...
Massive apologies if you've been replying to this email over the past few months. Your messages haven't been getting through because I'm an idiot.
Anyway, hopefully that's fixed now (the email, that is - I'm working on the idiot thing). I'd be delighted to hear from you!
Much love,
- dc
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this. David is currently gallivanting around Europe and will be talking to refugees in Greece. He is also co-writer of BBC Radio sitcom Foiled, does copywriting for The Bike Project and is almost always available for work. davidcharles.info // @dcisbusy
Comic by Justin Boyd at Invisible Bread.