According to Chinese culture and tradition, 2025 has now begun a new zodiac cycle in the Year of the Snake. It is said that in this year, favourable lunar conditions will mark a great time for promoting growth and transformation. So just as a snake sheds it’s skin, what comforting or cumbersome layers can we also shed away for growth and renewal in our own lives.  

 In some ways, we too can shed our old skin like giving away a bag of clothes to the charity shop.  We may even experience a fleeting moment of regret before rejoicing in the promise of a whole new wardrobe. But it is often the case that we are not prepared to let go of the things that we really love in life when they are taken.
The Year of the Snake can remind us that letting go is one of life’s hardships, that we can all benefit from paying a little more attention. And it is much easier said than done, because whether its ‘loves labour’s lost’, an offspring who’s eagerly flown the nest, that nice shiny thing you can’t find anymore or hanging on to your own stubborn thoughts. Everything comes and everything will go in its own sweet time not ours!

We can want a thing, pay the money and collect a receipt but it still may not remain with us for a lifetime. Sadly, there are a multitude of ways you might lose hold of a nice thing in life. Like when the government compulsory purchased your property for a crazed railroad scheme and thousands of folk couldn’t do a thing about it[1]. Capitalism will have you believe that joy is in the next diamond bracelet or fancy perfume, but it’s actually in those simple things in life that will give us all the lasting happiness that we desire. Because the truth is that the more we have and the nicer those things are, the greater their loss. And this loss isn’t hard to come by… in fact loss lies in wait around every corner, effortlessly catching us off guard time and time again.  
At some point in our lives, we will all fall victim to losing something that we still want to keep hold of, it is the basis of all mental anguish and suffering in this world. It’s a sad situation to which this modern world does not prepare us, and what makes it so hard is that it’s perfectly natural to view having things as normal because its in the use of external things that seems to sustain us… After all, it’s only human nature to want to keep hold of a good thing.

So how do we best deal with this impending and inevitable predicament? Could a pessimistic attitude be helpful here? To defend our walls well and keep a cool detachment from all nice things we come across? Or do we live, love and laugh… in the spiritual knowledge that it is in the experience of all life’s lessons that is the pact of each soul journey to enlightenment… in the daily practice of giving and sharing not keeping and hoarding… in the view that we are mere caretakers not owners… and in the remembering that life just as nature is an ever-changing landscape. A constant and incredible dance of the wheel of death and rebirth, to mourn the loss but always to rejoice in the dawning of the new day that is to come.
When were stuck for answers it is often helpful to look to the natural world to lead by example. We can see that nature does not accumulate or keepth for herself, it is always in a harmonic and symbiotic relationship of living to give and taking from earth what is needed to sustain. Because when we go we will take nothing with us. Live simple and live free.

“When you say you own something you become owned by it”. An conversation with Yogi Vishua Karma, in the kitchen of the Sivananda Yoga Centre London, 2015.

[1] High Speed Rail (HS2) compulsory purchase scandal, https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/owners-forced-to-sell-by-hs2-furious-at-cancellation-says-lawyer/5117454.article

That was how I fondly remember football, as I tend to look back on my days of youth with somewhat rose tinted specs… but now in my eyes football had fallen, straight through the hole of the entertainment abyss £££. Just another industry making big money in exploiting the humble supporter, turning a once ernest game into an unpalatable entertainment spectaculaaar! Parading these super star players off the field and through the screen onto the elitist world stage. You may as well have had them singing pop songs for all the wealth and frenzy that is whipped up ...  So why do we love to be entertained by this kind of ‘ghastly’ entertainment?

There’s a lot that can be said for the psychology of the human mind and how these mega industries are able to extract billions away from the common folk. By nature we feel thankful to others for pleasing or enriching our lives in some way and that’s rather a nice quality. But when appreciation ends up on our bedroom walls, inside of our wardrobes and a little too much in our thoughts and actions, then it begins to look a lot like idolisation and we’ve defo* been warned against that one! Yes folks we’ve gone and done it, we’ve filled our hole for reverence with celebrity culture. Damn right we need to see our idols celebrated on a podium and don’t forget the glitter bombs, because nothing says ‘I am the best’ better than a world stage to make clan and country great again… and the more glitter the better.  

Once upon a time, the world was full of annoying little sh*t’s in one way or another :-D. 

Some people were naughty, some people didn’t have the sense to know their left from their right (“ahem – don’t ask me to navigate you through town”). Others were a bit stand-offish, or quiet, or talkative, or too talkative! And that was just the splice of life, tonnes of folk; all having their querks and their very own unique ways of being. 

Then one day came labels and now you could go to the doctors, not just to find out what your physical ailments were, but to get your colourful personalities diagnosed too. The age of ‘ADHD’ was officially born and those imperfect ways of being became debilitating disorders that naturally needed treatment. 

   

The rise in short attention spans is definitely a thing. With the bombardment of a million different stimulants headed your way, concentration deficit remains at large. Like when you can’t live without coffee, your phone or insta vids (yes I blame ticktock for this unhappy state of affairs) then medication may well start knocking at your door. And who can blame folk?  If you need a little something something to be able to sit still and do a day’s work, then what’s the harm in that?  And there’s other benefits too, because let’s face it, we all know it’s far easier to deal with an annoying person when you know there’s a condition for their traits. Like when a person is posting way too much on the group chat, which then becomes totally fine when you know they’ve got some of that ADHD going on, and suddenly annoying bas*trd becomes a case for gentle sympathy. The world is a wicked wicked place my dad repeatedly warned me, so it’s actually kinda nice to see people treated better for any reason whatsoever, even for disclosing a disability in one’s personality.        

 

If you’re switched on in life, it’s a normal sort of thing for folk to be aware of their shortcomings and be on some sort of rocky road to personal self-development. These personality struggles are the residue of subconscious aspects of our selves, often developed through perhaps a little nature and an awful lot of childhood nurture of the dysfunctional kind. Everyone in the world can suffer from the shortcomings of a personality disfunction, however, aren’t these challenges for growth and improvement the very things that we ‘get ourselves out of bed’ for. What happens in the mindset of those who acceptance a medical condition then to reside yourself to the cruel hands of fate?

Labels make it easier to be forgiving of a person. It’s far easier to forgive a condition than to feel understanding for a plain and simple… good old annoying personality. But wouldn’t it be nice if society was a place where folk are free to live long and prosper just the way they are. Without medication to speed you up or slow you down, but to create the spaces and places that allow people to explore their gifts and live fulfilling lives just the way they are. Labels often become our limitations because the downside is that they can make folk feel less than they are, unless you have the personality type that thrives on proving everyone wrong.

When we believe that ‘we are something’, we exclude ourselves for being anything else, limiting our progression and expansion into anything more. But in essence we are not one thing or another, we are infinite spirit soul having a very human experience.  

As the radicals and anarchists, the liberals and freedom fighters began to philosophise about life and its loves, the confusion for many lies in the rational of it all. For instance, does it really make sense to excuse ourselves, or to limit the freedom for self-expression; for exhibiting mere natural behaviours? I mean, if folk want to get offended, that’s their problem, right? 

I’ve travelled to far off lands, where the idea of manners, really have felt like a long way from home. I’ve been pushed out of the way by grandmothers and grandchildren alike, almost been sat on, on top of buses and experienced the total non-existence of customer service at the best of times… and I can say, it felt bloody annoying. Indeed, nothing made me appreciate more, the stiff, uptight, and people pleasing ways of life back in Britain.

 

 

                                                           The Split Personality of Light

Forget military service, or a year’s work experience in industry. Why even bother to take a gap year out to go trotting merrily across the globe? Nothing in my opinion would enrich our lives more than if we all took a year off, in the contemplation and study of the very real *dichotomy and strangest behaviour of light.

Thanks to Gaven Pretor-Pinney, author of The Wavewatchers’s Companion, I have been, ‘mind blown’, over the past five months, knee deep in the reading and research of such a fascinating and mind-boggling subject. Because still to this day, “most scientists who have worked in the field of quantum mechanics would be at great pains to say, that they too have found the nature of light as bloody mysterious as the rest of us”. 

Since the mid-18th century, the predicament most physicists found themselves in, was the argument of whether light was a particle or a wave. Over the centuries, reputable scientists such as Newton, Young and Einstein, were able to convincingly theorise new evidence that would periodically overturn societal thinking of light’s behaviour at the time. This alternate - ‘is light a wave’ or ‘is it a particle’ conundrum continued steadily for over three centuries. But then, in 1923, the bonkers behaviour of light was finally revealed; in the famous double slit experiment conducted by Davisson and Germer, who discovered that light had all this time been leading a double life... inconspicuously moving around as waves, but behaving like particles, only while being observed [naughty].

                      

                                               

Davisson and Germer’s brilliant experiment didn’t, however, reveal that light’s behaviour changed through the mere act of looking at it. It was in the analysis of light, that had given rise to its duality and curiously still, this phenomena not only occurred through the mind of the human observer, but the same was true when the experiment was performed only in the presence of a machine. 

 

The peculiarity of light remains to this day bizarre, and there is no end in time and money spent in its continued pursuit. Could it be less of a question of ‘why’ does light behave like this and more of a question of what could the conscious self have to do with it? Where does the answer lie? Maybe not at the end of the Hadron Collider, but perhaps at the end of a very long and deep meditation. Is it that sometimes science can only bring us only so far, and that some things will remain as unanswerable as magic! 

*Dichotomy – a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet.