The Man Who Plants a Tree Plants Hope.

A post about normality, difference and community.

This is a post that, for the most part, is free to read. For the lovely readers who have been kind enough to subscribe to the paid part of my offering, there is, beyond the pay wall at the end of the post, a body scan audio which I hope you enjoy. I have written it specifically for this post so it’s not available anywhere else. It’s similar to what my Mum used to help me when I had a tummy ache or couldn’t sleep.

I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading. Sarah x

It’s a baby…

I don’t suppose there are many children whose Dad appears at the breakfast table to say that he has spent the night delivering babies. For me, that was a normal breakfast. My Dad would arrive home bleary eyed after a night at The Shrubbery - our local maternity unit - and talk about babies, stitches, forceps births and more. It meant nothing to us. It was just Daddy, talking to our Mum over a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea.

That’s what it was like with a Dad who was a GP specialising in Obstetrics. Monday nights were ‘On Call’ nights so we would get used to answering the phone with ‘Dr Wilsher’s house - how can I help you’. Looking back it seems like a remarkably 70’s type of normality that a 14 year old would be acting as receptionist if I happened to get to the phone first. But it was just the way it was. Normal.

My Dad knew his patients like family. He would come home with a bottle of Sloe Gin from one elderly gent in the Autumn and an Italian family would send my sister and I enormous dolls in fancy dresses. Pakistani patients would insist that he gave us beautiful glass bracelets from their trips to visit family. They thought he was wonderful and he thought they were too.

Nothing was too much as far as his patients were concerned. He would trudge out in the snow with a spade and his wellies to do home visits. He would pop in just to check how things were with the terminally ill and leave word that if any of his ‘regulars’ called on his day off he would still be happy to see them if they needed him.

I suppose it was a very different era.

Photo by Alex Hockett on Unsplash

It’s Hypnotherapy…

I didn’t realise it at the time, but one of the things he used to help people, was Hypnotherapy. This was not the sort of stage hypnosis you might imagine. In Hypnotherapy there is no talk of “Look into my eyes!” or clucking chickens…

He and my Mum, who was a nurse, used it to help people with pain management, to help people relax.

When I was little and had a tummy ache, I had no idea that my Mum’s soft voice and steady, calming words were actually hypnotic. All I knew was that she made me feel safe and sleepy and calm. Looking back now I can understand that she was teaching me to scan my body and gently relax my muscles. Usually I would fall asleep and wake up feeling so much better.

In the 60’s I imagine that the use of Hypnotherapy was considered pretty far out! Even these days people don’t see it as ‘main stream’. But my Dad and his senior partner, Vic, really believed in it. They could see the good it did to help their patients and, of course, their own families.

And so…

So why am I waffling on about my Dad, my childhood, hypnotherapy? I suppose it’s to show that everyone’s normal is their own. My normal was having a Dad who delivered babies by night and put us into relaxing Hypnotic Trances by day.

Your normal will be completely different to mine. Neither is better than the other - just different. As long as we can live our lives kindly then I had always imagined that we could just live and let live. And yet it would seem not these days and that breaks my heart.

I don’t really understand what’s happening to the world. There seems to be so much anger, such polarisation of thought.

In my work as a therapist, working with individuals, so often people’s deepest wish is simply to be happy, to love and be loved. Time and time again, that’s what it comes down to. And yet, as a society we criticise, we attack, we seem to act from a place of fear. Love and acceptance, particularly for those who are ‘other’, different to our ‘norm’, seem to be way down the list of emotions.

In my experience, working with people and also meeting people from the places I have visited, as disparate as Tanzania, South Africa, New Zealand, Switzerland, France, Ireland… most of us are ….nice. We don’t want much from the world other than for our loved ones to be safe and happy, to have a roof over our heads and food in our tummies. If we can live our lives with no huge disasters then that’s pretty good.

Photo by Kevin Delvecchio on Unsplash

Imagine…

Imagine if we were all like that… If we could all just live and let live, be kind, be respectful even if we came across people who were ‘different’.

But the world isn’t like that. Sadly there are enough people out there who are driven either by fear, or by a desire for power, or simply by being damaged, that the balance changes. There are those people who, for whatever reason, just don’t care about anyone but themselves. There are people with no empathy. There are people who deliberately hurt and abuse.

I honestly believe that they are the minority, but they have the energy and drive to get what they want at the cost of everyone around them.

Whilst the majority are content to just live, happy to love and be loved, the few have no qualms in stoking up fear, destroying lives, riding roughshod over others to get what they want.

I don’t know if this has always been the case or whether it’s a new phenomenon. Maybe it’s now simply more visible , with social media and 24 hour news.

So What Can We Do?

I don’t have any magic answers to this question. The only thing that comes to mind is - community. What strikes me about the people in this world who are fear mongers, trouble makers, tyrants…. is that they are all for the individual. You don’t get to be a billionaire or a dictator when your soul is filled with empathy and care for society, I imagine.

We are social creatures. When we live in kindness, in empathy, in connection with others, helping those less fortunate than ourselves and respecting the people, animals and world around us then we are co-regulated. I look after you and you look after me. If you’re hungry I share my food. If you’re cold I share my coat. We don’t need to make a song and dance about it, we just notice the needs and work to fulfill them.

To live this way there has to be trust I suppose and maybe trust has been lost in so many places, replaced by greed, by a desire to ‘come first’, be richer, more powerful, more respected because of that wealth or power. Fear has made us doubt strangers and friends alike.

If you are ‘other’ - someone that doesn’t meet the ‘norm’ of the society in which you find yourself, then you become an object to be feared, distrusted and then, potentially, attacked either verbally, economically or even physically.

But if we live as a community, embracing ‘other’, embracing each other in the understanding that we are all fellow strugglers, we all have our own history, our own journey through life, then we are stronger together. Surely?

Begin The Conversation

So how do we begin? What can one person do in a world where, more and more, fear reigns? What comes to mind is the story by French author Jean Giono, “The Man Who Planted Trees” In this inspiring tale, the narrator meets Elzeard Bouffier, a shepherd who, single handedly, over the course of a lifetime, plants thousands of acorns which transform the barren landscape into lush, thriving forest.

It is a beautiful allegory which shows the impact small acts can have on the world, how perseverance and consistency when things seem impossible can be transformative.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Whether we decide to plant acorns or begin conversations in shops, whether we campaign actively for peace and understanding or quietly help the people around us… we can all create a community that grows beyond the barren landscape in which we now so often live.

We are all different, of course. Some of us will have the confidence to do more than others. But if we all do something, if we all plant our own acorns and begin to help others around us and in the wider world to plant theirs, then things can change. It might not happen immediately, but it can begin a movement - a movement driven by kindness, by love, by a sense of community, an understanding that we are all part of something so much bigger, connected to each other, to Nature, to the future.

This is not about us as individuals so much as being about the greater collective, looking to the future, nurturing the now. As Jean Giono said:

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”