You are behind each miracle, a photo by Daquella manera on Flickr.
from My Week With Marilyn
by Colin Clark 2000
2011 Harper Press, London
p.247
Introduction
'All my life I have kept
diaries, but this is not one of them. This is a fairy story, an
interlude, an episode outside time and space which nevertheless was
real. And why not? I believe in magic. My life and most people's lives
are a series of little miracles - strange coincidences which spring from
uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We
spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the
surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.'
_bradley-manning-pride014_, a photo by savemanning on Flickr.
'The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant,
systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after
day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what
you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our
nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body
and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our
mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.'
White King Orchid, a photo by Brisbane City Council on Flickr.
'Science writer David Dobbs is intrigued by this notion that the
genes and traits that underlie some of our greatest weaknesses like
despair, difficult behaviour and mental illness could also underlie our
more positive aspects like optimism, empathy and resilience.'
'So
the conclusion that the researchers drew was that this gene is not
really a gene that simply makes you vulnerable to bad behaviour and bad
environments, it makes you more sensitive to your environment and your
experience and the kind of parenting you have ...
So
it's not a gene for vulnerability, it's a gene for sensitivity to your
environment and accordingly it can steer you on a lower darker path if
you have a poor environment or a brighter sunnier happy more sociable
path if you are luckier in your draw of parents and other things that
affect your life.'
'The big change is that it sort of
turns inside out the predominant genetic paradigm in psychiatry and much
of behavioural genetics over the last 20 years or so ...
This plasticity hypothesis replaces vulnerability with overall responsiveness and it turns inside out the disease model ...
it's not a matter of resilience and vulnerability but how responsive you are to your experience in the environment.'
'And
the idea there is to recognise that the patient, the person who is
struggling, is not simply vulnerable and doomed through genetics and a
history of bad environment to a life of depression or what not but the
same responsiveness to environment can be an asset to them because to
the extent that they can change their own environment they'll respond to
those positive changes more.'
from Radio National, All In The Mind
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/orchids-dandelions-genes/4420952
