Life Via a Line

Throughout my life there has been times when I've felt lonely.  It hasn't always happened when I have been alone, I’ve been surrounded by people yet have felt no real connection to them.   I have been through periods in my life when I’ve been successful and periods where my life has fallen to pieces and loneliness has been a part of both. I feel uneasy admitting I have felt lonely because it's such a taboo, to admit being lonely makes me feel a failure on some scale.  Am I fault because I have an inability to make a connection with people?  I am socially awkward so maybe it is my fault? Loneliness is apparently becoming an epidemic.  It's become an issue that has serious repercussions on health and well-being. Humans aren’t used to being alone, we have survived in groups, groups kept us alive.  Today, society has changed and we no longer all live in communities, so we do not rely on our neighbours, we live apart and function as independent separated be...

"Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia". Euthanasia has been at the centre of heated debates for many years now and is surrounded by religious, ethical and practical considerations. The term is derived from the Greek word euthanatos which means easy death.  In today's society anyone who is able to undergo or wishes to undertake euthanasia usually has an incurable condition.  In many cases it is carried out at the patients request but sometimes the patient may be too ill and the decision is made by relatives, medical staff or in the majority of cases, the courts.   Recently, in the UK press, and by press I mean not the red tops, we have started to see cases where some people want the right to end their life.   Eut...

The NHS is failing, it's on its knees and I am sat here wondering is the general public so deluded that they believe that a world class health service can continue to be run on a shoestring? We have loved ones dying on trollies in corridors so some form of taxation, insurance or something needs to be created before the one and a half million NHS staff loose their last ounce of faith in an institution that they passionately believe in.   On 16 July 2015, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary was giving a speech at a health think tank known as the King’s Fund, that morning Mr Hunt caused massive damage, I personally believe that it is irrepairable and he infuriated doctors up and down the UK. Mr Hunt claimed that patients up and down the country were dying unnecessarily because consultants refused to work weekends, therefore causing an excess of deaths at the weekend. If I remember correctly, in his speech, Mr Hunt claimed there were six thousand avoidable fatalities a yea...

My subconscious mind, I believe is like a computer’s hard drive. It saves whatever information I feed it, without any bias. It does not discriminate between useful information and trash information and believe me, I have a lot of trash in my head. I have learnt that my subconscious mind learns through repetition, over my life to-date it has been fed the same information multiple times, so it continually overwrites until the information gets etched in.  When I was small and I was learning to ride a bike, at first, like everyone I found it incredibly hard to balance but I continually practised with my parents and I started to be able to maintain balance for longer periods of time.  Finally, I could just get on and cycle off.  Repetition meant that my subconscious mind picked up what it took for me to maintain balance.  I have learnt over the years that some information is hard to erase because once my subconscious mind learns something it continually falls back on t...

Like most people I have spent an obscene amount on new cars, the sparkle and smell of a shiny new car used to draw me in like a magnet.  Along with cars, I had fallen into a rabbit hole called material possessions.   Wardrobes, cabinets, cupboards stuffed full with golf gear, electrical items, clothes, gadgets and all manner of material possessions.   Cupboards bulging and I was sinking so spent 1hr plus on the running machine every evening to make myself feel better back in 2006.   In 2012 we started to get rid of the stuff and have recently had our last clear out of my golf stuff as now I have other, more important things to look after than possessions that mean absolutely nothing.  I try to believe that I am wiser, older and I have started to listen to my inner voice that I ignored so long ago. I’m catching up on what I should have been doing, reading, spending time with my family and I have started writing because I am now ...

In life there is always something we feel we cannot and should not do for fear of humiliation, regret, having to explain ourselves to others, and sometimes to ourselves. When you think about it, the word should is an instrument of regret. Decisions that we make everyday may not lead to the results that we want in life, but does it really serve to tag on a conditional disclaimer to everything we have said or done in the past? It does if you want, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, to “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.  In the real, modern world without prohibition, flappers, speakeasies, jazz, and glam, it doesn't serve you to caveat your life with  should  if you want to experience life in the moment, at its fullest. It’s not easy to remove the word should, this seemingly harmless word from vocabulary because we’re programmed to blame ourselves when things don’t go according to plan or as we hoped they would as if there...

I have always believed that surrendering equates to failure. Earlier this year, I felt completely defeated by life. I was down for the count.  I knew while being down for the count, that I couldn't get back up on my feet until I surrendered. Every part of my life flooded before me, my life felt perfect until this point.  My golf, my career to date, my wife, my family all of it on a conveyor belt flooding my mind.   7 years prior to having my line fitted while I was out playing golf, Life had thrown me a massive curveball, more like a shower of curveballs that ripped my life up into a billion pieces.  To everyone around me, I appeared to be living the dream.  Lady Captain off of +2 while holding down a job in the NHS.  My life was never the same again.   After a few years of this, my life was unravelling before my eyes and after knowing nothing but success, I started to encounter nothing but failure.  Exhaustion, pain and my ...