2024
Texas Hold 'Em
/I’m not a good card player. Our tatty free deck, inherited from my first longhaul flight in the days of Air Lanka, was missing a few crucial cards, which would always scupper solitaire, the only game I knew how to play. As card-playing was not a tradition in our family, the pleasures and probabilities of games like poker were lost on me and it’s something I still can’t figure out today.
Maybe it’s the glamorous casino association with James Bond but I like the idea of card games. I like the metaphor of them and feel they hold insights for everyday life. How do you play your hand? When will you take a risk? What is your tell? I wish I knew cards better such that I could play more intuitively and therefore, know myself better.
Which is why I feel I’ve been lacking the perfect analogy for this current phase of my life. Having qualified as a GP I can now pursue other avenues as I am out of the rigid structures of training. Different career possibilities have opened up before me and I can now work towards something different, if I want to.
But what? What do I work towards? And am I playing the hand I’ve been dealt in the best way? Should I stick or twist?
As a GP, I already have a defined career, which I could commit to and never have to change roles again. However, this option has become less appealing considering how challenging General Practice is at the moment. I hope that this is the nadir and things will improve over the next few years, but there is no guarantee of that. In fact, I have been holding on to this hope for the past decade and each time the bottom has dropped further.
But with a general election around the corner, maybe this really is the darkness before dawn and by changing trajectories I may miss out on a fulfilling career in a field I have worked so hard in. But if General Practice remains as it is, I will lose yet more years in demoralising circumstances and lose out on time in which I could have been pursuing something more suited to me.
At times like these, I wish I knew poker better. How do you make something of a seemingly bad hand? How do you turn a ‘high card’ into a full house? Raise or fold? Throughout my career I have had times where I’ve felt very much like I was not in control of my own fate, whereas now, confronted by numerous possibilities, I find it difficult to know how to steer my direction.
And what of trends? I thought that by choosing a career as a doctor all those years ago, I’d be in safe, sane territory with a ‘good job’ at the end of it. Little did I know that there would be years of erosion of services and salaries. But if I choose another exciting field now e.g. medtech, would I be pursuing another fata morgana? And what about my driving passion - writing? With that being superseded by AI generated content, am I honing my craft in a soon-to-be obsolete field?
The uncertainty is paralysing.
I have no idea what is the right way forward for me but nonetheless I know I must try it. The solid choices I have made thus far have not led to greater contentment, so I may as well try something new. It’s not too late and at least it’s exciting.
At times like these I find myself coming back to the lodestar poem, The Summer Day by Mary Oliver.
“Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”
What should I do with my ‘one precious life?’ I don’t suppose it matters, as long as I am trying for better.
Utopia for Pessimists
/And the dark days draw on. Despite the winter solstice, despite the new year, this month has felt inexorably dark. And rainy. Bad news and wet weather are a dismal combination, the perfect fodder for black dogs and demons. Spring seems a laughable idea in the midst of one of the wettest Februarys on record (1).
But it’s not just February. Heaviness has set in over the last few years starting (in my opinion) with the descent of austerity after the financial crisis of 2008. Austerity touched everyday life in a way the preceding wars fought on foreign soil did not. Public services, particularly relevant to my work, were pared away to leave the mere skeleton framework underneath. We have suffered ever since.
And then came a pandemic. And then came an economic downturn. And then came the largest attack on a European country since World War 2.
So, yes, darkness may well be the word of the current decade.
However, a conversation with an old friend recently reminded me that such conditions have often sparked a flowering of positive change. He used the example of the expansion of the welfare state in the strained years after the Second World War and then the youthful countercultural optimism of the 1960s, where norms were challenged, often for the better.
‘‘The only way to get out of this gloom is to imagine better. And there are people doing that.’’
However, what optimism now? For my peers, who are working full-time but still struggling to pay bills and student loans despite a yuppie’s salary, I feel exhaustion overrides any positivity. How can you think to change the system when all energy is spent keeping yourself afloat?
And what about the next generation? Those in their twenties with the world at their feet? Surely there is more hope there? But they too feel the squeeze of a rigged economic system (rigged against them I hasten to add - the average student loan in £45000 (2)) and the psychological toll of a life spent online on social media.
So, are we doomed? Destined to find the bottom dropping from one low to another? No. I don’t believe so. I choose not to believe so. In fact, I think that is the only way to get out of this gloom - to imagine better. And there are people doing that.
Kate Raworth’s ‘Donut Economics’ envisions another, more sensible way to guide our economic direction. The refusal to accept that as it has been, so shall it ever be, is key in breaking the learned helplessness of decades of entrenched policies. And Rutger Bregman’s call to think of positive futures in his book ‘Utopia for Realists’ (from which I’ve borrowed the title of this piece), is essential if we want to imagine something better in the longrun. How do you build the future you want to see, if you don’t have a vision of it first?
I am constantly impressed by how many initiatives there are out there, envisioning a better future and going after it. From organisations like ‘Youth for Change’ advocating for Gender Equality, to my son’s nursery holding a Breast Cancer Awareness bake sale, there is so much good being actively done in the world, it’s there once you start to look for it.
So whilst the overall mood of the age may seem dark, brightening so many small corners, is the good of the world. I pray this is the turning point, the nadir before the hockey stick swings back on the upward track, but even if that’s not the case, I know there is still hope as long as there is a vision for the future. As long as we believe we can do better, we will.
Brighter days to come… margate in a rare break from the rain
The Waiting Game
/January, for me, is the month of waiting. Despite its resolutions and virgin diaries, too much of the old year carries into the new for it to really feel different. The weather is still hostile and the daylight hours too short to feel like winter has turned a corner. In fact, with most of the coldest months still to come (with their associated eye-watering energy bills), January can feel like the first stop in a descent into further darkness.
I’ve now stopped bullying myself into relentless optimism at the thought of a new year. In the past, my ‘fake it til you make it’ attitude has ground against the heaviness of this first month and I have found the incongruence difficult to deal with. My body urges me to shun the dark, to stay in bed where it is warm and the reading lamp glows golden, but my mind chastises me for not going out for a run in the 4C cold.
“Our lives aren’t always in spring and I find the imposition of the seasons a useful reminder of that.”
This year, I scrapped the self-flagellation. So what if the resolution to exercise three times a week is broken straight away? There’s always the following week to try again.
It’s one thing to be forgiving to oneself, but society seems less understanding. Instead of a gentle return, post-Christmas, it feels as though there is an assumption that people are rested and revitalised after their ‘holidays.’ Forgetting, that for many, Christmas is a dismal time of anti-climax, familial tensions and heightened SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). The return to work can be jarring for those who don’t feel ready to go, go, go as their companies start the first quarter.
So, how do you manage it? How do you ease back in, when it feels like you’re expected to dive head-first? Insight is probably the first step. Acknowledging that there is a difference between what is felt and what is expected will at least identify that there is an issue. Adjustments can then be made accordingly. For me, that means early bedtimes, nourishing meals and staying away from my phone. Making sure that all other variables are optimised sometimes compensates for the midwinter lethargy.
But sometimes, there’s nothing for it but to wait it out. This may be difficult to accept when so much of our lives now are geared towards instant gratification. Having to wait for warmer weather and the associated uptick in mood? But I want to feel better now! And of course, the impatient child in me will hate the next thing I’m about to write but yes, there is beauty and enjoyment to be found in every season. Just like convenience, gratitude journalling has become the vogue, so why not use that to find the joy in interminable rain and wet socks?
I’m being facetious. January is a hard, trying month and I speak that as a January enthusiast (it is, after all, my birth month). I’ve learned to live with its slow, heavy days by adapting my behaviour to suit it, rather than pretending I can be as lively and spirited in the bleak midwinter as I am in the summer months. Our lives aren’t always in spring and I find the imposition of the seasons a useful reminder of that.
And yet even as I write this, a mild frost thawing off the soil outside, I see precious green spears pointing up through amidst the ice. They promise daffodils and crocuses and tulips in mere weeks. It may take a little time, but even in the heaviest winter, time ticks on and soon it will be light again.