musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The art of our necessities is strange


Do you ever miss things you thought you never would? Or details so obvious that when they are pointed out suddenly surface like children playing hide-and-seek? A bus that just left the corner where you usually catch it; the snack you often grab from the fridge when you’re feeling a little peckish but didn’t buy in town because you were afraid you were going to miss the bus…?

No, those are just little everyday misses scattered along the trail as you stumble through the day. They are merely annoyances and don’t materially affect your pride; they happen to everybody. And, because you were distracted by the wind rustling through the leaves and the creek burbling somewhere in the underbrush, no points would be taken off if you didn’t notice the quiet little brown bird watching you on a branch far above your head. It’s probably brown for a reason -so it won’t be noticed… Still, that’s what some people are good at, I suppose: details.

I don’t think I’d ever get a degree in hunting, though; I’m far too distractible. As I’ve struggled through the scrub of my own old-growth forest of years, it has become painfully obvious that I miss a lot. I don’t mean to, or anything; it’s just that I found that many details are not really necessary for understanding the Big Picture. Of course, simplifying something, stripping it to its underlying skeleton, sometimes makes it easier to understand what’s actually being portrayed -avoiding the forest to understand the trees, as it were… or is it the other way around? Details, details!

But, real Art -the type that sells paintings or photographs, anyway, seems to have value added if there is some easily missed ingredient that explains it. I discussed this in an essay I wrote 3 or 4 years ago about, well, flies.[i] I mean if they’re not snacking on your food, or banging on the window to be let out, then they are merely background noise, eh? That they should, or could, add a kind of unexpected meaning, a depth, to a picture had never really occurred to me, I’m afraid.

But details like that are sometimes the most important point of the Art, as was suggested in a compelling essay I read recently[ii] To understand the art, it is often useful to cultivate an eye for seeming trifles; indeed it is important to ask ‘What am I looking at, where should I look and what does it mean?’ Art often contains information and messages hidden to the untrained eye.

‘For example, in the 18th-century painting Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop by Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch, looking beyond the flowers painted in full bloom reveals a swarm of insects, which art historians regard in a wider context of spiritual meditations upon mortality.’ I couldn’t be sure I found them, so I don’t expect them to jump out at you in the copy and paste that begins this essay…

But my point is that details often are the point; it is why a cursory glance at a painting may not tell you much about it. The artist hoped you would examine it more closely to understand its meaning -understand why it was painted in the first place. The article called this process of examining something ‘slow looking’, although slow as I was, I think I missed the clever artistic thrust. Perhaps I was too slow: the trees and the forest stuff again.

But as a general rule, I get it: looking at things as carefully as one should at a painting ‘help[s] young learners develop skills for reasoning, communicating and coping with uncertainty… engagement with art and objects… help[s] students cultivate observation, interpretation and questioning.’

Interestingly, albeit rather too late for me as I sink slowly into retirement from my engagement in the medical field, this slow learning would help young professionals to respond to ambiguity. ‘Learning how to analyze art changes how people describe medical images, or photos of clinical interactions, and has been shown to improve their empathy scores.’ Analyzing X-rays, for example, involves taking a few minutes extra to absorb any hidden features, and often allows surprising details and connections to surface.

Actually, when you think about it -slowly, one would hope- the idea of taking your time to analyse something has tentacles that spread over a wide range of fields… even Retirement. Well, mine anyway.

At first, retirement is a foreign country: overwhelming and confusing; but the freedom is exciting, if not liberating. And yet as time passes, the novelty wears thin, and it is easy to let the newness fade. Days risk becoming just names on a calendar, and counting stomach-hours merely ways of passing the intervals between meals. Rather than ‘slow looking’ they can be ways of avoiding annoying details instead of seeing them as interesting adjectives which describe the nouns which form our days.

So, instead of meditating (read napping), to fill the time between meals, or going out for long, lonely walks in the rain through the nearby forest, I have begun to assign daily tasks for myself, the performance of which allows my mind to wander -slowly, of course- over topics I can use for my essays. I mean, vacuuming the house doesn’t occupy much cerebral space, I don’t think; it makes each room I enter more of an adventure than a chore however. And, so I’m not profligate with my time in any one area, I bought a new rechargeable vacuum cleaner that does not have a cord to limit my choices without having to re-plug it in each new room. Even more clever, I think, the battery only lasts 17 minutes (I timed it, of course) and this offers an excuse to allow any ideas that occurred to me in especially dusty areas to come to fruition as I slowly wait for it to recharge.

But, lest you think that my house is now over-vacuumed, I can assure you that there are multiple other tasks allowing for slow looking around the place. A house is a matryoshka doll and once slowly disassembled, allows for an equally slow re-assembly. The possibilities, like the dust behind furniture or under the bed, are endless.

So, I’ve learned a lot about slow looking: it’s never too late to start. In fact Age, and its ever-expanding posse of degenerating neurons, has a way of enabling it in spades.

[i] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2021/04/25/like-flies-to-wanton-boys/[i]

[ii] https://theconversation.com/for-both-artists-and-scientists-slow-looking-allows-surprising-connections-to-surface-252355?

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gozzter

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