I have written a lot about side effects of kindness, that when you give you also receive. Sometimes receiving can be in the form of acts of kindness done for you, or of seemingly random blessings showing up in your life, but they also come in the form of physiological effects.
I find myself writing this piece today because it was 5 years ago on this day that my dog, Oscar (main photo), passed away from bone cancer at the age of just over 2.
I broke my wee toe about three weeks ago. I have such a dangerous job – I was preparing to give a talk, walking around my office speaking aloud as I refined how I was going to describe one particular topic, and I hit my toe on the radiator.
Look at grass. We say it is green. But it’s not inherently green. It’s green for us because we have 3 photoreceptors in our eyes that are sensitive to specific wavelengths of light. If we had different photoreceptors, grass would appear different.
We often doubt ourselves and imagine that we have to change so that the world accepts us. We imagine we need to compromise on our dreams, on doing what makes our hearts sing, in order to succeed.
I remember waiting in line a coffee shop once, and a woman drove over my foot on a mobility scooter. She didn’t look back to apologise. At the time I did have a thought that a person would usually have said sorry, but I let it go because, well, you never know.
We live in a world where statistics tell us how things are and the chances of something happening. Many of us take statistics we hear as facts, assuming that they apply to each of us individually.
Research shows us that when a person receives a placebo that they believe is a drug, and subsequently experiences a placebo effect, it is because their brain has produced the substances necessary to give them what they expected the drug to do.