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Another year begins. How are you going to make it better than all the others you have lived up until now?

It is always a salutary reminder that tonight, when the sun goes down on this day, that’s it, you will never have that day back to live again…it’s gone…for good! Taking in the full force of this fact, can sometimes motivate us to gird up our loins, (how do you do that?) step up and make each day that we are given really count in the story of our life.

So to start 2012 on a positive note, while you are still in the mood for new years resolutions what better way than to consider taking some action to increase our own and others happiness this year? As Mark Williamson, director for Action for Happiness, a product of the Young Foundation says;

“For far too long our main focus in measuring the progress of nations has been economic growth, in the form of increasing gross domestic product (GDP). Although very useful as a measure of economic output, GDP fails to take into account many of the things that matter most to us. Moreover, our obsession with growing GDP has increasingly put people’s lives in the service of the economy, rather than the other way around. Economic growth is really just the means to an end, not the end in itself; it matters only insofar as it contributes to social progress and well being. Yet the tragedy is that, despite decades of growth and material progress, surveys consistently show that average levels of life satisfaction in the UK are no higher now than they were sixty years ago. 

Caring about others is fundamental to our happiness. Helping other people is not only good for them and a great thing to do, it also makes us happier and healthier too. Giving also creates stronger connections between people and helps to build a happier society for everyone. And it’s not all about money – we can also give our time, ideas and energy”.

So if you want to feel good, do good!

I liked Action for Happiness’s latest research which  has found 10 Keys to Happier Living that consistently tend to make people’s lives happier and more fulfilling. Together they spell “GREAT DREAM”.

GIVING Do things for others

Caring about others is fundamental to our happiness. Helping other people is not only good for them and a great thing to do, it also makes us happier and healthier too. Giving also creates stronger connections between people and helps to build a happier society for everyone. And it’s not all about money – we can also give our time, ideas and energy.

So if you want to feel good, do good!

Q: What do you do to help others?

RELATING Connect with people

Relationships are the most important overall contributor to happiness. People with strong and broad social relationships are happier, healthier and live longer. Close relationships with family and friends provide love, meaning, support and increase our feelings of self worth. Broader networks bring a sense of belonging. So taking action to strengthen our relationships and create new connections is essential for happiness.

Q: Who matters most to you?

EXERCISING Take care of your body

Our body and our mind are connected. Being active makes us happier as well as being good for our physical health. It instantly improves our mood and can even lift us out of a depression. We don’t all need to run marathons – there are simple things we can all do to be more active each day. We can also boost our well-being by unplugging from technology, getting outside and making sure we get enough sleep!

Q: How do you stay active and healthy?

APPRECIATING Notice the world around

Ever felt there must be more to life? Well good news, there is! And it’s right here in front of us. We just need to stop and take notice. Learning to be more mindful and aware can do wonders for our well-being in all areas of life – like our walk to work, the way we eat or our relationships. It helps us get in tune with our feelings and stops us dwelling on the past or worrying about the future – so we get more out of the day-to-day.

Q: When do you stop and take notice?

TRYING OUT Keep learning new things

Learning affects our well-being in lots of positive ways. It exposes us to new ideas and helps us stay curious and engaged. It also gives us a sense of accomplishment and helps boost our self-confidence and resilience. There are many ways to learn new things – not just through formal qualifications. We can share a skill with friends, join a club, learn to sing, play a new sport and so much more.

Q: What new things have you tried recently?

DIRECTION Have goals to look forward to

Feeling good about the future is important for our happiness. We all need goals to motivate us and these need to be challenging enough to excite us, but also achievable. If we try to attempt the impossible this brings unnecessary stress. Choosing ambitious but realistic goals gives our lives direction and brings a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when we achieve them.

Q: What are your most important goals?

RESILIENCE Find ways to bounce back

All of us have times of stress, loss, failure or trauma in our lives. But how we respond to these has a big impact on our well-being. We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose our own attitude to what happens. In practice it’s not always easy, but one of the most exciting findings from recent research is that resilience, like many other life skills, can be learned.

Q: How do you bounce back in tough times?

EMOTION Take a positive approach

Positive emotions – like joy, gratitude, contentment, inspiration, and pride – are not just great at the time. Recent research shows that regularly experiencing them creates an ‘upward spiral’, helping to build our resources. So although we need to be realistic about life’s ups and downs, it helps to focus on the good aspects of any situation – the glass half full rather than the glass half empty.

Q: What are you feeling good about?

ACCEPTANCE Be comfortable with who you are

No-one’s perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Dwelling on our flaws – what we’re not rather than what we’ve got – makes it much harder to be happy. Learning to accept ourselves, warts and all, and being kinder to ourselves when things go wrong, increases our enjoyment of life, our resilience and our well-being. It also helps us accept others as they are.

Q: What is the real you like?

MEANING Be part of something bigger

People who have meaning and purpose in their lives are happier, feel more in control and get more out of what they do. They also experience less stress, anxiety and depression. But where do we find ‘meaning and purpose’? It might be our religious faith, being a parent or doing a job that makes a difference. The answers vary for each of us but they all involve being connected to something bigger than ourselves.

Q: What gives your life meaning?

Join the Movement www.actionforhappiness.org

New Years resolutions: Avoiding Cancer

Of course it is not always possible to avoid most illnesses entirely. However, we can do a lot more than many think, at least to reduce our risks, of many of the major killers in our culture today. Often one of the most feared and distressing diseases is cancer. For many this miserable condition seems just to appear out of the blue and we have absolutely no control over the roll of the dice. And for some this is probably the case. However, the latest researched reported by the BBC (read article here) showed that nearly half of cancers diagnosed in the UK each year – over 130,000 in total – are caused by avoidable life choices including smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things, a review reveals.

Tobacco is the biggest culprit, causing 23% of cases in men and 15.6% in women, says the Cancer Research UK report. Next comes a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in men’s diets, while for women it is being overweight.The report is published in the British Journal of Cancer. Its authors claim it is the most comprehensive analysis to date on the subject.

Lead author Prof Max Parkin said: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get it.

“Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that around 40% of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change.”

This looks all very interesting, however the respected Alliance for Natural Health (Read the report ) has looked beneath the surface and sees this report in a different and much more critical light. They expose a number of potential deficits to the report that show not all may be as it seems. As they say;

“We are concerned that the effect of this study will be to further perpetuate the cancer racket, where people continue to feed industry by buying into health-destroying behaviour, before finally developing cancer and turning to industry’s cancer wing to be patched up or not. It does absolutely nothing to cause any kind of a shift in the cancer industry juggernaut, a sector of medicine that has been pushed wildly off course by the profit motive. So why not check out the major life style causes of cancer and decide to do something in 2012 to change your risks in the areas that you CAN  control?”

So as usual, not much in the public domain is as it seems!

Book of the Month

Life Blood: How to Change the World, One Dead Mosquito at a Time By Alex Perry (Find out more here)

With all the gloom and doom around the mess we have landed ourselves in economically and environmentally sometimes it is good to refocus, stand back and see the world from another angle. Half a billion people are still infected every year with Malaria. Millions of children are dying for want of a net to sleep under. But here is a good news story to set against the bleakness, things are changing. And Alex Perry has charted a fascinating part of that multi billion dollar effort to change all this, and it looks as if it is starting to work!

Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief for Time magazine, Here he has written a short, fast-paced, enthralling and informative account of the latest enormous effort that have been going on in recent years to rid  the world of this, one of the greatest scourges of mankind that has haunted us since before medicine began.

Set against our own non-communicable disease profile of own goals, see above,  this account of  massive efforts through the UN, NGO’s  and the new billionaire philanthropists  casts  a timely light, not only on how Aid is delivered but also on the whole structure of Aid verses self interest, and what we can learn from the introduction of new ways of thinking into the delivery of assistance to our fellow man. As Tim Butcher, author of Blood River, says on the cover;

“Anyone interested in how the world can realistically be made a better place should read this fantastic book”.

Of course it is not always possible to avoid most illnesses entirely. However, we can do a lot more than many think, at least to reduce our risks, of many of the major killers in our culture today. Often one of the most feared and distressing diseases is cancer. For many this miserable condition seems just to appear out of the blue and we have absolutely no control over the roll of the dice. And for some this is probably the case. However, , the latest researched reported by the BBC ( read article here) showed that nearly half of cancers diagnosed in the UK each year – over 130,000 in total – are caused by avoidable life choices including smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things, a review reveals.

Tobacco is the biggest culprit, causing 23% of cases in men and 15.6% in women, says the Cancer Research UK report. Next comes a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in men’s diets, while for women it is being overweight.The report is published in theBritish Journal of Cancer. Its authors claim it is the most comprehensive analysis to date on the subject.

Lead author Prof Max Parkin said: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get it.

“Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that around 40% of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change.”

This looks all very interesting, however the respected Alliance for Natural Health (Read the  report ) has looked beneath the surface and sees this report in a different and much more critical light. They expose a number of potential deficits to the report that show not all may be as it seems. As they say;

“We are concerned that the effect of this study will be to further perpetuate the cancer racket, where people continue to feed industry by buying into health-destroying behaviour, before finally developing cancer and turning to industry’s cancer wing to be patched up or not. It does absolutely nothing to cause any kind of a shift in the cancer industry juggernaut, a sector of medicine that has been pushed wildly off course by the profit motive. So why not check out the major life style causes of cancer and decide to do something in 2012 to change your risks in the areas that you CAN  control?”

So as usual, not much in the public domain is as it seems!

It is always a salutary reminder that tonight, when the sun goes down on this day, that’s it, you will never have that day back to live again…its gone…for good!Taking in the full force of this fact, can sometimes motivate us to gird up our loins, (how do you do that?) step up and make each day that we are given really count in the story of our life.

So to start 2012 on a positive note, while you are still in the mood for new years resolutions what better way than to consider taking some action to increase our own and others happiness this year. As Mark Williamson, director for Action for Happiness, a product of the Young Foundation says;

“For far too long our main focus in measuring the progress of nations has been economic growth, in the form of increasing gross domestic product (GDP). Although very useful as a measure of economic output, GDP fails to take into account many of the things that matter most to us. Moreover, our obsession with growing GDP has increasingly put people’s lives in the service of the economy, rather than the other way around. Economic growth is really just the means to an end, not the end in itself; it matters only insofar as it contributes to social progress and well being. Yet the tragedy is that, despite decades of growth and material progress, surveys consistently show that average levels of life satisfaction in the UK are no higher now than they were sixty years ago. 

Caring about others is fundamental to our happiness. Helping other people is not only good for them and a great thing to do, it also makes us happier and healthier too. Giving also creates stronger connections between people and helps to build a happier society for everyone. And it’s not all about money – we can also give our time, ideas and energy”.

So if you want to feel good, do good!

I liked Action for Happiness’s latest research which  has found 10 Keys to Happier Living that consistently tend to make people’s lives happier and more fulfilling. Together they spell “GREAT DREAM”.

So here are their ten Keys, check them out and then have a look around at their stimulating website Action for Happiness.

GIVING Do things for others

Caring about others is fundamental to our happiness. Helping other people is not only good for them and a great thing to do, it also makes us happier and healthier too. Giving also creates stronger connections between people and helps to build a happier society for everyone. And it’s not all about money – we can also give our time, ideas and energy.

So if you want to feel good, do good!

Q: What do you do to help others?

RELATING Connect with people

Relationships are the most important overall contributor to happiness. People with strong and broad social relationships are happier, healthier and live longer. Close relationships with family and friends provide love, meaning, support and increase our feelings of self worth. Broader networks bring a sense of belonging. So taking action to strengthen our relationships and create new connections is essential for happiness.

Q: Who matters most to you?

EXERCISING Take care of your body

Our body and our mind are connected. Being active makes us happier as well as being good for our physical health. It instantly improves our mood and can even lift us out of a depression. We don’t all need to run marathons – there are simple things we can all do to be more active each day. We can also boost our well-being by unplugging from technology, getting outside and making sure we get enough sleep!

Q: How do you stay active and healthy?

APPRECIATING Notice the world around

Ever felt there must be more to life? Well good news, there is! And it’s right here in front of us. We just need to stop and take notice. Learning to be more mindful and aware can do wonders for our well-being in all areas of life – like our walk to work, the way we eat or our relationships. It helps us get in tune with our feelings and stops us dwelling on the past or worrying about the future – so we get more out of the day-to-day.

Q: When do you stop and take notice?

TRYING OUT Keep learning new things

Learning affects our well-being in lots of positive ways. It exposes us to new ideas and helps us stay curious and engaged. It also gives us a sense of accomplishment and helps boost our self-confidence and resilience. There are many ways to learn new things – not just through formal qualifications. We can share a skill with friends, join a club, learn to sing, play a new sport and so much more.

Q: What new things have you tried recently?

DIRECTION Have goals to look forward to

Feeling good about the future is important for our happiness. We all need goals to motivate us and these need to be challenging enough to excite us, but also achievable. If we try to attempt the impossible this brings unnecessary stress. Choosing ambitious but realistic goals gives our lives direction and brings a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when we achieve them.

Q: What are your most important goals?

RESILIENCE Find ways to bounce back

All of us have times of stress, loss, failure or trauma in our lives. But how we respond to these has a big impact on our well-being. We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose our own attitude to what happens. In practice it’s not always easy, but one of the most exciting findings from recent research is that resilience, like many other life skills, can be learned.

Q: How do you bounce back in tough times?

EMOTION Take a positive approach

Positive emotions – like joy, gratitude, contentment, inspiration, and pride – are not just great at the time. Recent research shows that regularly experiencing them creates an ‘upward spiral’, helping to build our resources. So although we need to be realistic about life’s ups and downs, it helps to focus on the good aspects of any situation – the glass half full rather than the glass half empty.

Q: What are you feeling good about?

ACCEPTANCE Be comfortable with who you are

No-one’s perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Dwelling on our flaws – what we’re not rather than what we’ve got – makes it much harder to be happy. Learning to accept ourselves, warts and all, and being kinder to ourselves when things go wrong, increases our enjoyment of life, our resilience and our well-being. It also helps us accept others as they are.

Q: What is the real you like?

MEANING Be part of something bigger

People who have meaning and purpose in their lives are happier, feel more in control and get more out of what they do. They also experience less stress, anxiety and depression. But where do we find ‘meaning and purpose’? It might be our religious faith, being a parent or doing a job that makes a difference. The answers vary for each of us but they all involve being connected to something bigger than ourselves.

Q: What gives your life meaning?

Join the movement

www.actionforhappiness.org

With all the gloom and doom around the mess we have landed ourselves in economically and environmentally sometimes it is good to refocus, stand back and see the world from another angle. Half a billion people are still infected every year with Malaria. Millions of children are dying for want of a net to sleep under. But here is a good news story to set against the bleakness, things are changing. And Alex Perry has charted a fascinating part of that multi billion dollar effort to change all this, and it looks as if it is starting to work!

Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief for Time magazine, Here he has written a short, pacy, enthralling and informative account of the latest enormous effort that have been going on in recent years to rid  the world of this, one of the greatest scourges of mankind that has haunted us since before medicine began.

Set against our own non-communicable disease profile of own goals, see above,  this account of  massive efforts through the UN, NGO’s  and the new billionaire philanthropists  casts  a timely light, not only on how Aid is delivered but also on the whole structure of Aid verses self interest, and what we can learn from the introduction of new ways of thinking into the delivery of assistance to our fellow man. As Tim Butcher, author of Blood River, says on the cover;

“Anyone interested in how the world can realistically be made a better place should read this fantastic book”.

Optimism in Britain

As all around us the affairs of the world struggle, as usual, with the imponderables of debt, currency failure, climate change and the failure of western democracies to function effectively, elsewhere in the world, the new middle classes of the Arab world and many other growing economies like the BRIC countries,  the forces of change are bubbling to the surface. It can all get quite depressing from this end, if we are not careful.However it is encouraging to see from a recent survey that we are a nation of optimistic thinkers…. continue. Contrary to our reputation for moaning, four in five Brits are optimists new research found that Britons look on the brighter side of life when faced with the prediction of depressing events happening to them in the future; read the results here.
At Helix House we too are optimistic and as we move rapidly into the darkest time of the year, when light levels drop and we withdraw into the warmth of our hearths, there are great compensations in enjoying these winter months of cosy inside life and getting together with others to renew our friendships. Which brings us onto the subject of kindness.

Random Acts of Kindness

The idea behind the World Kindness Movement (read more here)  crystallised at a conference in Tokyo in 1997 when the Small Kindness Movement of Japan brought together like-minded kindness movements from around the world. The WKM was officially launched in Singapore on 18 November 2000 at the 3rd WKM Conference. The mission of the WKM is to inspire individuals towards greater kindness and to connect nations to create a kinder world.  We all respond to kindness and recognise it when it comes our way. However, as a movement, it may all sound too sweet and nice for us hardbitten, tough types, who have seen what the world can dish out and don’t want to be another sucker.

But cynicism, like so many negative emotions, seems like an armour protecting us from hurt and being the fall-guy, and it is true we need to keep our wits about us, but it is really an invisible straight jacket that stops us from opening our heart and experiencing  many of the joys that life has to offer.

Several national  kindness movements seem to have sprung up and there is a UK section of this outfit. On the face of it it can look both sensible and too gooey by half, however, while I know nothing much about it, like the movements to put a scientific basis to positive psychology I have mentioned before,  ( read more about it here) there seems to be a legitimate arm of all these moves towards refocusing us away from what we can possess towards what we actually experience.  By helping us to see again how we can refocus ourselves towards greater happiness, which ultimately comes from within, and is hugely influenced by how we interact with and give to others, then it is, like all those encouraging books that espoused Random Acts of Kindness that were popular in the 1990’s, another reminder that giving is  invariable much more fun than receiving.

For more information on Kindness Day UK click here.

And so another year draws to a close soon. As the economic world shudders to a grinding halt and attempts desperately to redirect itself after decades of unwise excess, and we all have to tighten our belts and face an uncertain future, we can slow down for a few days over Christmas and take a moment to contemplate the whole nature of kindness, and focus on the joy of giving rather than receiving, the happiness that comes from relationships if they can be deep, honest and warm.

Book of the Month

The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People will take power and change politics in the 21st Century. By: Carne Ross

Simon Shuster, 2011.

Satirists at the Onion have commented that 2011 has already used up the next decades entire supply of news, as elsewhere (Click here for the  Global protest article from The Guardian). 2011 is being compared with 1848, 1968 and 1989. All years with the common theme of the dissolution of centralised power and the demand for ‘autonomy’ and person freedom. Across the world change is clearly in the air, and, even in our own, sedate, country, change, usually not for the better, is apparent. How to negotiated such seismic shifts? Carne Ross, has done his share of free falls from high positions and has come up with a book to guide us.

Have you ever written to the government and received back one of those clever, yet annoying letters, written for the minister by some smart young civil servant, that leave you scratching your head, wondering quite what it has said and what to do now that your outrage seems to have been suffocated by obfuscating but eloquent words, seemingly, with the express purpose of, leaving everything  just as it is?

Well, if you were at the UN, in the years leading up to the Iraq war and questioned the British sanction policy against Iraq that caused an extra 500,000 child deaths, and wondered about the shenanigans that lead to the Iraq war, you might well have become a little disillusioned.   Carne Ross was the British Diplomat in charge of pushing forward all those bogus WMD stories at the UN.

Seeing him on Newsnight, some time ago, and hearing his criticisms of the Foreign Office that he used to work for, inspired me to read this, his recently published, book.

Ross is a former senior British Diplomat. Having resigned from the British Foreign service, Ross now runs the world’s first independent diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat.Having been at the epi-center of the Establishment around the over heated time of the lead up to the war in Iraq, and found it wanting, Ross is an effective guide to the ways in which, increasingly, conventional politics is failing us, at both the level of the state, as well as the level of the more impenetrable supranational organizations like the UN or EU.

Ross does not believe in neat narratives but rather sees the world increasingly fragmenting, leading to a decline of state power and the  rise of non state actors, whether they are corporations, Mafia families, or more benign NGO’s.

Ross’s call to arms  is his view that something must be done and, if not government, who is left to do it? For Ross it is us, hence the title of his latest book. As he says it is no longer good enough to say international relations are not our business. We are all intimately connected now. Sadly, I fear that only about 10% of us, wonks have much interest in such subjects.

There is nothing like the disillusionment of the initiate especially If you have been the voice of the state, crafting those well modulated,  duplicitous words that shape policy.  Too often these fine pleadings rides roughshod over the lives of the ‘little people’, you and I,  who the state makes decisions about, often from thousands of miles away, quite possibly without ever actually going to the places concerned. Ross is aware of the tendencies of all foreign services to see themselves as the voice and even brain of the state and speak for it deciding the fate of not only their own nationals but those of others that their state can influence, often with minimal real consultation.

The UN charter was written in 1945 designed to stop interstate conflict. Now 80% of the issues before the UN are conflicts within states not between states. Independent Diplomat now carefully filters these non state actors  who hold high standards of  democratic  accountability and human rights and helps them gain a voice. Most of these groups never otherwise get a chance to sit down and explain their hopes and needs with the UN security council. This is what Ross and his teams attempt to do. As he says politics has changed fundamentally in recent decades. We need to focus not on process but on output!

This book is a noble effort, I am note sure it fully works, but it needs to be said and Ross is a convincing voice, in many ways, to lead us beyond the  limitations of so many old models that, as each day passes, are clearly failing us.

In some ways I found the most engrossing parts, his own story Carne Ross: An independent diplomat of his journey into, through and eventually out of the elite circle of the foreign office. His attempt to formulate a cosmopolitan, modern  peaceful anarchist model of citizen action and agency, while encouraging, perhaps needs more development to be widely embraced.

However next time you read one of those well constructed letters from a civil servant, you can wonder if this nameless writer is not also wondering if he/she might not gain greater satisfaction and deep meaning in her/his life by taking action, rather than cleverly obstructing it for ‘Sir Humphrey.’

As all around us the affairs of the world struggle, as usual, with the imponderables of debt, currency failure, climate change and the failure of western democracies to function effectively, elsewhere in the world, the new middle classes of the Arab world and many other growing economies like the BRIC countries,  the forces of change are bubbling to the surface. It can all get quite depressing from this end, if we are not careful.However it is encouraging to see from a recent survey that we are a nation of optimistic thinkers…. continue. Contrary to our reputation for moaning, four in five Brits are optimists new research found that Britons look on the brighter side of life when faced with the prediction of depressing events happening to them in the future; read the results here.
At Helix House we too are optimistic and as we move rapidly into the darkest time of the year, when light levels drop and we withdraw into the warmth of our hearths, there are great compensations in enjoying these winter months of cosy inside life and getting together with others to renew our friendships. Which brings us onto the subject of kindness.

The idea behind the World Kindness Movement (read more here)  crystallised at a conference in Tokyo in 1997 when the Small Kindness Movement of Japan brought together like-minded kindness movements from around the world. The WKM was officially launched in Singapore on 18 November 2000 at the 3rd WKM Conference. The mission of the WKM is to inspire individuals towards greater kindness and to connect nations to create a kinder world.  We all respond to kindness and recognise it when it comes our way. However, as a movement, it may all sound too sweet and nice for us hardbitten, tough types, who have seen what the world can dish out and don’t want to be another sucker.

But cynicism, like so many negative emotions, seems like an armour protecting us from hurt and being the fall-guy, and it is true we need to keep our wits about us, but it is really an invisible straight jacket that stops us from opening our heart and experiencing  many of the joys that life has to offer.

Several national  kindness movements seem to have sprung up and there is a UK section of this outfit. On the face of it it can look both sensible and too gooey by half, however, while I know nothing much about it, like the movements to put a scientific basis to positive psychology I have mentioned before,  ( read more about it here) there seems to be a legitimate arm of all these moves towards refocusing us away from what we can possess towards what we actually experience.  By helping us to see again how we can refocus ourselves towards greater happiness, which ultimately comes from within, and is hugely influenced by how we interact with and give to others, then it is, like all those encouraging books that espoused Random Acts of Kindness that were popular in the 1990’s, another reminder that giving is  invariable much more fun than receiving.

For more information on Kindness Day UK click here.

And so another year draws to a close soon. As the economic world shudders to a grinding halt and attempts desperately to redirect itself after decades of unwise excess, and we all have to tighten our belts and face an uncertain future, we can slow down for a few days over Christmas and take a moment to contemplate the whole nature of kindness, and focus on the joy of giving rather than receiving, the happiness that comes from relationships if they can be deep, honest and warm.

The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People will take power and change politics in the 21st Century. By: Carne Ross

Simon Shuster, 2011.

Satirists at the Onion have commented that 2011 has already used up the next decades entire supply of news, as elsewhere (Click here for the  Global protest article from The Guardian). 2011 is being compared with 1848, 1968 and 1989. All years with the common theme of the dissolution of centralised power and the demand for ‘autonomy’ and person freedom. Across the world change is clearly in the air, and, even in our own, sedate, country, change, usually not for the better, is apparent. How to negotiated such seismic shifts? Carne Ross, has done his share of free falls from high positions and has come up with a book to guide us.

Have you ever written to the government and received back one of those clever, yet annoying letters, written for the minister by some smart young civil servant, that leave you scratching your head, wondering quite what it has said and what to do now that your outrage seems to have been suffocated by obfuscating but eloquent words, seemingly, with the express purpose of, leaving everything  just as it is?

Well, if you were at the UN, in the years leading up to the Iraq war and questioned the British sanction policy against Iraq that caused an extra 500,000 child deaths, and wondered about the shenanigans that lead to the Iraq war, you might well have become a little disillusioned.   Carne Ross was the British Diplomat in charge of pushing forward all those bogus WMD stories at the UN.

Seeing him on Newsnight, some time ago, and hearing his criticisms of the Foreign Office that he used to work for, inspired me to read this, his recently published, book.

Ross is a former senior British Diplomat. Having resigned from the British Foreign service, Ross now runs the world’s first independent diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat.Having been at the epi-center of the Establishment around the over heated time of the lead up to the war in Iraq, and found it wanting, Ross is an effective guide to the ways in which, increasingly, conventional politics is failing us, at both the level of the state, as well as the level of the more impenetrable supranational organizations like the UN or EU.

Ross does not believe in neat narratives but rather sees the world increasingly fragmenting, leading to a decline of state power and the  rise of non state actors, whether they are corporations, Mafia families, or more benign NGO’s.

Ross’s call to arms  is his view that something must be done and, if not government, who is left to do it? For Ross it is us, hence the title of his latest book. As he says it is no longer good enough to say international relations are not our business. We are all intimately connected now. Sadly, I fear that only about 10% of us, wonks have much interest in such subjects.

There is nothing like the disillusionment of the initiate especially If you have been the voice of the state, crafting those well modulated,  duplicitous words that shape policy.  Too often these fine pleadings rides roughshod over the lives of the ‘little people’, you and I,  who the state makes decisions about, often from thousands of miles away, quite possibly without ever actually going to the places concerned. Ross is aware of the tendencies of all foreign services to see themselves as the voice and even brain of the state and speak for it deciding the fate of not only their own nationals but those of others that their state can influence, often with minimal real consultation.

The UN charter was written in 1945 designed to stop interstate conflict. Now 80% of the issues before the UN are conflicts within states not between states. Independent Diplomat now carefully filters these non state actors  who hold high standards of  democratic  accountability and human rights and helps them gain a voice. Most of these groups never otherwise get a chance to sit down and explain their hopes and needs with the UN security council. This is what Ross and his teams attempt to do. As he says politics has changed fundamentally in recent decades. We need to focus not on process but on output!

This book is a noble effort, I am note sure it fully works, but it needs to be said and Ross is a convincing voice, in many ways, to lead us beyond the  limitations of so many old models that, as each day passes, are clearly failing us.

In some ways I found the most engrossing parts, his own story Carne Ross: An independent diplomat of his journey into, through and eventually out of the elite circle of the foreign office. His attempt to formulate a cosmopolitan, modern  peaceful anarchist model of citizen action and agency, while encouraging, perhaps needs more development to be widely embraced.

However next time you read one of those well constructed letters from a civil servant, you can wonder if this nameless writer is not also wondering if he/she might not gain greater satisfaction and deep meaning in her/his life by taking action, rather than cleverly obstructing it for ‘Sir Humphrey.’

This month I want to write a few words about Arthritis. There are around 9 million people in the UK suffering from some form of the 200 different kinds of Arthritis. Some of these are quite rare, while some, like Rheumatoid Arthritis, R.A.  and Gout are, sadly all too common. R.A. is what is know as an auto-immune disease, where the body starts to develop an attack on our own joints, leading to degeneration of the joints, systemically. Whereas Gout is a disorder where the body cannot eliminate the natural substance, uric acid, effectively and any excess forms needle-like crystals in the joints, leading to swelling and pain often in the big toes or knees and wrists.

However by far the most common form of Arthritis,which most people tend to think of when this term arthritis is used is Osteoarthritis with 8.5 million sufferers in the UK alone.

Unlike some of the systemic conditions mentioned above, osteoarthritis tends to appear at certain joints rather than attacking multiple joints  as with R.A.

There is still so much we do not know yet about all these conditions. Every now and then a new drug hailed to solve all our painful creakiness, is discovered, like Prexige (lumiracoxib). This  burns brightly for a couple of years and then, as in 2007 with Prexige, is found  to lead to serious liver damage or some other unacceptable side effect and is removed from the market.BBC NEWS | Health | Arthritis drug licence suspended. Or over the counter, nutritional products like chondroitin sulphate deliver less than they, at first, promised.

Recently a new hope is being held out for stem cells as the bodies own repair kit that might one day come to the rescue. But until such, far off days, we are still left with the problem.

Joints that come together are covered with a smooth spongy surface and this cartilage cushions the bones, with a thin film and a  slippery fluid, synovium, and synovial fluid acting to reduce friction in the joint space. Strong bands of tissue, ligaments, support the joint and finally muscles and their tendons provide a dynamic and vital support to the joint. If this whole group of structures fails, gradually the bones start to grind together and wears away the cartilage at the ends of the bones, (or the discs that cushion and separate the vertebral segments of the spine) and with bone on bone contact new piece of bone can develop in response, narrowing and sticking out of the joint space, in the case of the spine,  sometimes potentially narrowing, for example, the spaces through which your nerve roots have to leave the spine on their way to the rest of your body.

Well, as so often some of the major things that we can do, come down to things that we don’t always want to do. First as many joints respond to trauma after some years with secondary osteoarthritis, we can try and avoid too many injuries in early life…tell that to your skate-boarding teenager or footballing husband!

Ok, so not a great start, what about staying at the correct weight for your build? If only, you say! Sadly the, as yet, less talked about costs of the obesity epidemic, will be a depressing rise in arthritic joint problems in the second half of life, as those joints start to complain of all the intolerable extra weight they are being asked to carry around day in day out. Think here especially of hips, knees and feet that carry all that weight for us. So once again what we eat has an effect, both on our weight and on the levels of chronic inflammation  we subject our bodies to, via, calming or inflammatory, food as a regular part of our diet.

The next suggestion will be no less popular with some, and might seem counter intuitive  to others, and that is exercise. Surely if you joints ache you should get off those tired feet and rest up? Well certainly marathon running may not be your best sport, but actually movement, to take your joints through their full range of movement, (yoga anyone), and anything that strengthens those all important supporting muscles that both move our joints and act to protect those other vulnerable structures within, can be a major help in reducing the damage and aggravation that OA brings. Don’t hammer the joints but just get them moving more often and get those muscles stronger so that they carry more of the support role that they are meant to.

If you are in a job that involves a lot of lifting or carrying or if you have to remain too  stationary for long periods, an extra look at your posture and lifting techniques could make a big difference.

There is some evidence that some nutritional and botanical medicine can help a bit, and those old standbys of minerals and vitamins like zinc and B3,  as well as SAMe, and possibly Chondroitin and Glucosamine Sulphate have some evidence of help. Others are looking towards botanical medicine like Boswellia, Ashwaganda, Turmeric, Cat’s Claw , Cayenne and Ginger all have something to offer. However perhaps we should consider them most useful, less as a magic bullet and more as part of a healthy diet that naturally reduces inflammatory cascades in the body. There is a lot of good evidence, for example, around the use of Turmeric in all sorts of health giving ways, some I suspect you did not know about.

Finally, Physical medicine like osteopathy can play a useful role. Too often we wander around with our joints poorly functioning carrying unnecessary  mechanical loads when a simple straightening out and loosening of some of those ‘stuck’ joints by an expert can allow us to function much more truly.  Like a car that has the tires inflated to the right pressure and that does not have any distortions in the underlying frame work of the car, and certainly not run with the hand break on, so too we are a far more effective machine when all our joints and those 965 muscles are all pulling in the right direction! A good Osteopath will be able to assess your mechanical health even if you, at present, have no obvious painful bits. why not ask for an M.O.T.?