We are programmed to think in terms of black and white.

Something is either good or bad. We support one team and dislike another. We love a certain television programme but don’t like something else. I think that we have evolved to be like this because it makes life simpler to navigate. Just ignore the stuff you don’t like, and stick to what you do, and everything becomes more certain in your mind. This gives us a reassuring illusion of safety and security, a stability from which to live our lives.

It doesn’t help us, however. Life is not binary, good and bad. Life is complex, so complex we barely really understand it, least of all how our own minds work. So it helps if we can become much more fluid and open in the way we perceive things. That way we don’t get floored when reality comes and hits us with a crisis or tragedy.

If we deliberately try to see things as parts of a spectrum we can learn to stop being quite so judgmental. This enables us to start to see the bigger picture of how we are. Let’s take the topical issue of mental health as an example. For decades when people, especially people in the medical professional and in politics, talked about mental health they usually meant mental illness, and almost always equated the term mental health with poor mental health.

This was such a prevalent mindset in the profession of psychology that the paradigm of “positive psychology” was promoted by Martin Seligman only as recently as 1998. Yet positive psychology is not some rare condition. It simply refers to something we all know is true every day, namely that we experience positive, healthy, enjoyable emotions as well as negative ones.

Every one of us can rhyme off words that describe what is at the negative end of the spectrum of mental health. Suicidal thoughts. Raging anger. Hopelessness. Sadism. Cruelty. Self-harming. These remain major issues for far too many people in our society, yet the words and conditions those words represent have been recognised and treated in various ways through all of human history.

This is not the case at all at the other end of the spectrum. What words describe that positive extreme end of the spectrum? Love, kindness, happiness, contentment, calmness, peace of mind, joy, laughter. How little effort have we made to explore how we become positive and mentally vibrant and well, compared with the negative strand of our mental continuum?

We need to recognise that almost no one is stuck at a single point on this spectrum, especially at the negative end. We need to update our understanding of one another so that we recognise that we are all fluid beings who are sometimes morose, other times cheerful, and that this change can happen in an instant.

Fluidity is in fact a much better way of describing the reality of who we are than the fixed image we have of our self in our own minds. The Buddha once said we are more like a river than a solid being, constantly in flow and change. Once you grasp this deeply, it helps enormously with the real purpose of life which in my opinion is simply to enjoy that flow and those changes.

Every human being travels along lines of behaviour and attitudes. A shy person can grow out of that shyness and become a confident outgoing type. A murderer can stop being murderous, or perhaps was only ever murderous in feeling and intention once, for a solitary moment.

When we start to think of people as changeable in any direction, and behaviours and moods and states of mind as temporary in each of us, then we are getting closer to the truth of how life actually is.

This growing awareness also helps us see our own prejudices and unfair likes and dislikes in the glare of true and deep observation. We start to see the problem with labelling people. We see how wrong it is to lump everyone from a particular group, race, religion, class, or political party as all being the same, when we see that not even one individual remains the same from minute to minute. The whole simplistic construct we make about others crumbles when viewed in a truer light.

Although it makes it much harder for our poor wee lazy brains, we come to recognise that we simply can’t label people, whether we’re talking about an individual or a group of individuals. Life is much richer and harder to pin down than our automatic mind wants it to be. The brain that has evolved to constantly try to seek order and simple understanding in everything it encounters needs to be trained to come to terms, then to be happy with the mercurial nature of not just our own species but of all forms of life.

The truth is, nothing about life forms is simple, and nothing about this planet we live on is simple. It’s all remarkable and complex and surprising and stunning if we can overcome our blinkered perspective that has slowly but surely grown inside us over the course of our lifetime.

So try to develop, day by day for the rest of your life, an ever-increasing rejection of stereotyping and labelling, and nurture instead a way of seeing everything as a much more fluid, flowing and changing swirl of what I can only call stuff, because there is no word to truly explain it.