Heroes Not Zombies

Continuing on the theme of sense making…….I’m endlessly curious about how we human beings do three things – perceive the world, make sense of life, and influence our day to day experiences of reality. Each one of those contributes to the richness of our unique daily lives. No two of us have the exact same experience at the exact same time and place. Never. We will all bring our previous experience, our memories, habits and distinct patterns of being to the present moment.

I think that perhaps one of the most powerful, and certainly most magical, qualities we have is the power of imagination. Some people seem to think we can separate imagination from the perception of reality very easily, that there is a permanent and impermeable barrier between the two. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a connection between that thinking and what doctors used to describe as “the blood brain barrier”, an invisible border between the body and the brain which drugs couldn’t cross. We know it’s not that simple now. But is there a big stretch between that thinking and the idea that some illnesses are “all in your head”? I mean, whatever did that really mean? I remember hearing someone claiming that for a certain patient “her pain is all in her head”. What did that mean? That it didn’t really exist? That she was either lying or deluded? What a way to dismiss a person’s lived experience. What a way to undermine a relationship of trust. What a way to fail to understand.

I think our power of imagination doesn’t switch itself off and on. Blimey, it even keeps going while we are sound asleep!

Perception is a creative act. It involves memory, signals from the environment, signals from within our own bodies, as well as our creative powers of imagination which enable us to make connections, see patterns and create images which we hope provide us with good representations of the world.

Sense making is also a creative act. Whether we draw on numbers, words, stories, images or similarities, making sense of the world is an act of imagination, a creative act of imagination.

Our daily lives are creative acts. We are much more the active agents of our experience than we realise. We are not blank slates for someone else to draw on. We are not data to be fed into an algorithm. Algorithms, statistics and data do not KNOW us better than ourselves. We are creating ourselves every moment of every day.

This photo is of a public work of art, placed in a square in Malmo. It’s a griffin with a crown. A griffin? An imaginary creature. There are no griffins in Nature. But we respond to this, don’t we? We react to it. It influences us. Part of the genius of this sculpture, I think, is the crown. Placing the crown on this creature’s head increases its impact and magnifies its significance and importance.

I’m well used to living with imaginary creatures. I come from Scotland. And, no, I’m not thinking of the Loch Ness Monster. I’m thinking of the imaginary creature which adorns castles, flags and buildings throughout Scotland.

The unicorn.

A magical, mythical creature of incredible power.

I’m not going to describe my own responses to the unicorn today. Instead I’d like you to notice what your own responses are. When you look at an image of a unicorn, what do you experience? What images spring to mind, what thoughts enter your head, what feelings emerge within you? What do you imagine?