Heroes Not Zombies

Was this photo taken a few minutes after the sun had disappeared below the horizon? Or was it taken a few minutes before the sun appeared over the horizon?

Sunset and sunrise can look remarkably similar. Imagine you’ve been in a coma, and you just come round and look out of the window. You see this scene. How do you know whether it’s dawn or dusk?

The answer, of course, is just to keep watching for a few minutes. You’ll notice how the sky is changing….either getting darker as the sun sinks still further, or getting brighter as the sun is about to appear over the horizon.

You could say that what helps us to make sense of what we experience in life is context…the circumstances of the event. It’s not the event, frozen in time, separated out from all the moments which precede it, and those which will follow. It’s the flow of change. We understand by taking our time and not limiting ourselves to a snap conclusion.

Physical context helps too, of course. If someone screams “Murder!” while you sit in your seat in the theatre watching the actors on the stage, then you understand there’s no need to call the police (probably!), but if they scream “Murder!” when you are outside in the alley leading to the stage door, then you know to get help a soon as you can.

Context makes all the difference – whether that’s the time context, the space context, or the cultural/social one. We have to be careful with our tendency to separate things out in our perception. We have to be careful with reductionism.

Our left hemisphere is great at separating elements out from each other. Our right hemisphere enables us to place all we see and hear in context. We need both.