A story of feeling our thinking leading to different creativity
Transcript of this video:
Last Friday, I had arranged to meet a friend here in Cambridge in the early evening to go for a walk and a conversation together. As it happened, it was absolutely pouring with rain. So I found myself waiting for him at Reality Checkpoint. It’s a famous meeting space in the middle of one of the parks, one of the big green spaces in Cambridge. And I thought it was quite funny: Here I was standing in one of the most exposed places in the city, getting progressively more drenched. But I reminded myself I wasn’t in a hurry, and I was in very weatherproof clothing. It wasn’t going to get wet-through in a hurry. I could just chill and wait. And soon enough, Vincenzo arrived. And we quickly decided that given the weather, we weren’t going to go for much of a walk. We were going to find ourselves a pub. So we just ambled off towards, well, the nearest one we could find, really, and just popped in there, got ourselves a drink, and started having a conversation.
It was a slow, relaxed one. I was definitely in the mood for it. We know each other reasonably well. And I realized in the course of this conversation that he has a habit, which I’d seen before but not really attended to, that often when he’s thinking, he closes his eyes and you can sense his eyes are moving underneath his eyelids. There’s vivid life in them. And I sat and watched this and I thought, oh, you can really get a sense of his whole body being engaged in this process of thought as if he is trying quite hard to find the right words to express what he’s thinking. You get the sense of he’s actually thinking something new. He’s giving expression to something he hasn’t expressed before.
And it’s a rather interesting experience and in fact later in the conversation I mentioned to him, “oh I noticed that this happens often in conversations with you,” and he was quite moved by it, quite touched by me having noticed it. And what was interesting was that the theme of much of our conversation was about the importance in life of expressing oneself from the inside out, finding something within oneself, within one’s own experience and giving voice to it.
Because we are operating in a society full of excitement and stimulus in which it’s very easy to get swept along. Some people talk about mimetic desire. We get swept along by what we see other people thinking and doing. Our attention is easily fragmented by all the demands placed on it by people anxious to get us to pay attention to them and sell things to us. And a lot of emotional health and well-being depends on our ability to really, as he did, metaphorically, if not literally close our eyes, slow down and get in touch with our own lived experience.
Which may or may not be comfortable for us to do. Sometimes that act of disconnecting from external stimulus, sort of weaning ourselves off the addiction, can be a bit uncomfortable but it’s sort of quite important to our well-being… and I noticed for days afterwards, in fact right up until now, I felt like I’m operating in a much slower less externally driven way of being. It gives rise to a different kind of what I want to call right now mellow creativity. It’s not creativity that I excitedly need to share with people. I’m not trying to make something happen. It’s a slightly more dreamlike state and it’s a really satisfying way to operate in the world.
And as I often am, I’m reflecting on what is this AI business because I think AI offers us shortcuts to the simulcrum of thinking, the simulation of thinking that is very fast and efficient and superficially quite attractive, but also a bit slippery. And I find if I spend too much time using AI to quote-unquote think or to stimulate my thinking, I get a certain amount of excitement, but then a kind of, I think the French call it a “petit mort” sense of disappointment that follows afterwards. And I think there’s something in Vincenzo’s embodied, if I say struggle, that may not be quite the right word, effort to really feel himself, to connect to his own experience. There’s something quite profound about that, that I know I want more of in my life.
Photo by Flavie Martin on Unsplash
