A bird will be a bird, even though some people will study just it’s wings, it’s head, clutches or feathers. A bird will still be a bird — but we won’t fully understand a bird by dividing it into pieces and studying them separately. Erwin Schrodinger believed that humanity should embrace all-inclusive knowledge: the word ‘University’ comes from Latin ‘universitas’ — ‘a whole’.
When I was a kid, I loved playing with kaleidoscope. Colored pieces of glass with every movement would gather in an unpredictable pattern and bring me to ecstatic delight. Look at one of those pieces. Tiny, homely, almost boring. Add a dozen of them, add some mirrors — and it’s the best thing in the world. It’s the big picture. It’s the unique pattern. It’s the Universe in miniature.
When I was a kid, no one would ever tell me ‘don’t break it’, ‘don’t touch it’, ‘don’t go there’. I had to break the Thing and understand what pieces it was comprised of, or the Thing would not even exist for me. But the most interesting was always the same — not the doll’s arms, not the doll’s head or torso, not the doll’s legs — but the way they are connected, work together and make up a beautiful toy. This was the most exciting. The discovery was the most exciting. The ‘aha! — that’s why dad’s watch works!’ (oops, not anymore).
It’s the discovery that makes us feel alive. The discovery that moves us forward. Always unpredictable, always beyond expectations. The feeling of being the first person in the world to own that new piece of knowledge. The way your imagination starts to work when it receives additional piece of the hidden data. The delight of having one more piece of a puzzle that comprises the future. Through discovery, we talk to the Universe itself.
We are great Homo Sapience. But unfortunately, crappy Homo Loquens. We are great thinkers, but mediocre communicators.
May be, language is not the best way to communicate. There are too many emotions and cultural landscapes involved, too much noise around to properly understand what we really mean. When I say ‘a bird’ — what bird do you imagine? I’m sure not the one I did. In order for you to understand me, I need to add as many adjectives and descriptions as I can, and still — it won’t be the bird I was thinking of, it will be slightly different.
But what the word ‘bird’ gives someone who hears it is an impulse for thinking. For imagining his own bird. For departing on a journey of creation. We are Homo Sapiens.
I believe language is for thinking. And communication is a side outcome of something way bigger. Morse code is great for it. It’s clear, precise and to the point. Dot Dot Dash Dot.
We have many different languages — language we speak and write in, mathematics, body language, music. The sound waves hit the eardrum. These waves reach the brain and become music — inside our heads. The most important part of creative processes — the outcome — doesn’t happen in the head of the creator. Rather, it happens in the brains of each and every one of us who listens to the creation, over and over again. The waves reach the brain and boil there to become Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 1.
We co-create it. We are born creative. And creativity doesn’t depend on what we do, it depends on how we do it, how we think about it. Albert Einstein was a bigger artist in the world of his physics than while playing his violin. There is art to whatever we decide to do.
Through Art, we created the entire non-tangible Parallel Universe we live in — the world of information, music, literature, poetry, philosophy. With it’s invented spaces and characters that we often times care about more than we care about the real people. For us our second reality has at least the same value as the first one. We play in it, but the game is so enormous and all-inclusive that it feels like real life. And it is.
Play matters as the opposite to the tangible world. The antonym for things that are hard to change. The antonym for everything we are forced to do. The antonym for helplessness, for planning, for boundaries. Play is the antonym for depression. When we play, we don’t care about the stakes. We do it wholeheartedly — our Parallel Universe is as valuable as the real life. But it doesn’t let us down. Through play, we feel connected, involved, inspired.
A dear friend of mine showed me The video that keeps inspiring me every day. To be curious, to keep my eyes wide open, to be ready for play, to be ready for discovery. Time journalist once asked Neil De Grass Tyler about the most astounding fact that he could share about the Universe. The most astounding fact was the knowledge that both the Universe and us, humans, are comprised of the same elements — Hydrogen, Oxygen and Carbon. We are made of stars. And as the Cosmos is constantly growing, we also do not have boundaries. In everything we do, we are always connected to it. While sitting on the bank of a river or climbing a mountain, while reading a book or sleeping, or while feeling lonely — we are always connected — just by being alive.
We might not know how the Universe works. We are inside of this dad’s watch and we can’t break it into pieces in order to understand everything at once. We tried though — we broke it into Red giants, Black Holes, eternally collapsing objects — but what is truly inspiring is that the Universe itself is just those magical connections that make a bird be a bird, that make the waves hit your eardrum and become music.
There is beauty to the unknown, because it hides thousands of ecstatic delights, discoveries and ‘aha’s’. And the greatest gift each of us receives the second we are born is the gift of the unknown. The gift of the future delight. We are all gifted to make our own discoveries — just by being alive.
