Intro: A Partially Understood Life
This blog series will be my sketchpad, working through partially formed ideas and explorations in the realm of human experience, allowing vignettes of wisdom to emerge from a free flow of ponderings.
Why do humans make such a mess of things in life, work and relationships…?
Topics will be varied and a little experimental. I’ll be drawing on the many disciplines which strive towards understanding the human experience, from the fields of psychology and philosophy to the attempts of art and literature to capture the essence of being human.
What I’m really aiming for are insights to illustrate and partially understand our plight as a precarious species, aware of our mortality and apparent insignificance in an unfathomably vast cosmos, not knowing whether there is any meaning to all of this, but trying to make sense of it anyway. I want to leave this mortal coil, knowing that I’ve had a good stab at making sense of it all, striving for greater understanding of why we do the things we do, and whether there is any coherent meaning to it all…
Human behaviour and human relationships, whether at work or in our personal lives, can be so complex, so unpredictable, and so often apparently lacking in meaning. My assumption is that by trying to partially understand the human experience, one can at the very least make that experience more tolerable, more satisfying, more meaningful and perhaps a little less absurd.
By taking the sketchpad approach and striving for only ‘partial understandings’ I’m hoping to break through my natural tendency for perfection and for taking on projects which are too much of a stretch for my time constraints. When we conceive of the perfect project, the greatest outcome, we tend towards procrastination as what we can realistically achieve today is so far off the ideal we’ve conceptualised. By striving for ‘partial understandings’ I’m giving myself permission to be imperfect, for my first drafts to be ugly and badly formulated. From there I can only improve through tweaks and iterations to incorporate further insights or better ways of explaining myself.
My aim is to eventually turn these ‘vignettes of wisdom’ into something I can take on the road and share with others in various formats. Initially in the form of workshops with work colleagues, leading on to something that I can package into courses and an app, and market to corporates and individuals to help people navigate our complex worlds with a higher level of consciousness.
Setting some rules and guidelines for myself:
- Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly — from Anne Rice’s observations on Franz Kafka
- You’re aiming for a partial understanding of life, so don’t be tempted to go too deep, start with surface-level stuff and work down from there.
- Publish early, even if it is only a partially formed idea. The thought that someone might see your raw ponderings and laugh at their naivety will be a good incentive to come back and improve them.
- These vignettes are to consolidate your own understanding as a foundation for their worthwhile application in the future, so don’t stress about trying to be perfect or impress other people.
- Try to write little and often. Do something small every day.
- Don’t try to fix or influence other people too much. What you are really seeking is understanding.
- You don’t know exactly where this is leading. You’re following your interests and building a reservoir of notes and insights — be open to happenstance and opportunity as it occurs.
- You’re not an expert or an academic, so don’t pretend to be one, be humble, but remember that even the so called ‘genius’ is still a pathetic scared chimp just trying to make sense.
- Ultimately, you want your day to day life in the future to be more satisfying and rewarding than your current situation. Put the work in, strive for authenticity, and don’t worry about what all the other bastards out there think of your half baked ideas and hare-brained schemes…
Closing thoughts — transcending our collective ignorance:
Modern ‘western’ life brings many comforts, unimaginable even to our ancestors just one or two generations ago. The vast majority of people can meet their basic survival needs with a trip to the supermarket or with the click of a mouse. We have entertainment on tap and global communications are accessible to all. Anyone with a curious mind and an internet connection can access an exponentially growing reservoir of human knowledge from the comfort of their sofa.
But despite our luxurious worldly affluence, so many of us experience a nagging feeling of emptiness, that something is missing. We exist day-to-day in a bubble of stress. We ricochet between the highs and lows of existing. Like Sisyphus, we feel cursed to forever roll that boulder to the top of the hill, only to see it tumble back at the end of the day. We carry that lingering feeling that there must be more than this.
Pondering things, and being able to articulate and share your understandings with others — this is what humans have done for eons, it’s part of what makes us human. Some people chose the scientific approach to understand their world, others through music, art or literature, my daft ramblings in a hardly noticed blog are unlikely to spark a transformation in our collective consciousness, but if everyone made similar efforts to understand and articulate their world as they understand it, then maybe we could transcend our collective ignorance…