A New Layer of Meaning
“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
-Diana Ackerman
What’s ‘width’ for you?
We are all enveloped in an invisible structure that boxes our initial perception of the world. That structure could be the family you are born into or the culture, which shapes one’s foundational values, habits or judgements.
Expanding and altering that invisible structure is the key to making sense of things around you holistically. It could be possible by gaining a new filter to life i.e. a new layer of meaning between you and the world.
It’s more like imagining the world in instagram filters where every new filter adds more depth and variety to the same picture that’s in front of you to make something stale look more exciting or blurring the details to give it wholeness.
What seduces Imagination?
Your thoughts. Stretching the widths of your thoughts and letting it flow like water. Dripping and playing around the corners of curiosity or evaporating and merging into something bigger or could be just the embracing the uncertainty of loosely stated ideas. A lot of times all it requires is to listen to the world in its many forms.
Think of brain as a concept library. The more concepts you gain, the more you slice up the world in different parameters and the more alternative realities you get to enjoy. Your changing concepts have a repelling effect on your changing thoughts and emotions.
Polymaths have understood this pretty well and have beautifully blurred the boundaries between various disciplines. Everything around is seen as an ecosystem. Which made divergent connections possible and led to beautiful discoveries.
Contributions made by Aristotle, Galileo, and da Vinci couldn’t be possible if they didn’t see the world through different lenses. Leonardo da Vinci had wide areas of interest like drawing, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, literature, astronomy, botany, writing and history. He made connections which were often ignored, and had the advantage of choosing from a wider mental landscape.
The Takeaway
What makes the world interesting is the interaction between elements and not the elements in and out of themselves.