My brother-in-law Brian Olewnick once told me “I don’t paint to create a painting, I paint to help me see the world.” As I was reflecting over a cup of coffee this morning, it occurred to to me that I write for the same reason.
I tend to spend a lot of my spare time writing poetry, flash-fiction, articles on philosophy, and articles about meaning coaching. All of these end up being not an end in themselves but merely my own way of seeing the world, or my own way of seeing how I feel about the world.
Through various forms of creativity we depict our experience of the world in a language that we can best understand at this moment. This may not be in a language that the rest of the world understands. It can be through a series of dance moves that are so far out of the world of known dance that somebody who can not truly understand it is likely to say “that’s not dance.” But for seeing the world for oneself, it does not matter what anybody else understands about the language because the language, whatever it is, is the symbology of our inner experience. What is it that you do to see the world?
You are definitely onto something here. Is it everyone or just “kinesthetic” learners, who have to manipulate their observations physically? Tear them apart & put them together again… Writing does this for me. It feels sort of geeky to admit that diagramming often does it for me, but mapping out something with both words and spatial relationships does access both sides of the brain, right?
Works well for me too. I am very into mind mapping and even more so I like semantic networks. I am using a program called Personal Brain right this month. The free version. I may buy the $$ version after I buy my next laptop.
Photography is how I see the world. I see things so much more clearly thru the camera lens.
My dad is a great shutter bug. I always admire people that can do that well. Have you read Trungpa’s Dharma Art? He was great with a camera as well.
I need colored markers. That software looks like fun. I wish I knew more about semantic networks… I can only ever get as far as seeing why tagging is a good idea (but I can never remember my tags, anyway).
I spent some time today writing some semantic network software. Just some concepts with links between them. Java. It may evolve over time into something useful.