DAY 047 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Use Feeling Words

Feeling words are an invitation saying, “This is my experience, this is what it feels like in my skin. Do you feel this way too?” I hope I’m not the only one who as a kid from time to time wondered if I was the only “real” kid with everyone else just being simulations, as if I was just being run through my paces in the rat maze. We only know ourselves ultimately (and not very well), but we can only imagine what it is like in another’s body, we can only trade bits of information back and forth to know that we’re not alone.

Art makes me feel less alone. I’ve read books that make me feel like the author has somehow scraped out my brain like a Halloween pumpkin and described what it is like inside. I have seen films that have a truth and a poetry to them that resonates with the deepest, most elusive elements of my being, somehow illuminating something that I don’t consciously contend with.

If we never speak to our experience, if we never express what it is to be, we are insulated in some ways, but we lost the opportunity for epiphanal moments--for someone else to vibrate like a sympathetic string on a guitar and correlate our experience. If we don’t facilitate that opportunity for others, we end up with a profound poverty, a lonely not-knowing that will tint and stunt everything.

Note: As I just got back from Utah and a lot of natural beauty, I think I’m going to introduce Wonder in lieu of this topic for the remainder of the project.