Let’s say you’re in front of the mirror, and by lifting up your right arm you notice a small pimple on your elbow. You’d go check with your left hand to confirm its texture, expecting something quite specific. You’ll confirm it’s a pimple quickly, with a simple touch.
Similarly, you might check your hair, observe it with a critical gaze. Its softness — or lack thereof — will be easy to predict, and you’ll anticipate it way before putting your hand on it to confirm it.
Deduction is a skill. Guessing on few data, finding patters, relationships, equations to explain and connect. We’re relatively good at it. And most of it we do unconsciously. It goes without saying though, that machines are better. Machines don’t get distracted with other data or desires. The dry observation and consequent calculation is their biggest strength. Our strength is different, and it coincides also with our biggest issue.
An anthropologist named Ernest Becker wrote this about us in 1973:
As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.
He calls us gods with anuses. Which is not only a funny image, but also the biggest source of our conflicts. We are not the best at either, our analysis is not spotless and our instincts are not straightforward, but our potential lies in having both: the analytical, elevated mind and the primitive, visceral needs. If we only train one, we’re losing the beauty of having them mutually inform each other.
Let’s get back to observing. What would happen if we’d give up for a second the illusion of being able to make accurate assessments and predictions? If in observing all those variables we asked for the help of our belly (although Becker would say our anus)?
The “belly” has a whole other way to connect things and make predictions, functional to other forms of survival. If I look at my face and see rings under my eyes I might make a judgement on looks, fatigue, products to use, and stop there, or spice up that analysis with the matter-of-factness that my body is very good at. Things start emerging, non linear and evocative. Rings, circles, bed, October, hours, time, sorrow, hollow, full, moon, sight… It feeds itself and could go on forever. I stop and look at things that make no apparent sense. I learn to observe in another way. Observe a picture I’ve painted, an image that keeps moving but goes nowhere.
What would happen if we trained visceral analysis and elevated impulses?
In the face of data: emotions.
In the face of emotions: reflection.
Stop, observe, take the hand of the god and the hand of the worm. Ask their help in tasks that you were always taught needed hyper specialization and instead can benefit from full on chaos and shuffling.
Empatherapy 