Strange but True
By Peter LloydI'm sitting here on this huge, dirty, old rock, when I look up and see a furnace in the sky. It's looks about as big as a dime, and yet I can feel it's heat.
As I ride my rock through a blackness that apparently never ends, at a tremendous speed I can't even perceive, I realize that's what's really frightening—how little I can perceive. How little I really know about where I am and where I'm going. And not just me. All the people I care about are in the same boat, that is, on the same rock.
The colors I can see squeak through a slit in a much larger spectrum of visual opportunities. I hear only a narrow band of vibrations, compared to what my sometimes bigger, and usually more formidable, fellow rock riders sense.
My ability to reckon their presence by the atmosphere they radiate and leave behind is remarkably inferior, especially when compared to those who move a little closer to the surface of the rock.
Even so, some members of my tribe act like they know everything, as if they own the whole rock. We all go around looking for patterns, but when some of us see a pattern repeat itself often enough, we assume it will always work that way.
And even though the more patterns we find, the more questions we raise, some of us insist there's only one way to respond to what we do know. It's as if those one-way proponents rely entirely on the same process that makes their hands jerk away from a biting mouths.
The rest of us tend to let the sum of our experience show us sensible, sometimes inspired, ways to behave. When we express ourselves, we call it art. One of us once said that the job of the artist is to "make strange the world."
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.