Special Uncle facilitates a fresh perspective.
One wonders whether the frequent realignment of the kiddle point of view, literally, has an impact on their capacity to conceptualize a broad range of possibilities? That, and the tablula rasa brain. Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind,” and revere it. In her lecture on beginner’s mind, Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman cites this gem from Suzuki Roshi: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.”
Now, just for fun:
The Upside Down Map page,
a really nifty book from which I’ve gleaned hours of fun and scads of unexpected insights, The Art of Looking Sideways (picked apart & cited here),
a bit about “social codes of looking,” from Notes on ‘the Gaze,’ offered up for general edification by a Welsh professor, and
this here series of pages on Seeing, accompanying an exhibit of the same name from San Francisco’s Exploratorium. [BTW: the uattributed quotation at the top of their page is from the incomparable Anaïs Nin.]
My partner bought me a copy of The Art of Seeing Sideways last year for Christmas. I love using it to spark new creative ideas, and it’s a great source of random knowledge.
They say that the two-year-old who sees a parent suddenly float to the ceiling will be momentarily surprised, and then accept it as just one more thing that happens in the world. Understanding the reaction of any other (older) people in the room would prove much more difficult.
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