Two women are standing in the middle of a plain under the summer sun. They are both, rigid with fear, and poised to lurch.
I’m one of them and have no memory of my conversation just moments before…moments before that sabre toothed tiger started chasing us.
Because that was irrelevant information not likely to save us from the thing most likely to kill us in the next 10 seconds. Our brains were trying to decide whether to run to the lake -because we know our pursuer can’t swim- or to the cave which is closer, but is only safe if the tribe is home and awake.
As I run past the white oak, I notice the shadows are longer and pointing eastward, indicating late afternoon. Will the hunting party be back? Should we climb that tree? Will it follow us?
When we finally stumble back to the cave, dripping wet and shivering; grandma tells me about the beautiful rainbow. What rainbow?! I didn’t see any rainbow and I’ve been outside for the last 4 hours.
When we are under threat, we are ill equipped to perceive beauty. And most threats are not as obvious or as time-bound as a chase. They are insidious- they weave themselves into the fabric of our lives so slowly, so subtly that we can’t tell the flaw from the design.
Our brain takes trillions of bits of information every second and discards 99% of it. Most of the information swirling around us never makes it to our conscious attention. Yet, we walk about as if we are the holders of perfect information.
In the absence of complete information (i.e. real life), our brains make up stories – because we are wired for sense making – and, they are rarely good stories – because we are also wired for threat detection. Immediate dangers, threats and predators might demand our complete attention when they appear. But absent that, we should ask ourselves if we are operating in “survive” mode or in “thrive” mode. We cannot thrive when we seek to survive.
The great and underrated thinker of our century, Michael Polanyi remarked that,
“We can know more than we can tell”.
What did he mean? Can you think of a time your mind produced something, but you couldn’t explain how? Perhaps because the part of the mind that produced that art or that insight is different from the part of the brain to which we have access – the verbal, storytelling part.
We sense so much stuff and make sense of only a small subset of that. Because our brains very quickly sieve through all the incoming data and select bits to which we direct our attention and filter out the rest.
If I live to 100, I might see 2 perfect rainbows and one blue supermoon. I may see my mother, who lives in India, maybe 30 more times. I may find myself at the improbable junction of luck and longing maybe 5 more times. Paul Bowles observed that beneath the Sheltering Sky, “it all seems so limitless.” And yet, I carry on as if I can somehow manufacture more time when mine is used up.
Regardless of the benevolent or malevolent forces that visit us, we choose where to direct our attention. May we start to do so with “a purpose that bears on eternity.”
The whatness of things 