inviting and living into the essence of human experience
Thank you for being here. Thank you for your presence in this world. Thank you for letting yourself notice and wonder, daydream and meander, slow down and allow the less of things.
It requires courage to wonder in an age of quick, algorithmized answers.
It requires trust to daydream with the worthiness of your inner wisdom.
It requires grace to allow boredom and not reach for what fills the empty or busies the still.
I am grateful to live my days with humans and more-than-humans who know how to be present with boredom, daydream, and wonder. And I am grateful that my work lives here in the realms of this potent triangle of Venn Diagram play.
Ideas about why these three “things” matter are not in short supply. There are endless links to click, products to buy, and agendas to agree with. The landscape is saturated with opportunities to “like” ideas and engage on the surface of things.
It’s easy to like the idea of boredom. It’s a little less easy to practice it. It’s easy to share books and poems about the magic of daydream. It’s less easy to design learning that trusts in daydreams’ realms of intelligence. It’s easy to name wonder as essential and recite quotations about its beauty. It’s less easy to sit with uncertainty, surrender to mystery, and ask for deeper unknowing.
Lately, I’ve been noticing an increase in headlines with invitations to be “more human” in an AI world. Listables share the top ways to engage wonder, creativity, connection, and awe as essential human ways of being. The words sound good, and… language is usually the first thing to be co-opted. Sometimes it’s sanitized or watered down. Sometimes it’s saturated in distractions. Sometimes it’s replaced with meanings far away from the essence of the words.
What is the essence of wonder?
What is the value of daydream?
Why is boredom a space that needs care?
Large language models can “answer” these questions. You could, too, if you wanted a bite-sized morsel for your Instagram reel.
But the gift of these questions is the space they open for us to not answer them. For us to live into their possibilities, sit with their uncertainties, feel ache and hope and bewilderment, follow threads of memory and dream, get lost and find more questions.
Boredom, daydream, and wonder are experiences. There’s a world of difference between presence with wonder and performance of wondering (as process of extraction or cause-effect for something later). The same can be said for daydream and boredom; they are messy, nuanced, mysterious experiences, not useful methods to deliver us somewhere else.
There are larger questions at play:
What is the essence of human experience?
What do we mean when we talk about a “human experience” of learning, curiosity, or creativity?
We are cluttered with information and options and opinions and ideas that “sound good” on the surface, that seem to be “helpful” for humanness in an AI-era, that subtly nudge us to integrate “new” ways that “enhance” human creativity. This language is slippery and subtle. Often, it calls to a deep inner need as it also slightly alters what we know as (or expect from) our experience.
What do we need in this moment of humaning on earth?
How do we discern what we need and how to create this for ourselves, our children, and communities?
It seems to me that the words “human experience” hold more distraction than substance. But our experience of being human holds endless mystery that matters significantly.
We need space to slow down and deeply consider what we want experience to be for ourselves and our children. We need space to linger with what we don’t know and deeply connect with what we do know within ourselves. We need space for reflection and conversation so we can find clarity of discernment for when we say yes and when we say no, thank you.
Beautifully, as humans, we can create this space for ourselves through the questions we invite and our willingness to stay present with them (through daydream and meander, boredom and stuckness, uncertainty, angst, confusion, and surprise).
as delight, Melissa
