There is a theme recurring -- a growing distinction between appreciation and action. I recently heard it when a wine person was explaining the difference between tasting wine (looking at it, smelling it, whooshing in your mouth and observing the flavors) and drinking wine (unconscously pouring it down your trap). Clearly I was in the latter camp.
Then I began to see it more as I played with my son - 7 months - as we would have moments of great communication...if I was paying attention and not just doing those fun, annecdotal Dad-like things. You can gesture in life (very convincingly) because many life's gestures happen to be repeated. But to act, meaning somehow to derive from a particular presence, is oddly more complex.
I'm not intentionally trying to be Buddhist about this - be mindful, pay attention, be here now (mr. watts) - but there are similarities. The experience with my son can be very pleasurable in either mode, but there is a deep resonance and subsequently different, newer, creative actions when we are there, together. Another way to describe it is that there is a certain innocence or risk in a non-idomatic interaction with the world. Maybe it is even anti-idomatic, requiring an intentional opposition to certain chunks.
Software is a way of codification a set of routines, processes, and intellectual systems. It wouldn't or shouldn't be surprising to us that the pot should spill over that codification should begin to feel comfortable. We embed (word of the year) so many functions (delete, undo) given that we interact with computers and phone and the like, that one should expect that specific scripts become comfortable. We look for plug-and-play. We intend life to be backwards compatable, make it such, and then are troubled by a legacy-oriented life that is less interesting.
Enough things in human life were and are common - washing, moving, eating - and one can understand the desire to try to 'just get through them as fast as possible'. The intention is to get onto something else, something dramatically more enjoyable and meaningful. But the mode begats the mode. We find it hard not to add the next sequence onto the one that proceded it. Our approach carries over into a more enjoyable experience and we see, feel, hear less.
So after that wine thing, I decided, "Maybe I could ALWAYS taste. Maybe I could make a mission to bias toward interaction vs action."
From everything I can tell, it does require practice...or (shit) mindfulnes. You come around to having to repeat at minimum a (routine) approach to escape a routine experience. Sort of like having a certain rigourous discipline or training (say, music or mathematics), and then within that order finding a freedom (maybe because of that order?).
Well either way, it would suggest a certain inefficiency in meaning. I ate a dinner the other night at a restaurant Moto, where we were treated to course after course of flavor, invention, pun, riff and so much more that I couldn't understand. There were animals flown from across the globe to be on these plates, wine from 6 or seven countries (spaning about as many years in time), ideas that worked these pieces into forms and states (I'm not exaggerativing). Well, so much of the rich experience of this trip (nothing less) was the 50 or so stories that were part of it. The waiter tells us about the mollusk's shell forming from the beating waves, the diver who must pry it from the rock, the fedex that gets it hear every day. Later, someone explains the preparation of the ribeye - three dips, three flames - and you can then taste each layer of transformation.
If you read certain fiction which does have layers of symbols such that you begin to watch out for them, then you begin to pick them up (another foot, another mention of the color red) and the clues (dear Hansel) create another frequency that you begin to hear more clearly. It does require a life where there are creators that lay down the lower frequencies of meaning (people actually creating vs recreating). I do not know whether being in an efficient mode (recreating) much of the time precludes use from being a fully experiential mode (creating) some of the time. But there is apparently some significant tradeoff. I think a mythic vision of things is being made much too difficult.
A quick link to slowly maturing wine notes.
