5 minute read
When was the last time you felt relaxed, happy and free? Not a care in the world. Navigating our physical world. In the moment. Perhaps moving ahead but not skipping ahead. Hint: the answer has something to do with motion. At least it does for me. Some of the most liberating and blissful times in my life were times when I was out in the real world moving from here to there aimlessly, with no particular place to be. I was traversing the spaces ‘in between.’
When I ask myself the aforementioned question, I don’t have to think too hard - a handful of memories stream in effortlessly.
There was that one sunny afternoon in Amsterdam when a few friends of mine and I rented a small motor boat, where we enjoyed our picnic lunches while drifting through the canals. It’s a particularly touristy thing to do but we were all locals at the time - just enjoying the reality of living 2 meters below sea level. We joked, we laughed and we all screamed suddenly when we saw particularly low bridge approaching. And we ducked, we ducked fast!
Other splendid memories include walking around the Upper East Side of Manhattan arm in arm with my late grandmother, and then doing the same thing in London a few years later with my late grandfather. No agenda. Just being together - a classic walk- and-talk.
I remember my mother and I slowly making our way round and round the running track at Coldwater Canyon Park in Beverly Hills, engaged in deep conversations about life and death and shallow conversations and gossip about fashion and fairweather friends. It was the best. Our motivation for going to the track was just to get out of the house - it may have been Thanksgiving or one of those holidays when you feel cooped up at home, who knows?
Another time, my husband and I walked from the Museum of Natural History in New York’s Upper West Side. We bought hot dogs at some dodgy-looking stand and ate them while side-stepping through Central Park. We passed the Dakota - famously where John Lennon lived and tragically died, Columbus Circle, Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, Chelsea. It was a dreamy balmy afternoon and we had made absolutely zero plans. We relied on our own god-given powers (feet don’t fail me now).
On a separate occasion, one of my best friends and I were doing an impromptu bar hop in Amsterdam. At one particular cafe we spotted a slot machine. We put a few Guilders in and won! Cha-ching, it all came pouring out. Overjoyed by our unexpected winnings, we headed to the next watering hole. On the way there, we spotted furniture, candelabras, paintings, etc. on the road side — clearly someone else’s trash but as we discovered our treasure. In front of these found items, pasted on one of the phallic Amsterdammetje poles dotted across the city was: ‘free.’
Freedom from choice
Yes, folks freedom, that elusive concept. That thing we’re all told we have in abundance in the West (while some of us wonder if we’re not just in another kind of post-consumerist, digital surveillance state, with high taxes and low trust). To quote the band Devo (whose new documentary I just watched): ‘freedom of choice, freedom from choice!’ But I digress.
The episodes I highlighted were great because I was in the moment and of this earth, wandering it, with loved ones — whether by foot, by boat, bicycle, motorcycle. Any machinations of my ego (I need to do this, I must go there, I can’t forget to do that) were gone. The pressure was off. And that’s real freedom… not just from societal, governmental chains but from the restrictions of your own mind. Anything is possible. But equally nothing is possible and sometimes the quiet, gentle void of nothing (and no agenda) is all the possibility you need.
At these times, I was in motion but very still inside. That forward movement meant that I was in between places - not-home, not-hotel, not-work… In these sorts of liminal spaces - cognitive, physical and experiential transition zones, you break from your routine and aha moments are de rigueur.
These pocket locales appear in my oil paintings: a road ascending upwards but going seemingly nowhere as we can’t see over the steep rise ahead… the famous image of a distant farm on a hill that you see at your eye doctor’s office when you’re asked to read text close-up. There’s dynamism in these transitory zones, roads or paths, but it’s a quiet ‘in between’ dynamism. Pure magic.
Amidst the current AI (LLM) versus humans debates around hot topics like AGI (artificial general intelligence) I’ve heard a fascinating theory. Achieving a level of ‘intelligence’ that surpasses humans may well be a false (tech-bro driven) narrative. A machine can’t surpass true human intelligence - which doesn’t just come from the physical brain. We humans are living an embodied experience of daily perceptions which collectively make up our consciousness and intelligence. We walk through this world. We’re not soulless data models making ‘educated’ guesses or sophisticated predictions using information which originated in a physical world we can never truly experience.
We humans feel, hear, smell, taste, sense, intuit, touch, perceive… As a hypersensitive person I can attest to that on a weekly basis when I take the train to work. I can smell a gutter punk’s booze odor when he’s practically in the next train car over. I get strange vibes when someone’s gait or vocalizations are slightly off - and I can’t put my finger on it because the insight isn’t coming from brain logic. I’m not lurching my head forward, craning to download data from a tiny phone screen; that brain-heavy environment is where AI may have some edge over humans.
Instead, I prefer to occupy a space where I can shine a light on those human gifts of perception, consciousness, senses: the physical world. This is where true presence is power, motion is stillness, and our untapped human potential waits to be bathed in sunlight so that it may blossom into bliss.