Contemplating is a long-forgotten art (if not practised by mystics, poets and artists) and is magical thinking.
Now let’s ask ourselves some deeper questions which will allow us to expand our horizons:
- Which is my greatest talent?
- What are the joys of my life?
- Which is my favourite hobby?
- Which thing shall I start to do from today onwards?
- Which thing shall I start to do in a different way from now onwards?
- What are the things that allow me to be myself?
“At the abbaco during the few months that he attended it, he made such progress that he often perplexed his master by the doubts and difficulties that he propounded” wrote Vasari about Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo asked more and more questions, with that insatiable curiosity which would nourish the fountain-head of his genius through the whole of his adult life.
He kept a notebook where he wrote down everything… he recorded the definitions of thousands of words: “I possess so many words in my mother tongue that I am more likely to have trouble with the right understanding of things than from the lack of words with which to express my mind’s conception of them.”
Creativity is one of the gates to freedom, it is a bridge to truth and beauty.
In the film The Shawshank Redemption the main character, Andy Dufresne (actor Tim Robbins) broadcasts music from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro throughout a penitentiary and for a moment everything stands still and everybody is silenced and listens to the notes, played by a microphone at full volume.
Just imagine the scene. Everything stands still and everybody starts to listen.
Remembering that moment, a convict says:
“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”
Free to dream.
Creative questions and answers.
We need to do some cleaning: to clean our language, to clear out our ‘relational’ space so that our real knowledge may emerge, so that experience may come to light by itself.
A word uttered in a certain manner, stressing a part of it (some letters, a letter, a consonant) can surely make the difference, because there is energy inside every single word.
There is creative energy in every single word and in every single question.
The real basic question is how to act with ourselves and with others with as little interfering as possible, creating the right situation of transition or trance that allows us to go on