The Poetic Life
We live at a time when people over-rationalize, over-complicate and overthink just about everything. Turn on the TV and you’ll see politicians and the media generate enough heated intellectual discussion to make your head spin. It sounds important, but it’s not getting us anywhere. In fact, it overwhelms and destroys most efforts to improve our lives. We seem to have forgotten what truly matters, what lies at the core of our human experience, what goes to the heart of things.
I’d like to propose a different approach, which in reality has been around for a long time—what I call a “poetic sense of life.” I’m not talking about writing verses or living like a bohemian, but about following our intuition, nurturing our curiosity and engaging in constructive observation of the world around us. Let the mind wander and engage in clear and simple reasoning without disfiguring the initial message in order to become absorbed in a vibrant and creative process, leading to all kinds of discoveries and ideas that can influence your future or even humanity in good and bad times.
I believe we should always keep in mind that simplicity is the mother of creativity, and curiosity the daughter of intelligence.
But when fear and power infiltrate the human mind, we fall into an “over-rational” mode that generates rules and regulations with the excuse of protecting the system. In reality that is an egoistic way to operate, replacing creativity and intelligence with smartness, intellectuality and political correctness. They seem more practical in the short-term and make it an easier route to take, especially now with the new technology in place. Ask a question of the computer and you will get a precise answer with which to pursue your short-term strategy. My problem with that approach is that most of the time I don’t even know how to formulate the right question!
Reason or rationality are both important. But only when they are harnessed to the poetic sense of life that connects us to our deeper wells of creativity, intuition and curiosity, from which will spring genuinely new ideas and answers to questions we have not yet imagined.
~Piero Rivolta
Copyright 2015