Here, I will talk about koans, life koans, and visual koans.
A koan is something that brings you to the very edge of logical reasoning. From there, you face the abyss, the impossibility of using logic to make sense of it.
But there’s more to our mind than logic. Our mind evolved to find solutions. If you eliminate the obvious solutions, i.e., the logical solutions, the mind goes beyond its line-up of expected meanings. This is when something new and fresh can emerge, seemingly out of nowhere.
It takes disruption to go beyond the tried and true. Or, rather, for the apparently true to reveal itself as meaningless, which prompts your mind to find new meaning.
The disruption can be an unpleasant surprise, something for which we do not have a ready solution in our usual playbook. It stops us on our tracks.
It can also be an intentional disruption, a moment when we choose to pause or slow down to pay more attention to what we usually take for granted.
I think of such moments as an active pause, because what happens is very different from when you pause a video. When you resume playing a paused video, the pause has not changed its contents. Not so for us human beings. If you were to resume precisely what you were doing before pausing, you would look robotic.
An active pause is the moment when change becomes possible.
Visual koans
Photography is like that for me. I encounter a scene which jumps at me as a potential image. It’s as if it asks me to engage with it. I start seeing it in terms of the image it could be as I frame it in my phone/camera. Later, I further engage with it in selecting from among several takes, cropping and, in some cases, changing it digitally.
It all starts with the intuition that there is some sort of meaning for me in the image that will come out of that. Not necessarily an explicit, logical meaning. In fact, when the message is very explicit and logical, it often turns out to be trite. It’s more like a sense of something more, and the specifics of that something more often change over time as I keep engaging with the image.
What comes out of that is very rich for me. What is so rich is not just the image itself. When I look at it, I am not just looking at the finished product. It is also a vivid reminder of the process through which it emerged. A meaning-making process. Or, maybe more accurately, a meaning-revealing process.
Of course, this does not mean that the image itself will be as meaningful to other people as it is to me, or even have any meaning at all for them. Sharing such an image is a bit like sending a message in a bottle in the ocean. It may never land. But it’s great when it does.
This website offers resources on how to be more present & engaged in your life.
