An occasional blog post. This time from Alan about not knowing:
‘Selfiecity’ was an exhibition which analysed 150,000 ‘selfie’ photos taken by Londoners in the streets with their mobile phones as data to assess our happiness. The tilt of a head. The intensity of a smile. All is data. The thesis: if we can only treat what we see as ‘data’ and if we are clever enough to do the analysis, we will know everything about ourselves.
We love, don’t we, the idea that if only we become clever enough we will, like gods, be able to know all truth, to comprehend all things and, best of all, to predict the future. Along with the fantasy of growth without limit, this Promethian fantasy of seizing advantage through god-like knowledge of the world informs the way we live in the 21st century. We put our faith in scientific advance and cleverness. If we are smart we will have nothing to fear!
The truth of life is less palatable. We live in a world of not knowing, of unpredictability. Our ability to control and predict things is, mostly, a veneer we use to shield ourselves from our terror at being prey to events. In a moment everything can change. And what then of our cleverness. For me, the truth of this was brought home by an unscripted admission to a neurological ward in hospital. One minute I was fitting in a quick visit to the GP in between ‘important’ things ; the next (59 minutes later, to be precise) I was be-gowned and lying in a bed in an Acute Assessment Unit.
I say this not for sympathy, but because – as you’d expect – it provides a spiritual challenge as well as a physiological one. For me it’s felt like an invitation to consider what is really important when our self-scripted scale of priorities is re-written for us by an unknown hand – and it has been a reminder too of where we are really called to live life: not in the solid place of fictional certainty where the skills we imagine we need are ‘knowing’, ‘planning’ and ‘scheming’, but in an altogether more uncertain and in-between place where the important life-skills are ‘waiting’, ‘listening’, ‘watching’ and ‘hoping’. And which is, in fact, our reality.