In a talk on creativity and consciousness, the director David Lynch (rest in peace and weirdness), said that “If you have a golf ball-sized consciousness, that is the scope of your experience. When you read a book, you’ll have a golf ball-sized understanding. When you look out, you’ll have a golf ball-sized awareness. And when you wake up in the morning, a golf ball-sized wakefulness.”
I’ve been thinking about Lynch’s insights on creativity and awareness. I’ve also been thinking a lot about models. Not this kind.
This kind:
Being able to live outside of this intersection of influences is a fantasy chased by out-of-touch billionaires and folks who don’t know just how good they’ve got it. They’d love to permanently float above these needs.
The reality is that we don’t float; we stand on the shoulders of our environments. Access to things like housing, education, social support, and food security function as nutrients—and their absence creates deficiencies. That’s just the academic part, anyway.
My primary interest is in behaviour. Making peace with what we can’t control allows us to focus on what we can. Or at least influence. Your health practices are the energetic supply for this ability. The powerhouse of the cell, so to speak.
We don’t always consider our ambient health environments. Or reflect on the mechanics of clean water or electricity every time we make coffee or turn on the lights. Infrastructure just quietly hums along for most of us. This can be unconscious but I think that automatic is a more descriptive term. That’s what we use to characterize habits. Infrastructure functions like a lot like a societal-scale habit.
We might imagine a person’s experience of health to be kind of like a golf ball at the centre of the social determinants of health… present but not consciously aware of all factors during a typical day.
What about the liminal spaces between our automatic and conscious actions? What do those look like — and where might we be able to expand our conscious awareness?
With intention and energy, that golf ball might grow into cantaloupe territory. More awareness doesn’t necessarily translate into change. However, action begins with noticing. We have to be aware of something to respond to it.
What do you do with this combination of energy and awareness? Like a dream, there’s no way to make sense of things from a distance. But when you are in the moment, you’ll know.
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