One of my fav life souvenirs is the thirty minutes I spent with David Lynch (#). It was a short amount of total time spent, that has had a long lasting impression on me. It is the 🎁present of his presence that keeps on giving.
Recently and relatedly, I was on the phone talking with Jessie Shefrin about what is on her mind — which is always something good. Jessie had read something about an anthropology framework by Dr. Margaret Mead and the notion of three states of observation: 1/ observer, 2/ participating observer, 3/ self observer. My visual interpretation of how she described the framwork as a quick sketch is as follows:
And with the little dots at the bottom, I imagine there are different versions of ourselves that hold the three kinds of faculties of observation in different percentages. I labeled them with possible “names” in my diagram above as a note to myself of a few related thoughts to pick up another day.
My original draft of this visual thought is the sketch below, which is a lot more raw:
The key takeaway is that you can be too deep in it or too faraway detached from it. And the trick is to learn to transit between these two extremes. I think that is what presence is. I felt it in Lynch’s presence 🎁. —JM
