Treat yourself like an experiment
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
More than 180 years ago, Emerson exhorted us to live our lives experimentally. To be bold, fail if we must, and learn from our mistakes and our accomplishments. His quote has always been at the back of my mind ever since I came across his writing during an undergraduate course on Emerson's work. While he is often seen as one of intellectual lights that the United States has produced, it's interesting to see this theme of experimental living carrying on in the work of acclaimed comic writer Grant Morrison. He had this to say in an interview on Off Panel:
David Harper: Do you think it's important for creative people to put themselves in new situations like that and to try new things?*
Grant Morrison: Well, I guess it's important for some of them. And I'm sure there are creative people who can quite happily just lie in their bed, like Marcel Proust and produce gigantic novels based on the cakes that they're eating in bed. So it doesn't necessarily work for everyone or it's not necessarily a necessity for everyone, but certainly for me and the type of work I do, which is quite wide-ranging. You're working in comics, a Batman is different from a Superman, is different from a Wonder Woman, is different from the X-Men. So you're trying to get as much input as you can to make sure that you can approach all these different ideas from different angles. So for me, it was definitely very important. I just thought it was a fundamental thing. But my whole approach has always been to treat myself as an experiment, that I am the laboratory for the work. So I'll throw myself into all kinds of insane situations just so that I've got material. I'm a bit cruel to myself in that way. Grant just goes out and has to do stuff so that I can write about it.*
Influencers, politicians, corporations all seem to project an air of unshakeable certainty, and this filters into our daily lives (and vice versa, I suppose). But too much certainty can also be a bad thing — just look at all the people who run roughshod over others, smug in their own superiority. But what if in whatever way we can, we live experimentally? To be that much less certain of our beliefs, our philosophies, and our perceptions...what would that mean for us and the people around us?