 "Then suddenly it hit me..." We use that kind of language to describe Aha!
moments, realizations that seem to come out of nowhere, but immediately
seem obvious. "How could I not have (a)realized, (b) considered or (c)
thought of that before?", we ask ourselves, incredulous at our previous
foolishness. Hit yourself on the side of the head already, that it was
stuck in there so long before it came out. Duh!
It's different
with children. I've watched children learning something, or discovering
something, or imagining or inventing something, and like adults they
get that look (you know, the wide eyes and the index finger pointing upwards,
which I'm convinced was the inspiration for the design of the
exclamation mark, which the Spanish have the good sense to put upside
down at the beginning of sentences to warn you to get ready for it). But with children it's easier, more natural, less earth-shaking, more frequent. They don't need warning.
It seems to me there are three different types of Aha! moments:
- Ideas -- when you suddenly imagine ("come up with") something new that is interesting or useful or expressive
- Discoveries -- when new information "comes to light" that provides important new perspective
- Understandings -- when stuff "comes together" and suddenly something "makes sense"
Mountains of books have been written on how to "spark" all three types of Aha! moments. I've written about how to imagine and how to think differently (type 1) and about where to look for information
whose discovery could innovate your business or a whole industry (type
2). Less has been written about the process of mental synthesis that
leads to breakthrough understandings (type 3), producing whole shifts
in how you see a problem or see the world, though much of what is
involved in Presencing and in Open Space is about allowing such understandings to emerge, naturally and unforced.
There are those who believe these sparks happen better in solitary
moments, and others who believe they happen better through
collaboration and brainstorming with others. I think there's room, and need, for both.
Notice
that my definition of all three types of Aha! moments include the word
"come". Indeed, we use the term "it suddenly came to me" to describe
all three types of moments. Mystics and consultants also talk about the
process of "letting come", opening yourself up to allow more such
moments to occur, to "present" themselves to you.
Perhaps its
just because I'm a slow learner, but I've found that as I get older,
such moments "come to me" less often. I still get just as many ideas
(in fact, because I've been practicing in both a personal and business
context and have acquired a lot more information to draw from, I get
many more ideas now than I used to -- I'm never at a loss for what to write on my blog). But I find I'm making fewer discoveries
of important or useful new information (probably because I've spent so
much time researching my writing and my work projects that I've already
cherry-picked the best -- and should look offline, in the real world, more often).
And, more importantly I think, the Aha! moments of understanding
are fewer and farther between than they used to be. They're the ones
that are so context-specific and dependent on all the baggage to be
organized in your own brain that they are the hardest to share with
others. Although reading Straw Dogs
probably produced my biggest Aha! moment in several years (that neither
I nor any group can 'save the world' because it is not in human nature
to change that fast), I doubt that my waxing rhapsodic about it has
sold many copies of Gray's book. In fact, all 15 of the bulleted
selections in my How to Save the World Reading List
provided me with Aha! moments of understanding, and it is readers who
have waded through most of the readings in this list, or at least
similar readings and experiences at similar points in their lives, who
report having had similar Aha! moments. We have a shared context to
produce them.
As Daniel Quinn says "people will listen when
they're ready to listen and not before" -- Aha! moments of
understanding only come to us when the context for them is in place in
our heads, and when the time is right. When I first read The Spell of the Sensuous
a decade ago I tossed it aside, where now it is one of my favourite
books of all time. At the time of the first reading, I just wasn't
ready for it.
In that sense, while the first two types of Aha!
moments are like small tremours that shake our world, the third type is
like a tectonic shift, massive, disruptive, causing our old 'world' to
crumble and causing us to rebuild new frameworks, new mental
infrastructure for our lives. They reshape our world, and frequently
produce 'aftershocks' that ripple through other aspects of our thinking
and our lives, altering them profoundly.
As the world becomes
more complex and our lives more specialized and disconnected from
others', our shared context is being continually diminished -- despite
the increase in cultural homogeneity in our society. As a result, I
think, shared Aha! moments of understanding are getting rarer, and
harder to come by. We fall back on poor proxies for shared
understanding -- namely shared 'values', icons, and political and
commercial brands.
What ways have you discovered to provoke
more Aha! moments in your own life, and in others? What's the most
important Aha! moment of your recent life, and how did it come about? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
