I mean you.

You’re not one person, but many.

We can’t say, “This is who I am: facts, data, provable/disprovable.”  We are many more things.

The scientist in her lab scrutinises the object of her inquiry, and questions and tests, and begins again.  Later, she returns home and enjoys the taste of the food she’s prepared* with drink and significant friends without a data file in sight, nor would she dream of “datafying” this experience.

Life is a mysterious thing: the one person is many things, and these many things are one.  How does that work?

We can’t discover what life is by pressing it hard in simply one way; we must find ways of journeying which allow us to both observe and experience.  Nassim Taleb suggests “flâneuring”** as a way to make ourselves available to more, citing examples of clerics who provided significant work in industry and science and more besides, who used their spare time to inquire and explore, allowing them to see ‘a free option when it is handed to us.’

McNair Wilson tells the story of a business guy in one of his creative workshops who was struggling to take notes on unlined paper with coloured pens and doodles – the things participants were encouraged to engage in by Wilson – objecting, “I’m a matter-of-fact logical person.”

Only part of the story.

Being pressured by his team to join in, this man found he was also someone else: “But today, I am taking the best notes ever and loving it.  What did you do to me … ?”

There’s a lot of mystery in life.  There’s a lot of mystery in you, in your life.  Go with it … flâneur (turning a noun into a verb, but try it anyway – I’ve been trying it for years and interesting things happen).  Be open to the things which life and the universe and, if you have a god, your god brings to you.

It’s both/and.  Focused inquiry and wandering, thinking and feeling, concluding and staying open, drawings and words.^

(*She’s probably played with the ingredients too, changing some on a whim, introducing something to play with the flavour.)
(**Flâneur: flaˈnəː,French flanœʀ/noun 1. a man who saunters around observing society.  Instead of being a tourist, who won’t allow himself to participate in the culture he’s observing, Taleb is encouraging wandering through life in a way which allows us to experience it.  He includes the story of a guy who experienced the cities he visited by literally following his nose – rather than following a tourist trail, he sniffed his way around a new place.)
(^The first recording “literacy” for Humans was the drawing kind: the visual arguably comes before the written.  Everyone can draw, we just forget we can.)