Making sense

I got an email from a Dutch friend, partly in response to my post about waiting for feedback. Margreet wrote about Winter Fires and how reading it had made her feel happy and optimistic about the future, but also about her reflections on what matters in life. Her partner works with people who have sensory disabilities—people who cannot hear or see and therefore whose experience of the world is shaped by other senses: touch, taste, balance, proprioception and others we may as yet not recognize or understand.

One of their friends who lives this experience recently spent the day with them at home, while she was reading Winter Fires, and she wrote about the thoughts and feelings she had about it.

But the reason for writing about that here is that Margreet sent me a link to this film, in which their friend also appears, and which I think deserves to be seen much, much more widely than the 340 views it has on You Tube. It’s called Nightwalking and I won’t say anything about it except to invite you to watch it: it will take less than 15 minutes.

This is what art does, at its best: open us to experiences, feelings and ideas we could not otherwise have and so help us develop our understanding of our own existence, within the limits of our capacities. Art does not teach: it enables us to learn. We all need to make sense, every one of us.

So many questions come out of this film—about the nature of humanity, about dignity and consent, about what we understand is happening, about value, meaning and purpose, about art. Watching people making sense, I think about how I myself make sense. No answers here, but as good a way to spend 15 minutes as I know.