Wellness Calendar: Friday 18 July

Perception
Perception: the ability to become aware of things by using the senses, as well as thinking and feeling.
How would you rate your ability to perceive things? Would you say you have a good antennae for being able to spot things and not only understand them in some way but also, potentially, give them meaning and purpose within your life? And when it comes to your art and other people’s art, are you able to explore and discover your own unique relationship to what’s in front of you?
There’s a school of thought that values each person’s own unique truth and the experiences they have in their own world. It’s called phenomenology.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, was keen to explore the continual conversation that exists between a person’s own body and the outside world as they perceive it. He noted that sometimes this relationship was passive and sometimes active. It’s through this ongoing dialogue that we get a lived experience, a ‘familiar place of our life’. How we express this constant negotiation of our reality is where art comes in. Art helps us to define our relationship with the world, time and time again, as we change and as the world changes around us.
What do you make of this?