The Side View is about the knowledge and intuition we use to navigate the world. It’s about how our minds meet the world, but it’s also about how our minds, when trained in the right way, change how we perceive what’s around us and within us. It’s about how we become skilled perceivers and doers, people who know the right details to attend to and the right actions to take.
The idea is that we can develop new ways of making sense of things, ways that change what we’re able to do in the world. From our perspective, sense-making is its own kind of craft, and the medium of this craft isn’t paint or stone or wood, but your own perception. Perception on this view is a skill you can shape through practice. We see our ability to pay attention to things as an art of its own. It’s an art of looking at things in a certain way.
These are good taglines for The Side View—attention is an art form; perception is a skill—but when we dig deeper into what this approach really means, to what it makes possible for us in our lives, we find something more interesting: When we start to look at our own perception in this way, we find that we can actually take hold of some of these dynamics and change them. In a way, the whole process of learning is about creating these transformations in perception. The Side View is about making sense of this process. By looking at perception and experience, we’re making sense of how we make sense.
We draw from philosophers, scientists, and athletes, as well as designers, artists, and contemplatives. What connects these approaches is the idea of practice, and the understanding that practice—in whatever discipline—is first and foremost about transforming perception and our ability to act in the world. Today there’s a tendency to focus only on the facts that experts produce, but we look at these people from a different angle. We study how they learn to see the world in new ways to begin with.
Take the architect as an example. The architect sees with an eye for design that the rest of us do not have, with a capacity for understanding how we might shape the environment and how the environment might shape us. There’s a level of understanding at work here that’s unique to architects, but we can say the same of carpenters, meditators, or athletes—they all have heightened levels of perceptual ability, and unique capacities for sense-making cultivated through practice, experience, and learning.
The ancient Greeks used the word askēsis, meaning exercise or training, to describe this process of transformation. We’re using this concept to explore the training needed to create skillful experts in any field, and to learn what the world looks like from their perspective. Our hope is that when we understand the nature of this process, new possibilities will open up for each of us in our own lives, possibilities that would otherwise remain hidden or inaccessible.
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