Experimentation has gone the way of the Maltese Falcon and the ever elusive perfect mate. We are constantly adding work tasks, home tasks, return-phone-call tasks, and reply-to-email tasks. It’s a world where the next thing to do is replacing the life that we’re all searching to live (mental note: Add, “find a life” to my task list).
What happened to experimentation? You try something and if it didn’t work out, you took what you learned and tried something else. Are we so busy and so programmed by the media that we not only base our values as human beings on the right combination of possessions and status dictated by the media? Do we not have enough time to make mistakes? Whatever happened to trial and error?
Trial and error has been so misinterpreted it’s worth redefining: it’s a process whereby you find the best way to reach a desired result by noting and eliminating errors or causes of errors; eliminating one way of not doing something you start yourself on a path to reach your desired goal.
On one occasion a young journalist challenged
Let’s look at the airplane autopilot analogy. In order to take its passengers on the correct navigational path, the internal guidance system computer keeps correcting the path of the airplane when the sensor detects that the plane is off the programmed path (i.e. drift).
When I write, I compose my sentences, choosing and changing words, rearranging sentences until I find the right combination of words and sentences that express my meaning. For me composition is just another word for trial and error.
As I go through this process, I find that I’m learning more and more, my prose is taking on figurative qualities (a happy side effect of wordplay) that I re-integrate into my prose, giving the overall composition more dimension as well as another level of meaning. This in turn gives my writing a uniqueness that expresses a style, soon to flourish as my own style.
Making mistakes is a part of the human condition. In many cases we gain valuable personal insight and gain rewarding experiential knowledge when we develop our own models rather than model ourselves around the success of others.
It’s like reading a travelogue, you know its itinerary, but you can’t experience the trip unless you go yourself. And even then your experience will not be the same as some one else’s trip.
I suppose that’s the only reason to experiment…so you can give your experiences to the world. For me, experience and experiment mean being alive rather than living a life.
