It is only nonsense because it does not fit our paradigm!

In this first video Brian Goodwin talks about wellbeing suggesting it is a word that 'relates to qualities because it is a quality of feeling ... you know what it is like to have a sense of wellbeing, but you cannot turn it into a number ... because wellbeing is a coherent integrated experience of that dynamic whole by a person'. If this is the case, could understanding wellbeing require a different level of perception?

This brings me to the second video where Wade Davis is talking about interspecies communication. What does this have to do with wellbeing you might ask? Here Wade references how Amazonian tribes people can distinguish different ayahuasca plants that a western scientifically trained botanist would identify as one species. When asked how they do this the tribes people will say, 'you take each one on the night of the full moon and it sings to you in a different key'. How do the tribes people find the plants? They will tell you, 'the plants talk to us'. As Wade suggests using our rationale Descartian mind we might say that this is nonsense - talking plants is ridiculous and there is no scientific evidence for such a claim. However, from a different standpoint Wade offers the view that 'it's only nonsense because it doesn't fit into our paradigm'. Different belief systems cannot only make for different individuals they can also make for different levels of perception.



Some might argue with Brian Goodwin and say, of course wellbeing can be measured and talking about wellbeing exclusively as a quality is nonsense. After all there are many people searching for that illusive quantitative metric of happiness and wellbeing. However, like Brian Goodwin's assertion that wellbeing is a quality, that may be correlated but fundamentally is each persons own unique experience, it thus requires or at least invites us to imagine that in order to understand wellbeing, like the Amazonian tribes people communing with plants, we have to inhabit a different reality, perception and paradigm.

Which brings me to my last video by John Shotter talking about the amazingness of the ordinary. Towards the end of this video (minute 13 onwards) John says ' as we go back into the enormous complexity of everyday life on the one hand ... on the other hand quite ordinary people deal with that complexity all the time without too much trouble. It would be nice if we knew how it was done. This would take a very different kind of inquiry from that used to create theoretical ideals and scientific models. It’s a kind of inquiry that looks into all the small details, the different arenas of interaction. And in many spheres of activity that’s the work that remains to be done. That’s the work of the future.'

John Shotter- sep 08- The Amazingness of the Ordinary from Dawn Dole on Vimeo.

What would happen if we took an action inquiry approach to study and understand wellbeing? Can we westerners' caught in the dominance of analytical rationale logical thought step outside of our own paradigm and see the world with new eyes? It's not like many thousands, nee millions of ordinary people aren't already intuitively doing this already. The only difference is they don't draw attention to it, they simple get on with living in all its complexity and messiness doing the best they can. What if we took our understanding of wellbeing from the experiences of ordinary sentient people.