Are ideas owned? Or can they rhyme across lives and bring us into a new state of care and connection?

"Every act is virgin, even the repeated ones." QBD # 20 for Ingold Weaving Lines

Do you ever worry that your ideas are being taken by others?

Have you ever come across a post or paper or book that says exactly what you were just about to write, or that does something similar to what you’ve just done?

Are you ever surprised to realize others have had the same idea? An idea you were sure was original? Have you presented an idea to your colleagues or peers only to have them show you papers or books (or movies or pieces of music) that are ‘already doing that’? Do you worry others will think you’ve taken their ideas, when they see how similar they are?

Most creators have had some experience of this, and it has been going on for as long as we have been creating. Even as a teenager, I remember friends of mine (popular musicians) being annoyed that new bands seemed to be stealing their sound. Still, this sort of ‘stealing’ seems especially obvious in the blogosphere and on social media.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen and heard this from colleagues on various platforms who are quick to point out how much their work is like something they’ve come across elsewhere. I’ve also felt this from both sides myself. And there seems to be something good in it, something more than we can attribute to technology.

Still, some might assume this recent increase in the closeness of our creations is because there are so many people relying on the same AI algorithms to feed them digital resources. And it’s true, many are now using AI to write their posts, and those posts do have a similar feel. (As

Michael Garfield

writes here, many of us in the podcast world now receive AI generated pitches to be on our shows, and the AI generation is well-written, and obvious.)

Today we have the choice of asking our technology (Chat GPT, Claude, Google Labs) to write outlines or papers or blog and social media posts for us. Those technologies pull together all the ideas that all the humans have ever put into digital language and come up with a summary which is considered a new post. They often use the same words and phrases (i.e., ‘deep dive’), and their lack of typos, not to mention their overall lack of vibes, make ‘machine text’ pretty obvious, at least to anyone who has experimented with making one. I imagine this will become obvious to everyone in time. Still, such programs can be great for helping us write summaries or outlines, or helping us delegate some of that work so we can increase our bandwidth in a world where we are in constant risk of complexity fatigue.

But those are not the posts I am referring to here. So let’s leave them behind.

What I’m referring to are the posts that matter, the posts that have live vibes, the posts that so many of us are giving so much of our time and energy to each week, the posts we are reading and really feeling, because they matter, and because life matters to those writing them.

What I’m referring to are the posts that reflect what we care about most, the words that take time and a search for meaning, those sentences whereby we strum the strings of whatever strikes us in the world as sacred.

I’m referring to those posts that have taken our lives to be able to write, the ones with words that might have taken weeks or years to live into. Only when it matters that much does the question of whether or not it was stolen become a question that matters.

So has it? Have they? Have our ideas been taken? Have we been scooped?

Has someone stolen your thunder? Beat you to it? Have you lost? Should you give up on whatever it is you’re creating that is similar? Delete it all?

No. Please don’t.

You have not lost and these experiences are not reasons to despair.

This is not how you are supposed to feel, though it’s understandable that you would; the world is set up for it. The way most platforms work now—those places we now share our creations—is through what philosopher C Thi Nguyen writes about as gamification.

We tend to assume gamification as a rule rather than a choice, and this assumption may be keeping us from the world we long to create, and from sharing our creations. A world we envision together, one that celebrates the synchronization of ideas and actions towards common goals, is one where we extend one another’s creations through both their similarities and divergences, not having to choose one or the other side.

At the moment, however, our stance (at least economically and professionally) is against shared attributions when it comes to desires like ‘going viral’ or ‘getting followers’ or showing off the digits of a subscriber list. We try to pinpoint it all to one individual, when there are always multiple individuals behind it. The worth in all this is being called into question from many sides, but these are still goals we are prompted to want. And they have bodily consequences.

If you can remember such an experience, how did it make you feel?

Was there a feeling of defeat? Of frustration? Of apprehension?

Have you stopped to wonder why that might be? And is that feeling necessary? Where is it coming from, and why we are we going along with it?

We could feel differently about it. As I will discuss below, I’ve realized lately that these sorts of events are actually callings into something deeper and lighter, something we often feel as synchronicity.

What would it mean for such experiences to become a source for feelings of connection and joy instead? We could come to think of ourselves and these moments as an experience of good health.

What would it mean for these moments to register as bodily experience of uplift, the way it feels when you experience something synchronistic? What if we saw them as portals into community building? As chances for distributive social expansion?

What if it felt like synchronicity? What if the digital world started to rhyme? What if these experiences connected our lives like the lines of a poem? Always towards new collaborations.

Could this begin to feel like synchronicity? Could the world rhyme for us? What if experiences across lives connect like the lines of a poem? What if we began to understand ourselves as multiplicities? Understand that we are creating together, even when we do not know it yet, and that these moments of fractal similarity are showing us our patterning so we can better steer?

To begin to feel such moments like this, and some of you maybe already do, would mean embracing different systems than the ones we now assume. It would mean holding the paradox of individualism and communal creation without yo-yoing between them as if they demanded a choice.

It would mean being strong in our unique contributions and realizing those as contributing to a wider life.

It would mean attribution of ideas in trees or families of relation rather than pinpointing them to the fame of one name, but also still giving credit to those who do this in ways we learn from and want to share.

It would mean a different bodily feeling to ‘having our ideas taken’, one that means we are processing with others and even as others, towards something we co-steer.

Still, I get the resistance. Having our ideas taken does not sound like something we want. Most of us think ‘having our ideas taken’ is a bad thing, at least at first, but what if that is actually the point? Ideas taken like medicine? Ideas taken under our wing? Ideas taken out with the spirit of love in which we accompany our dog for her nightly walk? Ideas taken in the sense of adding a node to a multi-dimensional mesh that changes with each of us, and for which we share responsibilities. Getting a grip on that is extremely challenging, and possible. And it could be act of caring for one another and the connections we share.

Don’t get me wrong though, I am not advocating for stealing.

Taking what others have worked hard to build and acting as if it is ours is not good for anyone participating in it, and does not spread the shared space I’m hoping to touch here. Taking someone’s work as if it is your own is about as vibe-filled as the algorithmic posts mentioned above, and neither are sustainable or much fun for anyone. Let’s steer clear of that.

After all, the strength of an idea is in its living tree, in the many branches and ways it spreads and evolves and connects as life, transparent in intention, and yet oh so complex.

When the ideas are part of a living tree, it is natural that there will be slight variations and near repetitions, fractal patterns that spur and spread simultaneously and come in as rhythms of synchrony.

We can look back and see these patterns in the ways we have developed.

Think of how Leibniz and Newton developed the calculus more or less at the same moment, without even knowing the other one was doing so. There are numerous other historical examples like this that are just as potent. There are so many that terms like ‘multiple discovery’ and ‘simultaneous invention’ have been coined to explain them. There are now websites listing ideas and new technologies that have come into the world in distributed synchronicity—and that many people had originally at once, in common patterning.

Photo by Parag Mehta on Unsplash

‘Stealing’ is the word Austin Kleon uses for how we build on one another’s creativity in other ways, by writing like our favorite writer until we can stand on our own, or playing the chords of our favorite musicians till we can write our own songs. In his bestselling book Steal Like an Artist from a decade ago, he gives people permission to continue and expand the lines of creativity that inspire them, providing an early guidebook towards staying decent and inspired in the digital age. I’m using the same word as Kleon (stealing) in the title of this piece because it evokes the feeling I’ve heard expressed lately from friends and colleagues. I’m also using it because of Tim Ingold.

Ingold’s work is the subject of a recent Love and Philosophy podcast, the QBD summary of which you’ll find below. And though our work is very different, and though I only discovered it after having come up with my own dissertation subject, there are distinct rhymes: I talk about path-dependencies and he talks of the life of lines; I write of cognition as way-making relative to the hippocampus, and he (long before me) writes of cognition as wayfaring relative to anthropology.

And yet, it goes deeper.

Read his books and you’ll see that parts of his own lines come from the inspiration of Deleuze, the wayfaring from Gibson, the bodily concerns of Merleau-Ponty. And yet it is also only his own. Look into where those same scholars got their ideas and you’ll see they culled them from others and made some new path from them, extending the lines and paths that many of us now continue to extend.

And yet, it goes still deeper: Most of these people, including Ingold, had their ideas before they found them in the works of others. Most of us have the ideas before we find others who have had them, and yet the others who had them are the ways we find out how to express our own thoughts. We are all indebted to one another, and that is why the tree stays alive. Many of these writers found one another, the way I found them, because they had ideas similar to one another. From above time, across space, this is synchronous. And it’s quite the gift. Writers like Tim Ingold bring a presence and craft of writing that brings these paths together and allows us to feel them in common force, which means they will be picked up by others, continued and furthered. This is the real skill, the real craft, and the reason these names persist through time and space.

Part of my conversation with Ingold was to acknowledge and respect this tree he is so beautifully extending, all these past lines and paths that make it possible for me to create with those inspirations today. I want to do this for the Gibsons, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and many others, as all are part of the landscape upon which my paths form.

Many people have worked their entire lives developing the ideas, practices and tools now so neatly culled and culminated by the rest of us, or that we take as foundational to grow new worlds. This is how it has always been, and will always be, so long as the work, and world, is living. In our conversation, Tim and I talk about how much of the work he pioneered is now the norm, though few remember he pioneered it (such as an acceptance of animal cognition, see On Reindeer and Men). This tree of memory is important. It is important we remember one another, even as we allow the patternings to extend beyond any one life. In remembering those who held the branches when no one else would, others can find the strength to continue caring for them.

What we don’t want is for those ideas to come with the spirit of the machine rather than in the spirit of the living; it only works if we feel the communal life in which those ideas formed.

What we don’t want is for those ideas to come with the spirit of the machine rather than with the spirit of the living; we feel them only through the communal life in which they formed. And one way this continues is through highlighting the branches and paths that have inspired and created the buds now bursting for us, whatever those are and wherever we are.

This is a hard nuance to hold, but it could not be more urgent in a time where we are being prodded to give our lives to optics and technologies. If we give ourselves over to the ‘us’ of old, to all our past creations which are now the materials used to train the machines we call AI, we are literally destined to repeat ourselves until we stall. But if we stop doing work because someone else has done something like it, that is also a stall. The life is holding both and entering the doors that open in their common patterning.

Can we hold this tension? Is there a portal beyond the trap?

Absolutely.

And it has to do with easing our sense of self while tightening our sense of community. It has to do with respectful continuance and wild montaging, re-arranging and creating such that life renews for us and as us.

Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

If we start to see these moments of digital rhyming as signs pointing us back to life, we might also come to understand these moments as forms of synchrony. And feeling synchrony is a very different bodily experience than having something stolen from us.

As I write this, I’m remembering a conversation I had with a literary agent, for example; he was upset about being scooped. He called me because he’d just seen that a book contract had been made for an idea very close to the one we were just about to pitch to all the big publishers. We’d put so much time and energy into it and it felt as if we now we had to give that up. Sadly, we did. Today I realize how wrong we were, how there was plenty of room in the big sea of the literary world for both those books and how it needed both. I wonder how often others have had this experience and stopped when they should have seen that as a sign to go forward in communion.

Another time that comes to mind: I’d been working for months on a few papers about technology and urban spaces. I was trying to find a way we might connect technological and ecological landscapes. We had a meeting to discuss this at the university where I was working back then. Upon sending the papers around, I’d asked people to critique the arguments directly. Instead, my well-meaning colleagues mainly took turns listing references they’d searched out and found that were similar; it almost became a game to come up with something no one had heard of yet.

It was as though the energy of some addictive social game took over, the game of upping one another with references or pointing out books no one else had heard of yet, as if we have been mining the libraries.

To be clear, I love these games of association as much as anyone and I have also played them. I would probably live in a library if they would let me, and it is exciting to find new books or papers that connect to my work. I understand how easily we can get carried away.

What bothers me here, however, is not that we share these references but rather that the game has become the focus, often at the expense of shared connection. The orientation lately leans towards ‘this has already been done before’ as if there is a dichotomous choice whereby we must either come up with something totally new or else become a ‘follower’ only.

But neither of these alone are helpful. As neuroscientist Gyuri Buzsáki has said to me more than once, there is nothing new under the sun. None of us comes up with anything from scratch. We are all reading books, listening to others, receiving and giving at once. Holding the paradox and understanding our creations as ‘always both ours and built from the work of others’ means finding the flow of this inherent tension without trying to solve it so neatly.

There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. — Octavia Butler

In other words, that we are coming up with ideas others have also come up with is not something to disqualify them but rather to show us where they connect. In fact, that might just be the point of creation itself—to find new connections and to extend the path and lines as we go, to open perspective through linking the parts where they overlap, as part of life rather than the only star in it. For all to follow only one person means for all to tread the same line, and there will be an end to it. For all to extend the line over space and time in common pattern is without beginning or end; it is continuity.

Living this, not only understanding it, is powerful. It requires us to reconsider what we mean by synchronicity and simultaneity, and to reimagine spectacle at its core. Our ‘spectacle’ is everything we assume are signs of power and success, the Optics, the obsession with the way we appear to one another rather than the way we feel together, and how easy it has become to ignore the living tree that holds this feeling together.

It worries me that it is becoming easier for some of us to give up on caring. We are exhausted by the gamification and would rather not participate. But caring is not the game; it’s only been confused with it.

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

Care is what makes life survivable. Giving up on it is to give up our sensory bodies, the source of all that matters to us, even when we are in the trance of the spectacle. Care is the only real power we have, the only paths towards better ways of life. At the moment, many around us seem to have lost that thread, and having lost it, we feel unmoored, as if we cannot find meaning, as if meaning does not exist. We feel this loss because the loss is ours.

My father used to say ‘There are leaders and there are followers in this world. Which one are you?”

He meant it well, and it taught me something back then. Still, as I’ve gotten older, and as the world has changed, I’ve realized that we need new words, something beyond this dichotomy.

Leading and following are part of the old paradigm, at least so long as they are considered binaries—you are either a leader or a follower—as if this is a choice one has to make. It’s not. In different situations, we are both, and more than both.

The new paradigm asks us to widen our sense of self into a multiplicity of experience, sensuality, and care, whereby we are all sometimes leading the walk through the forest or up the mountain or to the lake, and where we are all sometimes following another to those places. It is one where we are not only leading, and not only following, but also doing so many other things—watching out for others, bringing up the back of the line so no one is lost, pushing a wheelchair, using crutches, holding the hand of a child and walking at their pace.

We are always following in the paths of others, even as we build new ones. These lines are multidimensional; we are always leading those who will come after us.

This spirit of multiplicity is very different from the spirit of Optics.

What we experience as presented to us as reality are Optics.

What we feel in our bodies as that experience is reality.

In each moment, we can pause to realize the difference.

We can ask: How does this makes me feel? What is its desired effect? What was actually experienced by the one who sculpted it for this effect?

When we see or hear or experience someone or some situation in the media, we can get swept away in the Optics being presented. Optics are not only visual, they include all senses; they are a whole body experience. Which is why we can get swept away and not know it, not realize how they are making us feel.

When we scroll whatever we scroll and are taken up in the Optics, we might feel bad about it, and yet we get swept up in thinking of it as a sign of success. We get swept up in trying to become what has made us feel miserable, which means we are creating more situations of misery for ourselves and for those who follow rhyming paths.

We try to become ‘what is desirable’ even if it gives us a feeling we do not desire, not realizing that these images have been sculpted for that effect and that those people do not feel them. They do not actually feel like the feeling they are sculpting to present as their experience. If you take some time, and a deep breath, we can feel what is authentic in the posts and images and sounds that come to you, and we can learn that when we share those or support those, we are spreading the feeling they give us. Sharing is good, but only when we are aware of the feeling—is it one of care?

It’s confusing to unravel this, to hold this paradox, to understand that the images and words have been sculpted to give us the impression that those sending them had a feeling that they likely never had. We think they are successful, which then becomes the way we define success, which means we are defining success by nothing that was ever actually there, so it cannot ever actually be achieved: it is like trying to become an illusion. All we are doing is becoming like an illusion, disconnected from one another and ourselves.

This is why so many people feel as if they’ve failed or as if they are not as good as all these others in this space of sensory Optics—we are not connecting to one another there, but rather comparing one another.

In this sensory space of Optics, which is bodily, we are interacting with one another’s Optics, with the sculpted illusions that were never actually felt, but that make us feel bad because we cannot achieve them. In so doing, we rarely touch or feel touched and we confuse the Optics with the reality; we even call it reality, as in ‘reality TV’. This conundrum is now extremely hard to escape, as it layers over and over itself and tangles together all that we experience each day. We have to help one another get a grip.

Our referencing, whether visual Optics or Optics of another sort, whether those we experience in philosophy class, in the neuroscience lab, or around the dinner table, have started to feel more like a fight to see who can create the best illusion. They deal in binaries rather than seeing binaries as portals into multiplicities. When you combine this spirit with the one already mentioned relative to our dependence on our past selves frozen in algorithms, and our confusion about technology, it is no wonder we are losing ourselves, losing our sensory experience of the wonder of life.

What is dangerous about this, as I feel it, is the same thing that is dangerous about assuming ‘good Optics’ is a good definition of success. It isn’t. We give our power to ‘the illusion’, the Optics, because of the inertia, but with practice and support, we could stop it.

We are confused to think that ‘getting the most attention’ means whatever is getting that attention is ‘right’ or has taken the right path in life. These days, it may just as often be the opposite.

That is the paradox, but we are not holding it, we are being controlled by the swing of it. Many have lost the connection to care, lost the thread, and even though they feel it, they continue trying to win the inertia of attention, because it is all they know and it is what everyone seems to assume as successful. Everyone pretends it feels like success, even when they know it doesn’t, so as not to burst the bubble others hold them in. We do it so as to maintain that power, even though it fees bad and is moving us towards less, not more, connection to the beating heart of life.

We might fall into this same trap. And it is a trap. Because it is a very low grade of living, no matter how gilded it is.

Doing something ‘to create the illusion’ will give us the illusion, which is to say, we will be living it as if it were our only that choice. But illusion always requires more of itself to sustain itself. Perhaps you feel that in the current climate—everyone seems to be living in a state of hyper anxiety and trying to keep up. Our world seems to be oriented towards words that mean two things at once, defined by how much attention we get, not by the feeling or content.

What if we changed that through our awareness of it? What would we want to point towards? What if instead of supporting ‘what will get the most attention’ we decided to support what makes us feel healthy, connected and able to exist without being judged by Optics? How would we want to make the world? What would we like to exchange and make worthy? It doesn’t have to be what is assumed so today.

What if we started trying to make a collective idea smarter rather than trying to prove to others that we know about better ideas with the illusion that we know everything?

It’s hard to imagine because it literally requires a different cognitive habituation, one that does not center the ‘I’ but, rather, is ‘we’ based, yet still holding the ‘I’ as essential and different, embracing that paradox.

The more I think about it, the more I realize this could come through widening our idea of synchronicity, understanding it as describing an interaction beyond the individual life.

As a teenager, I loved the work of Carl Jung and his idea of dreams and the common themes that connect. This shared movement is also true of our waking dreams, of the goals and dreams we have in our waking, working lives—there are patterns that connect us through all dimensions of time and space, and we are the part of life that has become aware that we can choose those dreams. They are signs for all of us, not only to heed but to make.

These waking dreams share archetypes, and we notice them as synchronicities.

Here is a quote that says this in another way:

“Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time.”
― C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

That could also be true of across time and space in other ways, for what seems to be empty space or the time of the past or future might actually be experienced and represented as the lines and paths that connect us.

Another quote in this direction from that same book is as follows:

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not. [Ch. XL]”

― C.G. Jung

In other words, the center is everywhere, and we are making meaning with the rhymes we make of our lives as they co-create. It is these rhymes that shift the whole, that is the space of dark matter or ‘emptiness’ that connects. We can choose what success is, what money is, and we can choose what we want to be and do with it. But we can only do it together, as part of larger life.

When we feel like others have stolen our ideas, it might actually be a chance at feeling ourselves part of a larger pattern. When we have spent years of our lives to gain some understanding so as to share it through our writing, our art, our conversation, or even just our presence in this world, it may be we have also been creating poetry with the world around us, poetry that we cannot read except with one another’s help. We are the synchronicity but we need others to feel it as ourselves.

You might be asking: what does synchronicity really mean though? The following is from the current general entry about it in Wikipedia:

Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept introduced by Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, to describe events that coincide in time and appear meaningfully related, yet lack a discoverable causal connection.^[1] Jung held that this was a healthy function of the mind, although it can become harmful within psychosis.

…Jung developed the theory as a hypothetical noncausal principle serving as the intersubjective or philosophically objective connection between these seemingly meaningful coincidences. After coining the term in the late 1920s^[4] Jung developed the concept with physicist Wolfgang Pauli through correspondence and in their 1952 work The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche.^[5][6][7][8] This culminated in the Pauli–Jung conjecture.^{[9][10][11][12][13]} Jung and Pauli's view was that, just as causal connections can provide a meaningful understanding of the psyche and the world, so too may acausal connections.

But what if what we call ‘causality’ (as it is meant above) is little more than our ability to connect the paths from our position?

What if, from another position, this is the experience of two lines of a poem? What if causality can become our way of noticing the paths we are making and where they do and do not lead? What if this can help us change them or shift their rhythms together so as to move through the portals they will then unfold? What if every event can be seen as part of numerous paths and we are the turn of the kaleidoscope that opens them? What if these are synchronicities within the multidimensionality that is our action in common, as the growing tips of life coming to recognize its own living?

All that might sound too philosophical, or too mystical. And all that would require a few philosophical papers to really unpack, but that is not the point. The point is that feeling like our ideas are being stolen, or feeling that we may have been stealing ideas without knowing it, might be reframed (so long as the intention and orientation are toward the life of the idea itself) as synchronicities. These may be synchronicities that are localized neither in the individual nor in the space but rather in our relation. They are not end points but doors into new ways of being alive as multiplicities.

In most of the cases where our ideas and ways of expressing them rhyme (as my ideas did with Ingold’s, or as the ideas of Deleuze did with Tim’s), we are strangers and it is the rhyming of our ideas that brings us together. It gets our attention and introduces us to one another. In such cases, no one has ‘stolen’ anything but rather, we have been given an introduction into new layers of life. We have noticed that we rhyme and in so doing, extended and fractal-ized the lines of poetry that hold us in larger lives. Rather than feel someone has stolen our thunder, we can join them together to feel an even more powerful force.

Many of our societies and communities seem to set us up to feel as if we are in a race of ideas and only one will win. The urgencies we face today, however, are forcing us to rethink what it means to be an individual, what it means to be human, what it means to have meaning at all. In this urgency, we have the chance to turn from the dominant Complexity of Optics and the binary mindset that sustains it, and towards a Complexity of Love, which is one that allows binaries to be as they are, and then notices the movement holding them so as to enter new forms. This embraces the synchronicities we experience as collaboration towards making way with a larger connected body, even as we are always only ours.

Every polarity is also a multiplicity.

The binary rollercoaster or whiplash we experience between ‘original’ and ‘already done’ is a confusion. It is us confusing ‘our means of communication’ with what we are communicating about—confusing the form of the idea with the reason we want to share it.

This confusion is in the very grooves or our languages and technological choices at the moment, and if we give over to its inertia, we are giving over to a world that produces more of its current traps.

What if we touch the earth again and remember how intensely wondrous it is? Right now, we can take a moment to realize that we have the power to put seeds in the ground and care for them, and that in so doing, wholly new lives appear.

If you let yourself consider this deeply, it’s almost mind blowing. We can participate in living, and we can know that we are doing it. Just imagine if we lost that capacity! Right now, we may be close.

The urgencies we face today can be better met if we find ways to lean into these larger wondrous lives and rhymes. When we are shocked by how similar our messages are to one another’s, let’s let that be an opportunity. Let’s feel these other creations as musical notes finding and harmonizing with our own across dimensions of time and space.

Because no matter who we are, we owe our life to others. We owe the chance we now have at path-making to those who continued to make paths. The more we can realize the weave of those lines, the more we can attribute to others, the more we can trace and share threads, the stronger becomes our tapestry.

As Ingold shows us, the world is built of lines entangled, not blocks stacked upon one another. He writes about how we can see generations as threads entangled into ropes, not layers slathered as if covering previous ones. It is these robes that hold the world together, that make it flexible, and that allow it to grow.

A quote I have always liked by the French poet Rene Char goes like this: "Every act is virgin, even the repeated ones."

We are patterns that share patterns. Our lives are fractals, all showing the same pattern but none the same form. This is why synchrony can exist. It is a harmony across dimensions that depends upon these rhymes, this spatiotemporal synchronicity, this entanglement that is beyond our old ideas of causality, space, time, and self, and that is also holding them.

Holding paradox is being able to have original ideas and rejoice in others having them at the same time. How remarkable, after all, that we can have the same ideas as one another even though we have never met or shared them. How remarkable that this is how we find one another, in patterns spreading and resonating.

Philosophy as a Practice for this post:

Learn to notice the ways your life rhymes with those around you. Imagine your lines as part of a grand living poem, with so much more yet to be read and written.

QBD #20: Tim Ingold, Episode 55

For the 55th episode of the Love & Philosophy podcast, I had a discussion with Tim Ingold, who has ideas similar to the ones I write about in neuroscience and philosophy—we consider all cognitions continuous with locomotions and lines of movement—though he had them before me, and in the context of anthropology. As he says himself, however, they are ideas he first had for himself, too, as I did, and then found reflected in the work of those who came before him, such as Gibson, Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, as I found mine in his own.

Reading his work and all the work that has inspired him, deepens my own and extend the lines of care in all of them. It was an honor to discuss these lines with him and to consider the role of care in it all. We ended with a question Ingold appreciates from Hannah Arendt, which I’ll paraphrase here as—Do we love the world enough to take responsibility for it? Yes, we do. Here is a summary of our conversation.

♡ Life is Lived in Lines

Though he may not be as well known in the US as he is in Europe and the UK, Tim Ingold is a renowned anthropologist and philosopher who has been thinking deeply and writing articulately about some of the most challenges issues of our times for decades. Looking back at debates like nature vs nurture, or previously wild and now accepted ideas such as ‘animal cognition’, one finds that Tim was already saying what has now become the norm, though he was criticised for it at the time. Being among the first is rarely easy, and yet he knows he was not the first, for he learned this from the Sámi people of Finland who depend on their reindeer, and so many others around the world who have long lived this knowledge, even if they are relatively ‘new’ to academic scholarship.

Another thing I appreciate about Ingold's work is how it bridges the natural sciences, humanities, and cultural studies, offering a unique perspective on human existence as intimately connected with the lines we traverse in life, lines that never fit into only one category, and never quit begin or end. They are lines we feel and then find in our resonance with others so as to bridge and extend—this is what I write about above as the rhyming of our ideas, or our larger synchronicities.

It is not easy to move across so many disciplines with such lines, and yet Ingold has managed to build well-walked paths connecting art, philosophy, architecture and anthropology. Such anthropology comes in the tradition of Gregory Bateson, who is also one of Tim’s inspirations (and my own), but Ingold writes with a poetic and literary clarity that distills ideas in ways even the greats like Bateson did not. People really like to read him, and he puts a lot of time and care into his craft.

Two main themes he writes about that inspire my own in Waymaking are those of lines and of wayfaring. In a very general sense, we are both discussing life as the ways we make, and we can draw or represent these for one another as lines and traces through time and space, including conceptual and emotional spaces. We all have lines, and we are all connected by them to all we understand as cognition, which is itself a movement.

♡ Unending Lines and Entangled Traces

Ingold has written two books on lines, one called Lines: A Brief History and the other is The Life of Lines. Both revolve around the concept of lines—not just as physical paths but also as metaphors for the connections and trajectories of our lives.

Walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, and writing all unfold along lines when we try and represent them and share them with one another. Ingold argues that these activities are not just actions but are integral to the way we make meaning and connect with one another across cultures and generations.

🌳 Nature, Culture, and Responsibility

One of the themes of our conversation is the need to revisit our understanding of nature and culture. These are often presented as binaries, as if there is a choice, or as if neither word is real. Ingold suggests we hold them both as important and real and part of shared patterns. To do so, he suggests we return to the original meanings of these terms: "nature" as the power to give birth and "culture" as the responsibility to nurture and sustain life. In so doing, he challenges us to think of nature and culture not as opposing forces but as interwoven elements of our experiences and responsibilities, and as calibrations of synchronicities.

♡ Education as an Act of Love

Ingold and I both draw inspiration from Hannah Arendt's notion that education is about deciding to love the world enough to take responsibility for it. This perspective sees education not as a mere transfer of knowledge but as an ethical commitment to nurturing future generations. Ingold emphasizes that teaching should be seen as an integral aspect of anthropology, not an adjunct to it, as it embodies the act of engaging with and learning from others.

❁The Body and The Line

I found Ingold’s critique of embodiment very helpful. Embodiment is a word we use in cognitive science to help us get out of the habit of considering all cognition as ‘in the brain’ or ‘in the head’ but Ingold points out that this word can also sound like cognition is trapped inside the body, as if it is entombed there. It might be better to consider cognitions as bodily actions rather than ‘embodied’ actions. This brings up the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who was another early advocate of cognitions as movements or ‘movement as a way of knowing’.

A seasoned cello player, Ingold connects playing the cello to this moving philosophy of lines, viewing it as a gestural expression that pulls lines of sound from the instrument. This musical metaphor extends to a broader critique of common academic concepts like 'embodiment' as expressed above, which Ingold finds limiting. He argues for a more dynamic view where life and experience are about being in motion—constantly attending, responding, and forming connections.

💫 Reimagining Our Future

Ingold is both reflective and critical of current trajectories, particularly the over-reliance on digital technology, which he believes is unsustainable in the long term. We will soon not be able to depend upon it, he believes, and so we best not forget our bodily skills. He advocates for a return to fundamental, time-tested skills and the care that comes along with them, for these can ensure the continuity of human knowledge and life amidst technological advances. In doing so, Ingold stresses the importance of maintaining lines of tradition and learning from the past to secure a sustainable future, but also a future where we are still able to care and connect.

♡ A Call to Thoughtfulness

Ingold's work calls for a thoughtful engagement with the world that is also a movement—a mode of being that involves attentive and responsible action and care that understands each life as part of living lines that extend beyond it. He believes in fostering environments where education is not just a preparation for life but an essential practice of living. By embracing the complexity and entanglements of life, Ingold suggests we can create living worth living. We still have meaning, we still have one another, and we are connected by the lines that we collectively and individually trace as part of life, not as standing outside of it.

Ingold's words serve as a reminder of the depth and richness of life as a tapestry of lines and connections, and we notice those through our synchronicities and commonalities, which then allow us to learn from all that is unique about each perspective. It's a call to reflect on the pathways we tread and to extend those lines in ways that enrich both individual lives and the fabric of communities worldwide. By choosing to walk these lines thoughtfully, we participate in an ongoing conversation about how to might live with care, wisdom, and responsibility.

Thank you for being here.