Welcome to Refigurations. This blog began when I first discovered the power of metaphors in making sense of where my life was going and became interested in the way certain metaphors allowed me to change perspective and shape-shift so that my whole lifeworld seemed to change. ‘Refiguring’ is my personal attempt to understand how this process works by writing it out and thinking aloud. In these posts I share some of the metaphors, aphorisms and speculations that are helping me making sense of living in an age characterised by crisis in meaning.

Some time ago it occurred to me that every relationship, interaction and thought I have fit into their own circles with their own unique evolutions from beginning to end. At any point in time I’m engaged in many circles at the same time, sometimes so many that I lose sight of where I am. This can be problematic because if I forget that this circle has its own life and dynamic, and that circle is completely different, I can easily mix up or misapply insights across these circles. On the other hand, sometimes the overlap and connections between different circles provide a strong positive feedback in both directions and create those serendipitous moments where things ‘seem to come together’ as if by magic.

All these circles “turn back on themselves and connect up with the past in odd ways”, and if I forget where I am on a particular circle I forget to learn from my mistakes. Repeating the same mistake is like a circle never realising it has completed its revolution and mechanically doing the same rounds. When I end up playing the same role in an old game or find myself continuing to apply the wrong tools to a problem, I know that I’m just repeating the past. Coming full circle is that point in a process when a new insight is possible. When it is clear that what has been going on has completed itself – whether a thought, a mutual enquiry or a relationship – and that something genuinely new is possible.

At that point the circle can veer into a new direction and spiral outwards instead of retracing the same movement that completed it first time around. This is what I am interested in. The simple metaphor of a circle has already taken us into a shared process of sense-making. It may not be perfect and it may not apply directly across anyone else’s reality or lifeworld but it is already a scaffold around which we can have a conversation that explores how we can use the metaphor of a circle to avoid repeating habitual patterns of thought and behaviour.

In my work over the last years, in which I have journeyed between a lot of different conversations, I have come to see the power inherent in creating shared metaphors and in sense-making as a collaborative process. So much so that I think engaging with each other’s metaphors and meanings, and building collective figures of speech is perhaps the shortest route to building a viable culture for a future which looks more and more uncertain. This is an effective way to find our own compass to guide us through a time when many of the concepts and meanings we grew up with are doing less and less work in explaining how things are going for us, individually and collectively.

The working title for this blog was emergent figurative thinking because these figurations are emergent in the same way that meaning and life itself is a constant process of emergence. From within this process there is no way of gaining the ‘grand view’: a complete map of the totality of existence. There is no way of assessing exactly where I am on a circle because there is no telling how this particular one maps onto the much larger circle of my whole life. In this sense there is only a view from within. But there are instances of clarity when it is possible to see that a particular movement has completed itself and it is those moments when something new, something greater, emerges and settles as an aspect of reality which previously was outside my view.

That is the territory explored in the posts that follow. I am keeping this blog as a diary or notebook of short prose pieces and will update it as time allows and as my own figurations develop. As a project of thinking aloud about shared sense-making, I welcome dialogue should these words provoke any comments. But my experience with maintaining websites and blogs is that it is much better to do this in the slightly more personal format of an email. Should an overlapping circle of dialogues emerge, I will of course bring them into a shared space. That’s what I do.