Moved

Consider the last time you were truly moved by something you saw or watched. A film, song, poem, or some other human creation.

If your experience is like mine, it’s like a rush of sudden understanding. An experience that gives substance and rich detail to a bunch of loose concepts and lingering feelings that have been boiling under the surface of your conscious thought but you’ve never been able to properly connect or articulate. Having such clarity around a complex thought feels rare and precious.

What strikes me about this experience is what the creator went through in order to deliver it to you. The creator HAD to have those same loose concepts, the same lingering feelings in their mind. But unlike you, they were able to link them together, to connect them into something concrete. And then, they found some impossible way to take that thought, translate it into photons, pressure waves, and human storytelling, so effectively, that you were able to decode and experience it in all the richness that you did. Accurate communication is so hard, so lossy, that it’s a miracle that you were able to get any degree of that original thought. And yet, you got enough of it to be MOVED. Can you even imagine the level of richness and understanding the creator originally had?

Perhaps the euphoria of being moved is less about the message itself, and more about discovering that there actually is somebody else out there feeling the same thing you feel, to the degree of richness and complexity that you feel it, despite your inability to communicate it.