Documenting our Landscape

If all I can rely upon to know is my own experience, what counts as experience? This question was addressed by John Dewey over 100 years ago and he concluded basically that the experience contributing to one’s knowledge base had to be transformative in the sense that the experience itself contributed to a life changing moment. So what is, in this sense, life changing about an experience? For sure one can discount habitual behavior or anything that is repeated as if by rote. No, the life changing experience is one that causes one to pause, to take notice, to breath in the moment, to embrace the now of the moment as if to savor the whole. One’s senses are heightened, one loses a sense of time or place while retaining a sense of awareness of both time and place. One might say that one is in the zone while in the flow of the transformative experience.