In the Eye of the Beholder

One reason my partner, Bob Dickman, and I blog is that it gives us the chance to get feedback from you on our book “The Elements of Persuasion,” particularly on the exercises we suggest. One of these (in the chapter of Awareness) is a walking exercise where you go out for a stroll and notice what is that captures your attention. It will always be one of the five basic story elements (in the terms used by the early Greeks: fire, earth, water, air or space) because that is how human beings are wired. We suggest you do this everyday for a few weeks. The more you do it, the more aware you become of all the stories surrounding you, and the more you will see the inherent beauty in those stories. A friend of ours, Amy Lenzo, does this everyday as part of her daily meditations on the nature of beauty and goes a step further – she takes along a camera. You can check out her photographs on her website Beauty Dialogues. There is something that transcends the personal in the beauty she captures. Something that is profoundly elemental. It is that elemental quality that gives each photograph – even the most abstract - the feeling that it is telling us a story. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So are the elements of story.