Squiggle Bird

Squiggle bird is small visual thinking warm up exercise that I got introduced to recently. As the first step, I scribbled random shapes on a white sheet for a minute. Then I got an instruction to add beaks, eyes, and legs to those shapes as per my wish with an aim in mind. The objective was to make these images appear as close to a bird. Initially, the shapes seemed to be weird uneven shapes, and it felt impossible to find meaning in that mess. But as I started to observe the shapes deeply, my mind surprised me. Within the next minute, I had replaced all the abstract shapes into birds with different postures. From this small activity, I learned something interesting about how our mind functions:

• Human mind looks for patterns - our mind relates objects and remembers them by their distinctive features like shape, lines, curve, smell, etc. During the exercise, I unknowingly started to see shapes in the abstract drawings as I was relating the shapes and curves of the abstract shapes with that of a wing, head, and neck of a bird. 

• Finding what's there but is often unseen: we are completely capable of finding meaning in a mess which initially appears to make no sense. If we focus intensely, we can see the invisible.

• Hidden meaning behind the obvious visuals: After the exercise, I realized that how easy it is for people with different perspectives and understanding to see the same thing in their unique ways. There is nothing right or wrong when it comes to this, and sometimes it can be impossible for one person to see things as the other person understands. Every mind is unique.