Some Mental Palette Cleansers

“There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new.” (Karen Bard, Parallax, 2014)

I'm thinking about ‘Mental Palette Cleansers’. Could they be essentials for a time defined by accelerating uncertainty, ecological and systemic crises, and a growing sense of collective disorientation? 

Ultimately, it would be an invitation to embrace weirdness not as a threat but as a threshold, a passage through which we can reimagine the world together. Asking us to actively disrupt our certainties, to stay with the tension between objective and subjective truths, and to question the frameworks through which we decide what is “real,” “right,” or “worth pursuing.”

These ‘Mental Palette Cleansers’ would seek something precarious: a practice of destabilisation. Being less about promoting good narratives and more about creating conditions where narrative itself becomes porous, provisional, and alive.

In this sense, the weird evolves as a method for unmaking, a way to loosen the foundations on which we construct our identities, our values, and our sense of reality. If everything we hold to be true is, in some sense, a fabrication, then perhaps our role is not to abide by inherited truths but to become conscious fabricators of ourselves. To fabricate not in deceit, but in awareness, to make and unmake meaning as a form of living inquiry.