Dusting Off Your World

Undertake an exploration of the untouched things in your world.

Look into old books that haven’t been opened in years. Look for some obscure item in your possession and explore how it may be useful to you today. Revisit an abandoned project. Recall an old practice or ritual and bring it into today. Visit a location that you haven’t been to in years. Reconnect with an old acquaintance or friend. Listen to old music. Clean up a cluttered area where things have been stored away. Find a use for these things, or put them in the hands of someone who can use them.

Seek out what has been left untouched and redefine its purpose in the present, either for you or someone else (whether it is an object or an idea or belief or relationship or activity or place etc.)

The focus of this is to explore the idea of redefining what you think of as the perceived value/usefulness of something that has been given the labelled as useless, or may have once been useful but has not been tapped in the present.

As part of the activity, you can make up fictional histories for these things telling of how they were once used to achieve incredible outcomes. Or you can take it from another angle and tell the story of how its usefulness fell into decay and how it descended into uselessness. Or tell the story of how it became useless to one person but was adopted by another. This imagination exercise can help you better think of uses for the object.

Another exercise to incorporate into this is to take the abandoned thing (whatever form that may be) and try to think of as many uses for it as you possibly can. The more numerous and interesting the uses, the better. This is builds fluid intelligence.