blog
When Fancy Turns to Love
by Tricia
When people ask me what I do, I tell them I look for the moment when things change.
Think about somebody you love. Remember the moment that your fancy turned to love? How did you know that something had changed? Was it something you saw, thought, felt, did?
My friend Ray-Ray is a talented professional chef. She says, "Cooking is like life: it's the judicious application of heat and pressure." She tells me that cooking is about knowing when things change. Good cooks see it. Great cooks feel it.
The human eye is trained to detect motion. For me, real research is about finding that moment when everything changes. Nobody ever wrote a good story in which nobody does anything, nobody says anything, nothing happens, and everything goes on as it had always gone on before.
Good research, great novels, and well-lived lives have in common the arc of a human story. Behind the research question, the variables, the dataset, the hypothesis or the thesis; the qualitative or quantitative approaches, there is a material change in the lives of the protagonists.
Research isn't just the facts, m'am. In the age of Google and wikipedia, anyone can dump a pile of data on you. Real research builds narrative momentum behind the facts. It grants insight. When I'm devising original methods, I'm creating knowledge. What's new knowledge? It's knowledge that didn't exist before I made it. And except for a few notable Greek mathematicians, new knowledge doesn't arrive in Eureka moments; it arrives through diligence, practice, and persistence.
When it arrives, new knowledge, in turn, creates insight. Insight shows me how I relate to myself and to the world around me. It suggests different ways to live and connects to me to my humanity -- sometimes, if I'm lucky, to my happiness.
The kind of research I care about isn't about what we know (or think we know): it's about how we know what we (think we) know. What we know drives what we do. What we do informs how we live. All those things together are who we are.