Vujà-dé is the opposite of the know-it-all-seen-it-all experience of déjà-vu (from French meaning already seen).
Vujà-dé is the experience of seeing familiar things and saying: I never thought about it this way! I never felt like this before! This is something new! I’ve never seen this in such light! We all love this feeling, don’t we?! We would go to great lengths to seek it, even if it means exposing ourselves to risks.
Children live in a vujà-dé world because, with their limited life experience, everything is new to them. They explore the world with positive curiosity expecting good things to happen! They build associative bridges between the known and the unknown and this is their natural learning process. And at some point, another natural process kicks in: habitability. The longer we live, the more experiences we have, the more tempting it is to rely on preconceived ideas based on what we’ve seen already.
Imagine you would cultivate this natural child’s curiosity and approach the familiar things in your life with it! Imagine how your life would change if you go about your day looking for the new, the unknown, the unexplored and the special in the most familiar situations? How would your experiences be different? How would you be different?
Sometimes vu-jàdés happen naturally and unexpectedly and people call them Aha-moment! We all have had sudden realizations or a creative ideas the resolve old problems. Where do these come from? Wouldn’t it be nice to have more of them?
Guess what, it is totally natural for us to have vu-jàdés! Think about it this way: your body is constantly renewing itself, every cell in your body is younger than you, one million cells die every second and this means that in one day, approximately 1.2 kg of cells die and your body produces new ones. Your body can teach your mind something about novelty.
You can cultivate the vu-jàdé attitude in simple and easy ways. For example, by breaking your routines or taking different ways to the places you frequent, going to new places altogether, taking up new hobbies. Or, you can simply seek to see the weirdness and peculiarity we tend to oversee in the same old, same old familiar situations. I am guessing you might find yourself giggling and enjoying yourself all day long. After all, this is the recipe for success the funniest stand-up comedians have mastered: they take some ordinary and right-down boring situation and flip it around in an unexpected way in the punch-line.
When you go about your day with the playful curiosity of vu-jàdé, you might start to notice that problems magically resolve themselves, or, at the very least, life is simply more fun!
Let me know how it goes!
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