One of the greatest gifts to our imagination is that our mind can swing between two very distinct modes of being. At the one extreme, we can experience ourselves immersed in our activities, fully integrated with our environment just like any other living organism. At the other extreme, we can experience ourselves as detached from our surroundings, as if we were outside observers of our world, of ourselves and even of our own experiences.

Without these two modes of being, we wouldn't have the famous and productive couple: Theory and Practice. The practice part is obviously the doing, the acting and being involved. Theory, on the other hand, is the perspective, the abstractions we develop when speculating about the actions we observe. We can picture it as a Greek amphitheatre. The actors perform, while the spectators theorise over their performance. And sure enough, the word  "theory" derives from the Ancient Greek, theoros, which means "spectator", whereas "practice",  derives from "doing" or "acting", also from Ancient Greek.  Now, to argue that creativity involves balancing theory and practice, acting and observing, is both offensively obvious and, as we'll see, somewhat more profound.

To give some depth to the above argument, we must dig a little deeper into these two modes of being: acting and observing. The first step is to recognise that we're not merely mechanical doers. When we act, we do so out of our vitality, out of being a living organism. In so being, everything about us is fundamentally embedded in nature, not only in the dimensions we may experience consciously but also on every possible spatial and temporal scale. In short, we exist within the unfathomable richness of natural life. On the other hand, when we become spectators, we're able to contemplate the world from a distant vantage point. What this grants us is the power of perspective, of abstraction.

The richness of natural life takes flight in our mind thanks to the detached quality of our abstractions. Together, life and abstraction give us the power of imagination. Take away our capacity for abstraction, for perspective, and we'd be like any other animal, displaying very limited variations in our engagement with our environment. If we only had abstractions, on the other hand, we would basically be like computers. And although we might use them as tools to explore our own creativity, computers are anything but imaginative.

The word abstraction is quite revealing in this sense. "To abstract", originally meant "to drag away" to "detach". That is, an abstraction is always an abstraction from; it is the loss of context. Therefore, any system based only on abstractions has no context. This is why computers are so consistent. Whatever information-processing a computer performs is completely unaltered by the things around it. We can warm it up, increase the air pressure on it, we can cuddle it, give it a long kiss, or shout at it, and, as long as we don't damage it in the process, the computation will proceed unaltered, completely detached from its surroundings. We, on the other hand, are anything but consistent. We are influenced by everything we can imagine. This is because we are embedded in nature. Our mind is embedded in nature. And so, changes in our environment effectively change who we are. They change what’s on our mind.

When it's warm, for example, we are inside warmth. Each and every living cell of our body, and each and every microbe that inhabits us is individually and collectively affected by the environment’s temperature. In fact, they are part of what warmth is: vibrating atoms and molecules. Thus, when the temperature changes, our whole body changes with it. We change with it. Our mind changes with it. A computer, on the other hand, has a very different relationship with its surroundings. A computer can have a sensor for gauging the outside temperature. The sensor abstracts, grabs away warmth from its context (vibrating atoms and molecules) and reduces it to a symbol, say "37º C". Only then can warmth, that is "37º C", be part of a computation.

Needless to say, we can also think about warmth in abstract terms. We do so whenever we entertain ourselves with the weather forecast. The symbols on the screen depicting the predicted temperature, wind, humidity and so on help us choose our clothes for the day. Yet, the meanings of the forecast do not lie in the symbols themselves. These symbols enable us to bring to our mind a world we're not yet experiencing. That is, the forecast is meaningful because we can speculate on how those weather conditions will affect us.

It is because the world affects us that the world has meaning for us. And it is because there are so many ways that we can affect the world and be affected by it, that we live immersed in a plethora of meanings. It is through these meanings that we perceive and makes sense of the world around us, that we think and imagine. Sensors and symbols don’t deliver meanings. Without feeling, without caring, without needs and desires, things are meaningless. Thus, we can think and imagine insofar as we can be affected. Things that don’t affect us cannot have meaning. Things that don’t have meaning cannot be thought.

Our needs and desires as biological organisms endow us with meanings. Our capacity for abstraction gives us the freedom to play with those meanings. When combined, they provide us with an open-ended playground for our imagination and creativity. It is in this dance between nature and abstraction that the beauty of thinking lies. In the erotic relationship between the tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible, nature has infinite ways to affect us and be affected. Thus, embedded in nature, we have a never-ending source of meanings. In an erotic relationship, the physical and the symbolic arouse one another continuously expanding our affective niche, continuously expanding our world of meanings. In this relationship, the possibility of enjoying new experiences is never exhausted. There's always something to be uncovered. There's always room for imagination. There’s always an invitation to creativity.