Before the modern scientific era, creativity was attributed to a superhuman force; all novel ideas originated with the gods. After all, how could a person create something that did not exist before the divine act of creation? In fact, the Latin meaning of the verb "inspire" is "to breathe into," reflecting the belief that creative inspiration was similar to the moment in creation when God first breathed life into man. Plato argued that the poet was possessed by divine inspiration, and Plotin wrote that art could only be beautiful if it descended from God. The artist's job was not to imitate nature but rather to reveal the sacred and transcendent qualities of nature. Art could only be a pale imitation of the perfection of the world of ideas. Greek artists did not blindly imitate what they saw in reality; instead they tried to represent the pure, true forms underlying reality, resulting in a sort of compromise between abstraction and accuracy.

The known fact of contingencies, without knowing precisely what those contingencies will be, shows that disaster preparation is not the same thing as disaster rehearsal. No matter how many mock disasters are staged according to prior plans, the real disaster will never mirror any one of them. Disaster-preparation planning is more like training for a marathon than training for a high-jump competition or a sprinting event. Marathon runners do not practice by running the full course of twenty-six miles; rather, they get into shape by running shorter distances and building up their endurance with cross-training. If they have prepared successfully, then they are in optimal condition to run the marathon over its predetermined course and length, assuming a range of weather conditions, predicted or not. This is normal marathon preparation.

Words like ‘near' and ‘far' can mean different things depending on where you are and what you are doing. If you were at a zoo, then you might say you are ‘near' an animal if you could reach out and touch it through the bars of its cage. Here the word ‘near' means an arm's length away. If you were telling someone how to get to your local shop, you might call it ‘near' if it was a five-minute walk away. Now the word ‘near' means much longer than an arm's length away. Words like ‘near', ‘far', ‘small', ‘big', ‘hot', and ‘cold' all mean different things to different people at different times.