Mixed Blessings
Earlier yesterday morning I was lamenting the fact that my companion of 50 years was demonstrating, once again, that she has higher priorities than only to be with me. She is leaving for several days to visit her extensive family. I do not begrudge her this inclination, rather I admire her most for the qualities she exudes that I am most lacking, and I am thankful both for when she is with me and when she is not.
When I got home from work I was looking around for the honey-do note she promised to leave, with reminders of what needed to get done over the weekend. It could not be found, honestly! So here I am with no one to listen to and nothing to occupy me beyond contemplating my own introverted navel. Suddenly, I discover again the state of mind in which inspiration is most often encountered. Without prevailing obligations or distractions, only now can creativity flourish.
There was a time when I actively pursued this condition. Practical necessity inevitably interceded. Occasions are now rare, but still can be realized. It is under this circumstance I am inspired to communicate the ‘Mixed Blessings’, both of loving one to have and also to have not. Susan will surely understand what I say, as I hope that others of you will too. We must always nourish self-fulfillment, whether together or apart.
Just recently, in anniversary commemoration of our steadfast connection, Susan and I attended an adaptation of Don Quixote, the preeminent practitioner of alternative attitudes, at the San Francisco Ballet. I was interested in seeing how his misadventures would be interpreted in dance movement. Alas, the Knight of the Woeful Countenance and his squire Sancho were relegated as mere bystanders to the follies in this production. In talking with others around the office, I was surprised to learn that many had never heard of my hero, and if they knew his name, they were not familiar with the tale. (How, I wonder, do they interpret the word ‘quixotic’?)
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Coincidentally, I had been toying with Chaos Theory as an idea for the subject matter of my next presentation, the point being that our analytical ability to know, predict and/or control reality is revealed as a scientific conundrum due to the ultimate rounding error inherent in our calculations… but I will refrain from going further for the moment. ‘Butterfly Effects’ aside, today I am burdened by an embarrassment of riches in trying to decide whether instead to relate the story of Don Quixote as a metaphor for this failure to find absolute truth. I think it might be slightly too challenging to correlate both Chaos and Quixote in a single talk, as I have alluded to here. You must agree, though, as surely as I am sane, an excess of ideas is simply another example of ‘Mixed Blessings’.
I apologize to the reader. You are correct, if you noted, that I was a bit too hasty in that last paragraph by failing to elucidate any benefits to Chaos or tie together its connection with Quixote. But since you are wondering…
We generally think of the tendency for things to become increasingly disordered as negative. In physics, however, it is a fact of life. Entropy is the word to describe the level of disorder in the universe and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that Entropy is not reversible and will always increase. This is the reason that the “arrow of time”, as it is called, only points in one direction. When Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can never put him together again. Broken eggs and spilt milk remain so.
Since the time of Copernicus, science has attempted to create analytical methods of describing physical reality, an infrastructure for human understanding. In most practical ways it succeeds. In the early 60’s, Edward Lorenz discovered, in the process of modeling weather patterns, that the smallest infinitesimal change of input into a weather system would produce vastly divergent weather results. This became known as the “Butterfly Effect” and is the fundamental principle behind Chaos Theory which we have come to understand impacts all dynamic systems. Basically, tiny inputs produce huge variables over time.
So how is Chaos a ‘Mixed Blessing’? It also means that the smallest most insignificant action that we individually contribute can have the most magnificent long-term consequences! Every little green consideration, every gentle enlightenment of a child, every kind word we say, can reverberate down through all of time.
What, you might now ask, does this have to do with Don Quixote? While Chaos informs us that our reality can only be approximately understood, due to its dynamic nature, and that different conditions might as easily have precipitated in each moment, the idealistic vision of one delusional individual exemplifies the alternative possibilities that always exist. Don Quixote saw elevated potentialities in humanity and personified a chivalrous code of conduct in a historical period when its loss was still recent. He nourished an idealized fantasy of both love and of evil in order to give purpose to a life lived for a higher cause. Some see this as mad futility. Others as recognition that the world we live in might well be otherwise.
Mixed Blessings,
-Phil
