Being a parent has a tendency to amplify the present and keep your mind from wandering much. Life is full of sound, urgency and redirected priorities. No sooner do you start something only to find your attention is needed elsewhere and you have to consistently make these snap decisions on assigning priority between making a sandwich and cleaning up a mess. It’s exhausting, but you do get acclimated to it over time. It’s just normal now.
So when I find these pockets of quiet, I try to make them last an eternity.
The rain just started falling, and I have the house to myself. A rarity.
Moments like this bring back reality. The magnification of the scales at work.
Hearing the birds sing through the gentile cracking of raindrops against leaves.
The motion of wind as it passes through trees, sending cascades of rain through the wood line.
I’ve been reading a lot about Systems Theory/Dynamic Systems lately.
Donella Meadows specifically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_lOoomRTA
I started off with Thinking in Systems, and in that book she quoted a book that shaped the way I view the world. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Seeing this drew me in and made me think that maybe this was something I needed to spend some time on.
Donella Meadows, from what I have read of her and her thoughts, seems nothing short of a sage.
Systems Theory originates in computer science, as an offshoot of Control Theory. Long story short. I have this dream of running an automated greenhouse when I retire (or before, we’ll see). In the process of researching that, I’ve come across this standard way of modeling a system and how it behaves. Donella’s focus was environmental. It seems intuitive to view the world this way, but the complexity that they’re able to describe and model with System Theory is pretty amazing. It’s fractal in how it can break down a system hierarchy and maintain this overall picture of a system. In a way, I think it is a way for science to look at something and learn while maintaining the beauty of it’s design.
You can see the purpose of everything, rather than just the function. It makes sense of biodiversity and how energy flows from the sun to you. A blade of grass to a human and everything in between. It describes economies, and computers. Cars and the solar system. You can look at an area with a high mosquito population and use it to deduce why they’re not being controlled properly, and find leverage points in that ecosystem to encourage predation. You can use it to model your household. Your finances, schedules, kids. It’s been pretty eye opening.
Sometimes I feel alone in my mind. Like I’m adrift. I get excited about things and I just kinda want to bounce them off people. I can’t really talk to anyone about this stuff, or what’s on my mind. I’ve always had trouble coming up with a justification for staring at the grass for so long when someone asks me if I’m alright when I’m caught in one of those rare pockets of peace.
“yeah, sorry, was just daydreaming”
Back to life.
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