This post brougt to you by Pink Floyd's Animals and Dark Side Of The Moon.
I've been thinking a lot of my own, ever-evolving theory of universal chaos. I even see it's strands of truth appearing in the most unlikliest of places and even the most likely of places, umm, alike. I'm going to skip as much of the usual sort of jargon that I tend to use, and try to speak plainly because it is more of a personal, perhaps intimate, perspective on life and the universe that I am presenting today. We'll leave the math and take a less conscientous aproach to logic. But that doesn't mean that what I discuss here cannot be, in some way, influenced by either of those things.
See, chaos, that is to say, the eventual and inevitable randomization of the elements and properties of nature as a whole, both earthly and universal, is an inevitability. Human beings and even parts of nature itself struggles against this all-encompassing law. The universe expands away from its own parts, people move away and leave teir roots, and gases expand to fill volumes. Even as gravity pulls us to the surface of the earth, we are actually trying to leae the grasp of gravity and separate from Earth. Electromagnetic bonds are responsibile for keeping our atoms secured to the other atoms that make up the very molecules that make up our body.
But I really didn't come here to talk about science today, for the most part. I really came to talk about something really very different, but still somewhat related to the chaos that creates each of these things. I came, more or less, to explain that chaos is a necessary component to most everything. Our attempts to create or restore order in our universeor reality is proof of its existence. After all, who wouldn't want something reliable and consistent in their lives? But the fact of the matter is that nature constantly creates and manifests variations on itself with no apparet rhyme or reason but merely on whim alone. So why struggle so hard agaisnt it? Relax. Remember the last battle scene in the original version of Walt Disney's Tron? Tron ad to wait for the opening to the Master Control Program's face to become visible before he could launch his data disc into t and destroy the MCP. This is how one might view it. Sure, it's important to defeat the MCP, but you got to wat for the moment to present itself.
Now, this doesn't mean that every little thing in the world should be approached this way, just most things. This is because some things are what they are because they do what they do. Bees make honey. Bees also buzz. But bees do not make french toast, and will probably never make french toast. It's simply not reasonable in the slightest to expect to be served some good french toast by an insect any time within our lives. Likewise, f you want to have some things happen in your life, you must be proactive and create those things or situations for yourself - bottom line.
But we actually do this to some degree anyways. We prioritize things according to how much chaos they actually create in our lives. Our leaders send troops to the middle east because it is creating immediate chaos in their lives, perceived or not, and redrect things away from other areas like education and solving the homeless problem. (This is not meant to ignore other reasons for these things.) Inasmuch as politics, a mother may choose to console her baby to keep it from crying instead of pick up the child's toys at that very moment.
Our lives are filled with so many things that can distract us from our major goals. Few things have ever been so apparent to me as this, partly because (I imagine) I've lived with an attention deficit for several years. One of the things that makes everything so difficult sometimes is learning to choose which components of the chaos to act upon and which components to let act upon you. Chemistry tells us that as a force or stress exerts itself upon a system, that system has a way of moving in a direction to relieve itself of that stress. Peoeple really aren't that much different. If you feel pressure from your neighbors to cut your lawn, chances are that you will eventually cut the lawn when they arrive at your door with a meat cleaver and a number of a good lawn care service. Everyone has certain things that are common that they canot live without. These things include things like food, clothing, shelter, health, water, oxygen, etc. Then there are those things that directly facilitate those things. These two kind of things are the necessary things in life. Everything else is just luxury. I need water, but I want beer. See the relationship? You can prioritize these things in the order that I have presented, and do just fine (i.e. create some order from the chaos).
Now, let's put everything together. This is the point of the discussion that I relate everything that I have talked about to printer repair. Many days, I get a broken printer, a printer in a state of chaos and dysfunction, to repair. Feeling the stress from my boss to perform, I begin work on my broken printer. The idea here is to return this printer to a state of function and representative of some sort of order that represents exactly what it is: a printer. But, wow, there's a lot of parts, and often I have to completely disassemble and reassemble these things. How does one do it? Well, we can't fix anything until we know how it is failing, so we check it out by running it through the tests to diagnose prblems with its basic functions. (Can this bee buzz? Can this bee make honey? Why is this bee making french toast? That's weird!) Once we determined what it's not doing properly, we then devise a plan to address those parts and functions. We can't very start in the center of the printer, we have to remove its outer compoents before we can reveal the problems on he inside. So, we start with the simple stuff on the outside and work our way into the thngs that are most important. This is like making the choice between those things that facilitate the things are important versus the things that are the mos timportant. (For the purpose of illustration, we note here that every printer part is treated as one of these types of things.) We find, as we go through our process, we need to make some changes to create some order (i.e. replace parts). After rreplacing these parts and reassembling our printer, we check it out again to make everything works right, and that we are indeed in a state or order once again. After a quick clean-up job, we send our bee back into the garden to collect some more pollen, and brave the elements. Congratulations, we've staved off another episode of chaos! You can look at the cleaning of the printer to remove the dirt as a matter of aesthetics, and thereofre like those things tha aren't really important because they do nothing to facilitate or keep the printer in order and functional.
So, in summary, I present these few, what I will call, truths or laws:
1. The universe moves in the direction of the least amount of order. This is The Law of
Chaos.
2. All things acted upon by the chaos in the universe can be organized into four categories:
The thing itself, the necessary components of the main thing, the properties of the
necessary components that cause the facilitation, and the things that are inconsequential.
This is The Law of Order.
3. It is the nature of the universe to create chaos, and it is the need of human beings to act
upon their realities to create order and make sense of things. This is The Law of
Opposition.This is akin to Le Chatelier's Principle in chemistry.
4. Things are what they are because they do what they do and vice versa; they have intrinsic
qualities and properties that define and distinguish them from everything else. This is The
Law of Uniques.
Invino Veritas
7/15/11
EOF
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