I'm recovering from reading Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie. Almost too wonderful: interesting, wise, unshowily elegant. As soon as the exhilaration wore off, I began to wonder if there is any point in my writing when this book has already been written. What on earth could anyone have to add?
In our overcrowded world, this fear lurks at the bottom of many minds. It's surely beneath all the sales of motivational and self improvement products. There's always something or someone better out there.
Categorising is an effective way to deal with the huge size and complexity of the modern world. You can't read the back of and dip into every book in a bookshop, let alone on Amazon. But you know you like books by author X or in genre Y. Starting there saves time. But categorising is not a neutral act, it ripples back upstream: bookshops categorise by genre, and publishers in turn encourage authors to stay filed in genres. News is categorised as 'world', 'health', 'environment', a big story or a merely local one. We categorise each other and we categorise ourselves: are we geeky, social, travellers, parents, booklovers? It's a useful way to navigate our expanded world - we know what size clothes to take to the fitting room.
When I read Sightlines it was natural to compare my writing, because it shares a category: I don't feel daunted by novels in the same way. But she threw me a line in 'Aurora', as she looks back at their ship, surrounded by icebergs:
"Though white, the ship looks dirty ... the way sheep suddenly look dirty when it snows"
That's the point. Categories lead us to focus on the abstract quality, and seduce our love out of the actual content of the life we are living. An appreciation of real sheep, rather of the category fluffy whiteness, is appreciation that will stand firm when it snows. If it is the sheep you love to see, then snow will make that love blossom forth into a love of mottled gray-brown, a love of hanky texture, a love of steamy bleating made visible in cold air.
Abstract thought has proved its worth with many excellent fruits: cars, solar panels, refrigeration and mobile phones, but it is dangerous. Abstracts bring ideals and ideals oppose life, reducing it to mere shadows on the cave wall, while outside we imagine perfection romping in the sunshine of truth. The great gift of being alive is to revel in the details - enjoying them as particulars, not imperfections. A hot chocolate moustache after a day in the cold, a worn cuff on a favourite jacket, evening light sliding under the clouds.
It's not for us to judge whether our contribution is worth making. All we can do is make it, in detail. Particularly.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Aaagh! Stuff!
How many products and services promise to simplify your life? There are books, blogs, storage solutions, handy organisers, decluttering advice professionals and TV insights into other people's stuff endgame... the list goes on, and with barely a trace of irony.
Some of the stuff is sentimental and charged with tenderness. Some of it is beautiful and gives me daily joy. But really a great deal of it just might-come-in-handy-one-day. This final category is both hardest to defend and hardest to control. So what is it about, really?
Sometimes I want to escape to the purity of a single note, a sparsely furnished holiday home, and a great empty sea horizon. It's restful. But it's good to come back to the complexity and richness of a life which has a past, a future, and a multi-stranded present.
Last time we went on holiday I realised that the great sigh of relief I felt when we got to the apartment was as much about its relative emptiness as about having finished the journey. Wow, I thought. If I go on holiday partly to get away from my possessions, then surely when I get home, I can get rid of 80% of everything and feel on holiday all the time! I came home determined. And I can't do it.
Some of the stuff is sentimental and charged with tenderness. Some of it is beautiful and gives me daily joy. But really a great deal of it just might-come-in-handy-one-day. This final category is both hardest to defend and hardest to control. So what is it about, really?
For a start: the might-come-in-handy stuff does, in fact, come in handy. I recently re-covered dining room chairs with material stashed for more than a decade. Like advertising, more than half of might-come-in-handy stuff is pointless, but nobody knows which half.
To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.
And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.
A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.
Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together.
To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.
And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.
A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.
Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together.
Sometimes I want to escape to the purity of a single note, a sparsely furnished holiday home, and a great empty sea horizon. It's restful. But it's good to come back to the complexity and richness of a life which has a past, a future, and a multi-stranded present.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Go down to the sea
I must go down to the sea, to the lonely sea and the sky, (from Sea Fever, by John Masefield)
The impulse to go off into the woods, down to the sea or up on the moor is all about the impulse to look away from the human. To stop staring into the mirror of culture and find something else, something beyond: a breath of fresh air.
It is the fundamental spiritual urge. Spiritual as opposed to the religious urge, because religion is a cultural vessel for spirituality. Whether religious or not, almost everyone has an upwelling desire to try and see past our human perspective and this is a spring which pours through our lives. It might run partly through religious canals, which are after all designed for it (some might say to contain it, and some might say to harness its power), or it might find its own way entirely: waterfalling, streaming or seeping through our inner marshland as a sense of wonder, of beauty, a feeling for the wild.
The Oxford Junior Dictionary shed lots of its nature words a few years ago, to make room for the new words which have become prominent in the lives of most young children now. Words like attachment and chatroom displaced words like acorn and conker. It's a sign that we're allowing ourselves to fall more deeply into human life, and away from the more-than-human.
I lived for a while in a very landlocked and urban part of the country, and hearing the cries of seagulls in the background of phone calls home used to feel like a huge breath opening in my chest. I didn't know then what I know now - that I have to attend to the non-human. Thankfully, I can get basic rations by watching birds who still whirl through the air in our streets and parks, by noticing the fungi which spring up after autumn rain, by giving myself up to the clouds out of the window, or by looking closely at a wildflower by the side of the road. But you have to pay the attention, and very humble things like pigeons, clouds and weeds are hard to attend to in our world of global image-sharing.
We hungrily consume 'nature' on computers and TVs. Fabulous footage of distant places, amazing plants, extraordinary animals. Photos of beautiful landscapes, wild skies, green river valleys. But the trouble is, it's not nature. It's photography. You don't get a lungful of it. It doesn't soak the bottom of your jeans and you don't get to pick a bit of it up and carry it home.
Like Narcissus, we are held in a gaze of rapture. We think it's nature, the other, but it's still just us. We need to look away and go down to the sea, or at least the park, before we drown in our reflection.
The impulse to go off into the woods, down to the sea or up on the moor is all about the impulse to look away from the human. To stop staring into the mirror of culture and find something else, something beyond: a breath of fresh air.
It is the fundamental spiritual urge. Spiritual as opposed to the religious urge, because religion is a cultural vessel for spirituality. Whether religious or not, almost everyone has an upwelling desire to try and see past our human perspective and this is a spring which pours through our lives. It might run partly through religious canals, which are after all designed for it (some might say to contain it, and some might say to harness its power), or it might find its own way entirely: waterfalling, streaming or seeping through our inner marshland as a sense of wonder, of beauty, a feeling for the wild.
The Oxford Junior Dictionary shed lots of its nature words a few years ago, to make room for the new words which have become prominent in the lives of most young children now. Words like attachment and chatroom displaced words like acorn and conker. It's a sign that we're allowing ourselves to fall more deeply into human life, and away from the more-than-human.
I lived for a while in a very landlocked and urban part of the country, and hearing the cries of seagulls in the background of phone calls home used to feel like a huge breath opening in my chest. I didn't know then what I know now - that I have to attend to the non-human. Thankfully, I can get basic rations by watching birds who still whirl through the air in our streets and parks, by noticing the fungi which spring up after autumn rain, by giving myself up to the clouds out of the window, or by looking closely at a wildflower by the side of the road. But you have to pay the attention, and very humble things like pigeons, clouds and weeds are hard to attend to in our world of global image-sharing.
We hungrily consume 'nature' on computers and TVs. Fabulous footage of distant places, amazing plants, extraordinary animals. Photos of beautiful landscapes, wild skies, green river valleys. But the trouble is, it's not nature. It's photography. You don't get a lungful of it. It doesn't soak the bottom of your jeans and you don't get to pick a bit of it up and carry it home.
Like Narcissus, we are held in a gaze of rapture. We think it's nature, the other, but it's still just us. We need to look away and go down to the sea, or at least the park, before we drown in our reflection.
Monday, June 8, 2015
Location, location, location
Not so long ago, 20 years if that, I'd arrange to meet a friend a few days in the future and a little before the appointed time, I'd take a jacket with my keys and wallet in the pocket and set out. It feels brittle now - no means of communicating to repair or even improve plans on the fly. You'd stick to the plan, or stand your friend up. No other choices.
The first one to arrive would wait because how else would we find each other? Some people would wait longer than others, some would be more punctual than others. If someone didn't show up at all, you'd assume something quite bad had happened, although you wouldn't be able to call and find out till you'd definitely given up on them - because in order to do so, you'd have to leave the meeting point to find a call box, and the longer after the meeting time that was the more danger your friend would arrive, and on seeing you not there, assume you'd already left and leave again too.
Now we can communicate with anyone we know wherever they are. We carry all our contacts with us all the time. It's great.
But experiences still happen in specific places. I was in the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey when I got a call telling me about my father's heart attack. That was over a decade ago and he recovered well, but the memory remains in that rose garden, part of what flits through my head whenever I'm there in that part of the year.
I covered a box file with woven paper strands while listening to a really moving afternoon play on the radio. I eventually had to get rid of the file, because I'd woven the story into it and it was much too harrowing to be reminding myself of on a daily basis.
We often holiday in the same town and have built up a patina of happy memories in the place: we all relax when we arrive. It's as if there are ruts worn into the place which make it hard not to be happy there.
I find it difficult to do certain parts of my day job from home, because my contact with the details of the meetings, calls and emails is much stronger when I sit at the desk or make tea in the kitchen where I had them. It's as if part of my memory is encoded outside my skin, perhaps in the arrangement of post-it notes, lego and paperclips on my desk.
The first one to arrive would wait because how else would we find each other? Some people would wait longer than others, some would be more punctual than others. If someone didn't show up at all, you'd assume something quite bad had happened, although you wouldn't be able to call and find out till you'd definitely given up on them - because in order to do so, you'd have to leave the meeting point to find a call box, and the longer after the meeting time that was the more danger your friend would arrive, and on seeing you not there, assume you'd already left and leave again too.
But experiences still happen in specific places. I was in the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey when I got a call telling me about my father's heart attack. That was over a decade ago and he recovered well, but the memory remains in that rose garden, part of what flits through my head whenever I'm there in that part of the year.
I covered a box file with woven paper strands while listening to a really moving afternoon play on the radio. I eventually had to get rid of the file, because I'd woven the story into it and it was much too harrowing to be reminding myself of on a daily basis.
We often holiday in the same town and have built up a patina of happy memories in the place: we all relax when we arrive. It's as if there are ruts worn into the place which make it hard not to be happy there.
I find it difficult to do certain parts of my day job from home, because my contact with the details of the meetings, calls and emails is much stronger when I sit at the desk or make tea in the kitchen where I had them. It's as if part of my memory is encoded outside my skin, perhaps in the arrangement of post-it notes, lego and paperclips on my desk.
Everything happens somewhere, and it leaves a mark on both the thing and the where, at least as they exist in the minds of the players. Everything may well be connected, but it isn't all here. If you google 'living in the present moment' you will find thousands of considerations of the importance of attending to now rather than losing yourself in regret and nostalgia for the past or plans and anxieties for the future. But just try looking for 'living in the present place': it's clearly not an issue.
Regardless of mobiles and the internet, we are still creatures, and we have a location. Where we are is meaningful. It's hard to talk about the importance of proximity without sounding parochial - the very word has become negative, when it used not to be. We know of a bigger world, but we live in a small one. No matter how much we travel, we are only actually in one place at a time. We may stay in one place long and deeply, or flit and skitter over a wide area, and that will affect the thoughts we think, but not how many hands we can hold at once, and what that holding means.
Regardless of mobiles and the internet, we are still creatures, and we have a location. Where we are is meaningful. It's hard to talk about the importance of proximity without sounding parochial - the very word has become negative, when it used not to be. We know of a bigger world, but we live in a small one. No matter how much we travel, we are only actually in one place at a time. We may stay in one place long and deeply, or flit and skitter over a wide area, and that will affect the thoughts we think, but not how many hands we can hold at once, and what that holding means.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Poisonous aspirations
These days we set objectives and fill up our diaries months ahead. We strive continually to improve ourselves: physically, psychologically, intellectually, spiritually. There's a truly massive industry supported by our sense that we are not fit, serene, rich, beautiful, happy, stable, educated, witty, creative, productive or just plain good enough.
We also have instant access to images which show how far short of the ideals we fall. No matter we know many of these images photoshop the truth: with their aid, we can vividly imagine and compare ourselves to the dream. Now some would say that the urge to be a better version of yourself is wholly a good thing, that it keeps us from becoming complacent slobs, wasting our talents on a life of TV and junk food.
I'm starting to think that the story of the Fall from Eden is all about this. Once you have knowledge of perfect 'Good', it is extremely difficult not to strive for it, or to fear, judge and attempt to conceal your lack of it. These are the features of being fallen, and shame at one's nakedness makes a good symbol. Nakedness is vulnerability, honesty - introducing the separation of good and evil leads to anxiety, grief and a desire to cover oneself.
But we don't learn best when we feel stupid, and regimes based on denial can take us only to the limit of our will power. Willpower is a finite mental resource, besides depleting other functions when it's being used. It's a temporary, stop-gap approach: it can't be the foundation of anything.
We all know that the second something is identified as a 'target' for some business or public service it becomes much less useful and generates unfortunate side effects into the bargain. Making something a target changes its relationship with its context.
I recently heard about a hospital target set to discharge recovered patients by 11am. Intended to speed up release of both the patient and the bed, in practice it led to some patients staying an extra night so that the target could be achieved... the following day. Similarly, we rank schools by exam results, and unwittingly affect the attention given to everything else that happens there: healthy physical, emotional and social development, creativity, self discovery. A growing body of research shows that when we reward children for anything we quickly re-focus their interest towards the reward and away from what we were actually trying to encourage. And this seems to be the case even if the activity we were rewarding was something they wanted to do in the first place.
Let's all stop looking over our shoulders at ideals of mind, body, heart and soul, and instead let our current lives fill up our whole attention. We're not perfect. Nobody can actually be perfect: perfect is a moment, as considered in a particular context. It's not something that can be an ongoing attribute of a living being. The attention you withdraw from striving can be reinvested in your actual life. And that will surely lead to learning and growth and do so easily because the effort is drawn from you by interest and supported by what's around you.
So put aside objectives and aspirations: they cast you out of Eden. Make peace with fallibility, your own and everyone else's, and you'll be instantly back there, and realise that you never really left.
We also have instant access to images which show how far short of the ideals we fall. No matter we know many of these images photoshop the truth: with their aid, we can vividly imagine and compare ourselves to the dream. Now some would say that the urge to be a better version of yourself is wholly a good thing, that it keeps us from becoming complacent slobs, wasting our talents on a life of TV and junk food.
I'm starting to think that the story of the Fall from Eden is all about this. Once you have knowledge of perfect 'Good', it is extremely difficult not to strive for it, or to fear, judge and attempt to conceal your lack of it. These are the features of being fallen, and shame at one's nakedness makes a good symbol. Nakedness is vulnerability, honesty - introducing the separation of good and evil leads to anxiety, grief and a desire to cover oneself.
But we don't learn best when we feel stupid, and regimes based on denial can take us only to the limit of our will power. Willpower is a finite mental resource, besides depleting other functions when it's being used. It's a temporary, stop-gap approach: it can't be the foundation of anything.
We all know that the second something is identified as a 'target' for some business or public service it becomes much less useful and generates unfortunate side effects into the bargain. Making something a target changes its relationship with its context.
I recently heard about a hospital target set to discharge recovered patients by 11am. Intended to speed up release of both the patient and the bed, in practice it led to some patients staying an extra night so that the target could be achieved... the following day. Similarly, we rank schools by exam results, and unwittingly affect the attention given to everything else that happens there: healthy physical, emotional and social development, creativity, self discovery. A growing body of research shows that when we reward children for anything we quickly re-focus their interest towards the reward and away from what we were actually trying to encourage. And this seems to be the case even if the activity we were rewarding was something they wanted to do in the first place.
Let's all stop looking over our shoulders at ideals of mind, body, heart and soul, and instead let our current lives fill up our whole attention. We're not perfect. Nobody can actually be perfect: perfect is a moment, as considered in a particular context. It's not something that can be an ongoing attribute of a living being. The attention you withdraw from striving can be reinvested in your actual life. And that will surely lead to learning and growth and do so easily because the effort is drawn from you by interest and supported by what's around you.
So put aside objectives and aspirations: they cast you out of Eden. Make peace with fallibility, your own and everyone else's, and you'll be instantly back there, and realise that you never really left.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
On not feeling guilty when the sun shines
Today there is glorious sunshine here, although it is raining somewhere else. I don't feel guilty about this.
But I do feel guilty when I think of how lucky I am in general. I'm living in a peace zone. I have interesting employment in a fairly free and equable society. Myself and those I care for are in adequate health and we have access to medicine. Other people are living in terror, in poverty, in pain.
Why is that different from the sunshine? I didn't make the wars, oppose international equal rights or undermine anyone's healthcare system. But nevertheless it is different, because I could do something about the misfortune of others. I sign petitions and give money to charities, but I could take humanitarian aid to a war zone, I could devote more time campaigning for equality and justice. Lots of people risked their own health fighting Ebola, thank goodness. But I didn't. I carried on doing my marginally worthwhile day job and looking after my family. I went out with friends, enjoyed the sunshine, and fretted about not getting enough exercise or giving my son enough vegetables.
The stoics believed that you need to start with acceptance of how things are; that all wise action comes from calm consideration rather than emotional drive. But to the best of my knowledge they mostly talked about coming to terms with your own misfortunes, not those of others. Presumably one's own suffering was the greater challenge then. They didn't have a 24-hour news industry.
News may be the greatest challenge of modern life. As responsible citizens of the world we must inform ourselves, just as we take an interest in the welfare of friends and colleagues. What is the difference? A few miles? In the age of the internet? It feels like a duty to be aware of world news.
But we experience news events out of context, and out of scale. It feels local: we see faces, hear voices. It feels as if it's happening in our street, and in so far as we all are interconnected waves in the universe, it is. But the world, though connected, is large, and we are small, and finite.
School trip nerves cannot be adequately responded to in the context of someone else's hostage crisis. But the news comes in, so, lest all personal concerns be swamped by the international theatre of cruelty and disaster, many people respond by blunting their sense of connection to the distant events. How else to defend raising money to further improve your local school facilities, when there are so many schools with no facilities, and so many children with no school at all?
Is there a better way to survive modern like than by blunting our awareness of connection? Perhaps the answer is to actively honour our particle nature. We do have a focused location, however much we spread out from it around the edges. Cherish the world right beside you - wherever you go and whoever arrives - because you cannot cherish properly at long distance. And be grateful, not guilty, when any kind of sun shines on you, because it's not shining everywhere.
But I do feel guilty when I think of how lucky I am in general. I'm living in a peace zone. I have interesting employment in a fairly free and equable society. Myself and those I care for are in adequate health and we have access to medicine. Other people are living in terror, in poverty, in pain.
Why is that different from the sunshine? I didn't make the wars, oppose international equal rights or undermine anyone's healthcare system. But nevertheless it is different, because I could do something about the misfortune of others. I sign petitions and give money to charities, but I could take humanitarian aid to a war zone, I could devote more time campaigning for equality and justice. Lots of people risked their own health fighting Ebola, thank goodness. But I didn't. I carried on doing my marginally worthwhile day job and looking after my family. I went out with friends, enjoyed the sunshine, and fretted about not getting enough exercise or giving my son enough vegetables.
The stoics believed that you need to start with acceptance of how things are; that all wise action comes from calm consideration rather than emotional drive. But to the best of my knowledge they mostly talked about coming to terms with your own misfortunes, not those of others. Presumably one's own suffering was the greater challenge then. They didn't have a 24-hour news industry.
News may be the greatest challenge of modern life. As responsible citizens of the world we must inform ourselves, just as we take an interest in the welfare of friends and colleagues. What is the difference? A few miles? In the age of the internet? It feels like a duty to be aware of world news.
But we experience news events out of context, and out of scale. It feels local: we see faces, hear voices. It feels as if it's happening in our street, and in so far as we all are interconnected waves in the universe, it is. But the world, though connected, is large, and we are small, and finite.
School trip nerves cannot be adequately responded to in the context of someone else's hostage crisis. But the news comes in, so, lest all personal concerns be swamped by the international theatre of cruelty and disaster, many people respond by blunting their sense of connection to the distant events. How else to defend raising money to further improve your local school facilities, when there are so many schools with no facilities, and so many children with no school at all?
Is there a better way to survive modern like than by blunting our awareness of connection? Perhaps the answer is to actively honour our particle nature. We do have a focused location, however much we spread out from it around the edges. Cherish the world right beside you - wherever you go and whoever arrives - because you cannot cherish properly at long distance. And be grateful, not guilty, when any kind of sun shines on you, because it's not shining everywhere.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
On being a wave and a particle
In order to understand how light behaves you sometimes have to think of it as a particle; sometimes it as a wave. We learn this at school, where they don't generally mention that the same is true of everything else in the world, not just light.
It's usual to think of ourselves as particles in a universe of particles. Particles eat other kinds of particles, wear particles, and tell, or don't tell things (particles of information) to other particles. This perspective sets up meaningful boundaries around various parts of the world and we can uncover real understandings by thinking this way. I'm a big fan of my smart phone, my hot and cold running water, and the fact that I'm here at all, which I owe to modern medicine.
But we are also waves in the stuff of the universe: local gestures of the space-time-mind through which other gestures - minerals, energy, other life - flow. Our actions provoke other actions and reactions and the interference patterns are so complex as to be unpredictable. Chemicals and microbes flow through us around the world too - we catch and pass on all manner of colds as well as ideas. Metabolites of the medicines we take pass through us into the water the whole city drinks. Sometimes we might, in time, have exactly the opposite effect to the one we intended.
We don't like the implicit loss of free will inherent in the wave perspective: we want to make choices, not just react and rebound against the rest of the universe. But the alternative can be even more depressing: as infinitesimal particles, we are futilely struggling like fallen flies in the meniscus of the world. It's a matter of scale: we can't change the world - it changes, and we might be part of that change.
The only answer is to let go of free will, and just do what we do. You love your children because you love them, not because you should. And all the laws and all the wars in the world haven't stopped people from doing cruel things.
Do we dare let go of both the responsibility and the blame. Could the world could survive an escape from conscious, intentional morality? Might it even be the saving of the world?
I am a wave, continuous with the universe and participating in unpredictable developments in unexpected ways. But I'm also a particle and unless I get up to put the kettle on, or persuade someone else to, there will be no tea.
It's usual to think of ourselves as particles in a universe of particles. Particles eat other kinds of particles, wear particles, and tell, or don't tell things (particles of information) to other particles. This perspective sets up meaningful boundaries around various parts of the world and we can uncover real understandings by thinking this way. I'm a big fan of my smart phone, my hot and cold running water, and the fact that I'm here at all, which I owe to modern medicine.
But we are also waves in the stuff of the universe: local gestures of the space-time-mind through which other gestures - minerals, energy, other life - flow. Our actions provoke other actions and reactions and the interference patterns are so complex as to be unpredictable. Chemicals and microbes flow through us around the world too - we catch and pass on all manner of colds as well as ideas. Metabolites of the medicines we take pass through us into the water the whole city drinks. Sometimes we might, in time, have exactly the opposite effect to the one we intended.
We don't like the implicit loss of free will inherent in the wave perspective: we want to make choices, not just react and rebound against the rest of the universe. But the alternative can be even more depressing: as infinitesimal particles, we are futilely struggling like fallen flies in the meniscus of the world. It's a matter of scale: we can't change the world - it changes, and we might be part of that change.
The only answer is to let go of free will, and just do what we do. You love your children because you love them, not because you should. And all the laws and all the wars in the world haven't stopped people from doing cruel things.
Do we dare let go of both the responsibility and the blame. Could the world could survive an escape from conscious, intentional morality? Might it even be the saving of the world?
I am a wave, continuous with the universe and participating in unpredictable developments in unexpected ways. But I'm also a particle and unless I get up to put the kettle on, or persuade someone else to, there will be no tea.
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