Here you are,
building and re-building your wall,
on the border between the manageable stagnation within your mind
and the beguiling chaos without.
The wind of reality blows through the cracks,
soft but incessant,
frightening and alluring…
– Knock, knock.
– Who is there?
– Life.
When as a child you look into the world
the magic of reality is there.
The world is fluid,
boundaries – weak,
cause and effect – unclear and remote…
The world is full of patterns to discover,
it’s varied and exciting to behold,
but also frightening…
and you begin
the job of organizing your impressions
in surfaces and colours,
when collected,
they can define the things;
you give them names,
the names are then collected once again
and through another level of abstraction
form into language –
so much more useful
than spots and lines,
but so much more rigid –
the magic’s almost gone…
You look again,
look carefully –
it’s bleeding through the edges,
it’s seeping in through places of confusion,
creating chaos,
giving you the option
to see new things,
to name them, change the rules,
expand the language
and the world we live in…
The spiral turns again.
Our most amazing ability is the ability to ignore.
As we grow, we learn not by multiplying connections in the brain, but by losing them.
We combine our expectations and biases with our perceptions,
which are themselves fictions created by our brains
simplifying and organizing multiple chaotic inputs.
Thus we create a thin veneer of simplicity and predictability
over terrifyingly unmanageable chaos
and call it reality.
