Windmills of the Mind
On the movement of things and the co-efficient of change | Curiosity, Causality, Complexity, Coherency, Clarity
"Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind”
- Windmills of Your Mind, song by Alan Bergman
Curiosity
There’s a strange irony to our existence in that the only true obstacle to understanding the world around us is the methodology by which we seek to understand it; it’s our own perspectives that limit us from a more boundless interaction with our environment.
It’s for such reason that we have to feel our way around through the dark and grasp for anything that can help to guide us forward; clinging to religion, mathematics or technology can help to contextualize existence to a degree, more so showing us that there’s way more to this game than can really be understood.
A very good thing - and the reason for our constant evolution.
The blanks remain unfilled as we continue to evolve at a rate so quick that we can barely squint through the dusty clouds of change; we’re at the front of a redshift that we’ll likely never be able calculate, let alone comprehend. Every century has brought mind-peeling revelation, showering us with more questions and curiosities, the closer we zoom and the farther out we look.
Only in the last hundred years have we begun to see (and to a much lesser degree, understand) the subatomic world, or to decipher the pulls of gravity and magnetism. Our knowledge of concepts that we call elementary today — from water cycles to celestial processions — are but a few lifetimes old and ever-changing yet.
With each new echelon of understanding, we ascend a perceptual dimension higher as we better navigate reality, all amidst confounding processes that spin us through an unending darkness of space and time.
An incomprehensible context that, only through some rather difficult means, can we somehow [begin to] appreciate.
“Everything material soon disappears in the substance of the whole; and everything formal (causal) is very soon taken back into the universal reason; and the memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.”
- Marcus Aurelius
Causality
Each novel connection of a dot shows us that the processes aren’t only something much bigger than us with which we have to adapt and align - they bring us in, sustain us, and take us out.
Our own physical composition of atomic structures is an example of this infinitely spun carousel:
“Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.”
- Bill Bryson
Is consciousness any different?
Each bit of experience swirls about to create a dynamic amalgam of genetics and conditioning, individually and collectively, in our lifespans, from those before and for those intended.
The threads of experience spin an obscure yarn; they result in both physical and non-physical streams of awareness that bring forth various currents of meaning and pulsate with the purpose of causality; physiological, psychological, neurochemical.
To borrow the words of Thomas Campbell, we’re ‘pieces of consciousness’ —fragmented expressions of a larger system that lets us ascend to incomprehensible plateaus of understanding the world.
And as consciousness seems to be the only thing that so effectively runs against the grains of physics and entropy, there’s a pretty important message to be hashed out through all the friction.
We often forget how much our evolving awareness really defies the natural order of the world, and how strange it is that we so effortlessly order the non-sense by deftly sensing our way through it.
We could — and considering all probabilities, should — be spending our days as some less complicated assembly of organic matter, say an amphibious being that breathes mud for a living on the hopeful chance that it can exist longer than a few rotations around the unknowable ball of light above.
But we somehow have the capacity to spend more time celebrating ourselves than being eaten alive — that’s a peculiarly wild privilege in and of itself.
Unlike inanimate matter, we’re able to build upon (and within) higher realms of existence - we cultivate meaning rather than just meaninglessly reassemble through time or space. Our perceptions of ‘we’ and 'of ‘I’ move us through possibility in some rather confounding ways.
Complexity
In observing the process of increasing complexity in things - ourselves included - we encounter another critical truth of our reality: change breeds opportunity.
Our environment is especially kind to those organisms that catch onto the cycles sooner than later; that causality is even possible allows for a way to learn the system.
Because information can be stored and because physics work by way of increasing information, change isn’t the only thing that’s allowed to occur; ambition and creativity - as in the ability to construct or imagine become universal elements to existence. Even the whole premise of non-physicality itself is made possible.
And because we cant fully understand this process of increasing complexity from any scope of reference beyond that of our own, we get tangled up in trying to weave some pretty thick threads together, threads that’ll likely always remain out of reach, imperceptible.
But through just observing it all, and through toeing those strange lines of [im]perceptibility, we can learn a lot. Inevitably, we seem to stumble over selves as we get distracted by bickering over the more trivial of the unfilled blanks, though if we can occasionally poke our heads out of the fog, we can learn quite a bit.
Objective truth begins to buckle under the weight of subjective revelation; from here, we begin to move much more fluidly with change. Observing more, opining less; accepting the greater processes that shape us, and ultimately discovering the more meaningful ways by which we can shape them.
“To see the world as it is, we must unlearn the habit of seeing it as we are”
- Anais Nin
Coherency
Coherency is the catalyst for perspective.
We enact change when we need it to order reality; we evade it when it threatens to spin things into disorder.
And so the only way to even out this bipolar relationship with change is to consider the greater cohesions at play - to respect change as a staple process to existence.
Change need not be liked, but to be ignored or resisted is to engage in an unwinnable existential battle.
And to look past the immediacy of change, towards the greater reverberations that may come about, is to tap into something of a greater understanding that allows us to remain composed through the worst of it.
From this, we can appreciate that some of the best things which happen to us are those things that don’t happen, or the spontaneous value of missed opportunities; we can appreciate failures as the mortar to the bricks of achievement.
“Words cannot adequately grasp the reality of things, which are in constant flux, and consequently there is no way for people to decide on what is true. Debates are merely exercises of rhetoric in which the winner is one who is simply more skilled at speaking. Ultimately there is no way to know whether our language really matches reality at all… the way that can be told is not the constant way.” - James Miller, on the first stanza of the Tao Te Ching
Clarity
150 million kilometers away (or 8 minutes' light travel), particles within our sun collide in an intensive process of nuclear fusion - this causes a shine that, through its intensity, nurtures life on the small blue fleck of matter that orbits it.
Atop this fleck are even smaller flecks, all of which move with the tides of change - biological, magnetic, cultural — vulnerable to the greater processes but somehow able to understand them.
Without such variability, there’d be no point to anything. Without the night, without winter, and without death, there’d be no love of the day and of summer and of life.
Atop this premise, we exist, swaying with the forces around us, carving out impressions and experiences that aim to achieve a humble bit of order from an otherwise chaotic world.
“Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind…”
