Complexities

On the one hand, there's you, and on the other hand, there's America. It's bigger than you are. So you try and make sense of it. You try to figure it out - something which it resists. It's big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out. - Neil Gaiman [December Ampersand project]

Being introspective has always appealed to me. I like to "try and make sense" of things, as it were. There are so many day-to-day things that have rippling effects years later. For example, I frequently wear a green knit hat. Someone could come up to me five or ten years from now at a reunion and say, "Hey, aren't you the one that used to wear that green hat all the time? Let's go out for drinks and reminisce." I could then end up getting together with that person and having a long-term relationship. Who knows? It's like the butterfly effect - simple events in one case can cause complex behaviors in something entirely different. [Or perhaps not so different - it's hard to say.]

I enjoy thinking about things, speculating on what could happen if I say something to one person who then tells another person in a slightly different way because he interpreted it differently. The power of language is complex and amazing to me. I love how connotations of words can completely change the meaning and yet not destroy it, how they can throw in complexities and contradictions that one wouldn't necessarily think of otherwise.

Trying to puzzle out contradictions is often difficult - indeed, sometimes it is easier on everyone if it is just left alone in a mess of threads hanging off an intricately woven rug. If you tug on one thread just a little too hard, you may find that it is more interconnected than you thought, which causes the whole rug to come unraveled and the beautiful pattern marred.

It may be "perfectly happy not to be figured out," but what's the fun in removing all the wonderments and ideas that made and unmade and remade the pattern in the first place?