Some phenomena are not about themselves. They take you one level, one dimension down into the substance of things, they are measurements of change, gauges of the inner workings of the world, consequences of movement.
Every atom in existence is a player in a giant set of games of variability. Imagine the collection of all of these games as threads, clusters, and fabrics. These threads of things happening, let’s say, are not even, they display changes in speed; they have lumps and thinnings; they stop and change direction, they soar, plummet or disappear. Their changes imprint a secondary metric into our world, a measure of variability, a smoothing over of its irregular nature. These measures show trends and directions, they clean the world of detail to reveal only the impulses of motion.
They are diagrams of change.
Take, for instance, the line of highest slope. The water always follows it when it flows down the hill. Or the line of lowest slope. A donkey will always find it when it carries burdens up the hill. These lines are not obvious, they are abstract measurements of the change in incline and they only become visible when the water, or the donkey, reveals their existence.
You will say to yourself that it is not reasonable to guide yourself by the wisdom of lesser things, and that is a vanity of human thought, which deems itself the arbiter of things only because it gathered a few droplets from an infinite sea of knowledge constantly refreshing itself.
There are no lesser things, and there are many respects in which the donkey is wiser than you. The wisdom of the donkey is also part of the larger game of life, for which it received different tokens to play than you.
We are not unchanging entities either; we are not like earthen pots, which once shaped and hardened in the fire are no longer subject to the motions of the world. We are tentative stems that emerge and grow and move and transform.
We always wonder why a thing happened to us, or why life favored one way instead of another, and we do not understand that we obey the same rules as the rest of creation. Everything needs energy to keep going and when it depletes its supply, it stops.
If you understand the underlying rules of these secondary measures of motion, which run flat when things cease to change, it will become obvious why every time your life doesn’t seem to change anymore it is approaching either a summit or a bottom.
We all know these things in our gut and take them for granted, we have feelings of elation or foreboding we can’t explain to ourselves, but which most of the time emerge from our awareness of these change measurement undercurrents that run through everything.
We all know instinctively that accelerating change leads to untenable outcomes.
There is no such thing as an infinite soaring or an infinite decline.
Infinite expressions don’t feel at home in the world of matter. This world needs ebbs and flows to stay on course and it can’t function when changes start happening faster and faster. A wheel rolling down an endless hill will eventually gather such momentum it disintegrates all on its own, even if no obstacle hits it. The unlimited increase in its speed reaches the inner workings of the wheel, those things that keep it together, and forces them into motion too.
In the same way, speeding up towards progress, which in the human heart reflects as hubris, brings people to emotions and situations inside which they can no longer function. It is as true for the things unseen as it is for the visible portion of the world. These points of extreme, where things become too fast, too far, when there is no limit to the building up of speed, break the fabric of existence. They create holes where reality should be. They are places where things no longer work as expected and where life can’t thrive.
There are a lot more laws to existence than those that we know, and these laws are consistent and inexorable.
One of these laws is that any coherent mechanism will self-regulate, refusing to allow local disruptions in its inner workings that could end up in the breakdown of its function.
Existence is such a mechanism.
It puts a limit on these sharp peaks and smooths them over, so they continue to be gentle waves and folds in the fabric of being, rather than rips and holes: all soaring civilizations experience decline, the stars that burn too hot consume themselves to nothing, there is no unlimited love, or unlimited pleasure, or unlimited fervor, every emotion slowly dampens itself in a series of diminishing returns.
Expect this to happen in your life, we amass so much misery while yearning for impossible things!
I can’t say this enough: life is motion. Ideals are gauges of that motion, among many others, instances at the top of a range. They are like temperature readings: just because you can measure the temperature at which the water freezes that doesn’t mean you can stay in it indefinitely.
A couple more things before we stop for questions.
Sometimes the footprint of subtle things is more obvious than they are. For instance, you can’t track the warming and cooling of every gust of air, but you can infer those changes from the stirring of the wind. You can assess the speed and the steering on a boat on the open seas just by looking at its wake.
You can tell winter is coming just by noticing how soon the plants go into dormancy.
All living and non-living things have tokens to play in this large game of existence, and these tokens are very different.
One that us lucky humans get to use is the ability to interpret the moves of other players, human and non-human alike.
Second, there are things that only change because they are tethered to other things: ocean tides to the moon, deserts to movements of dessicate air, lush forests to rain. They wouldn’t exist in the absence of their nurturing factors. We are such things ourselves, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for sunlight, water, air, an environment that offers us sources for the energy we need to keep going.
We are consequences, corollaries of the rules of a larger game, which involves celestial bodies, forces and fields independent of our understanding, and which have been in place long before we came to be, and longer still before our eyes were open to their workings. It is a good way for us to stay humble and not presume ourselves to be the wake that moves the ship.
