Butterfly Effect

When a butterfly flits its wings in the Amazon basin, they say, it affects the melting of the polar ice cap. How does it do that? Through a vast chain of multiple causes and effects too complex for anyone to fathom. How do they know this? Inductively.

An individual person who is a member of multiple, sometimes overlapping groups at work, at home, in a family, among friends, in schools, churches, and informal circles transmits and receives hundreds of signs, signals, and messages every day. Spoken, written, postural, gestural, performative, functional, aesthetic. It would be neat to discern exactly what led who to do what.

Why did you do that? People can be very creative when called upon to justify something.

I dreamed about owls. Not one owl, but three owls landing one by one in quick succession on three difference branches. Three big owls flying in from left to right, then landing right to left. Then I forgot about it, but it came back so I wrote it down. I can't tell you what it "means" except that my sleeping mind had owls in it.

I dreamed I was driving in a rainstorm and all of a sudden the windshield wipers blades shredded right before my eyes, splitting into long useless strips hanging by a thread while I stopped the car to try to fix them. In a rainstorm. In a dream. You tell me.

Chuang-tse famously dreamed he was a butterfly and awoke wondering whether he was really a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang-tse. An epistemological conundrum. Who can say for sure. For myself, I am reasonably certain that I am not an owl in this lifetime.

Sitting and forgetting is another big theme in Chuang-tse. He suggests sitting and forgetting as an antidote to strife and trouble, as a way of letting internal measures address the distress brought about by external matters. At least that's how I remember reading it. Sitting and forgetting is the same as meditation, if meditation aims toward tranquility by letting go of thoughts that arise and trouble the mind. Forgetting is just a negative, characteristically Taoist way of calming the mind.

Forgetting is a favorite issue of mine because of my own predisposition (or habit or talent or fatal flaw) for losing track of one thing while focusing on another. I multitask well - one thing at a time. The hard part is switching from one thing to another at the right time, like keeping track of the conversation without missing your exit on the interstate. Period. New paragraph.

Some people are exceptionally gifted at sitting; others have a penchant for forgetting. Rare is the bird who intuitively knows how to do both, and rarer still is the sage who can do both at once.

I'm pretty good at getting so absorbed in what I'm doing over the weekend, without a thought of the work I left on my desk on Friday, that by Monday morning I have no idea where I left off. I'm in the 99th percentile at letting my right brain take over temporarily, so my left brain retains nothing - or vice versa.

There was more I could have said about this momentous topic, but I forgot what it was, thank goodness.