A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[Striding purposefully into chaos
By Denise Hay - London Free Press
June 3, 2000
I have never been able to look into the future. I don't mean this in a Shirley MacLaine sort of way, mind. Tomorrow I can manage. Into next week I can sometimes visualize. But after that, it's just a yawning void. Can't picture where I'll be, can't imagine what I'll be doing or who will still be speaking to me. I have certainly never felt there was any kind of ultimate plan for me, or anyone.
I am, in my own unscientific way, very attached to the idea of a chaotic universe. I like thinking that we're all just floating around without the slightest hint of meaning behind anything we do. That anyone could look at the world we live in and still hold firm to the idea that we exist for a purpose indicates to me that I'm either looking out the wrong window as the car drives by or people are seeing meaning where meaning doth not exist. There is also the possibility that I am as shallow as I frequently fear, which I have, naturally, listed last.
Without specific faith in either God or astrology, it's difficult to find any reason to support the idea of fate. Perhaps because I'm comfortable with chaos, I don't need an overlay of predestiny to make me go, "Phew!"
The idea behind chaos theory must be equally comforting to uneasy minds. Chaos, in the scientific sense, doesn't mean unorderly, but is rather a term used to describe how certain systems behave; the key behind chaos theory is that initial influences, no matter how tiny, will affect how a system behaves. Thus you have the butterfly effect: the movement of a butterfly's wings in China will have an effect on a weather system in New York City. Chaotic theory can be applied to electricity, diseases, brain activity, animal populations, even the stock exchange.
Chaos theory allows us to make comfortable patterns of regularity out of things that initially appear quite untidy. Mandelbrot's fractals illustrate that the degree of irregularity remains constant over different scales. There is nothing we like more, as a species, than to rein in as much of the chaos as we can and provide a sense of orderliness. Fences, hair bands, clocks - we're determined to give ourselves some boundaries. It's unthinkable that we could exist without these things or that we could just drop fresh into each new day, without a plan or the slightest idea what we're going to do or why.
What prompted me to consider these things was something I recently read that stated atoms form with a kind of intention behind them already in place. There is a sort of atomic predestination that, no matter how bouncy and headstrong those atoms may be, ultimately seals their fate.
This has given me pause. If mere atoms are programmed to fulfil a certain destiny, how can I expect that I, even on a molecular level, can't be here for some purpose?
The problem with destiny, of course, is you simply have no idea what it is. Help an old lady across the street, bring about world peace, invent Post-It notes, catch a wine glass before it hits the floor. On a more scientific level, our destiny, like the atoms, could be merely greasing some elusive cog in the universal wheel, a fulfillment of biological or molecular purpose that is both mundane and probably out of our imaginative grasp. There is, I suppose, a comfort in knowing that, even when your life has turned into something of a nightmare, you - or your atoms - have bigger things in mind.
Kandinsky's painting Chaos/Control, used in the movie Six Degrees of Separation to explain the paradox of not only the whole universe, but our individual lives, springs to mind. Certainly, there have been times in my life when I've drifted too far from the magnetic force field and I'm about to spin away, as one astronaut in every space movie always does. I suppose if one spins out of the orbit of the rest of us, they're considered crazy. While I'm not making a case for the perks of insanity, given that our destiny ultimately may only lie with our collection of atoms rushing toward their goal, I see no reason why all of us, crazy or otherwise, couldn't be achieving some preordained purpose.
The whole unnerving and shifty idea of the meaning of life makes a person swivel their head to look behind them - Did I let the door close on that woman's face? - and squint into the future, straining for any potholes that may trip up an otherwise neatly packaged destiny. Given my inability to succeed at either, I think it's no wonder I'm a tad nervous. For the nonce, I will hold with my philosophy until I can formulate one that better looks after my future.
Pay attention to where you are at the moment, because that is the only place you can, with any certainty, ever be. If you don't pay attention, you might miss someone falling over a lawn chair - and those are the moments that make all the dark and meaningless days worthwhile.
Denise Hay is a London freelance writer. Her column appears every other Saturday.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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