Long Ago's

 

Naïve Art (Primitivism) / Walter Battiss/ Seychelles Curtains

Been spending time trying desperately to not read except on a broad overview of the goings on in the world.  It isn’t that I am not interested, it is just that the changes happening seem to be of the “fundamental shift” sort where my world-view and collected understanding are being pulled out from underneath the society that I live in.

Now, if I were a proper old man, I would take this moment to prate on about the “damn kids nowadays”,  but, I can’t quite get to that.  Inflection points are tough things, most folks don’t notice them until it is way too late.  I am thinking that by the time that old geezers like your humble correspondent notice them, the inflection point is long past.

Fortunately, I have never thought highly of the way that things are going.  I starting bitching about this a long time ago and took what I thought at the time were prudent steps to minimize the negative effects.  I think that the steps I took were reasonable considering the assumptions that I operated under.

But as I have aged and the world has changed, the assumptions that I used fifteen years ago have a mixed record.  I want to say that there was one of my assumptions that had failed completely, or for that matter, one of them was spot on.  I cannot truthfully say either of those statements are true.

Instead, I have a well-documented history of being half-right.  Because as I now have time to sit down and think about it, I spent too much time considering the fragility of a system and not enough time considering the resilience.  

Now, don’t get me wrong, I haven’t suddenly gone all Pollyanna on you, what I am saying is that every system that is functional has both fragility and resilience built in, and the arbiter of that dichotomy is simply time.  

I will say openly now that the world-model that I used fifteen years ago emphasized fragility and underestimated resilience.   Now, that being said, what are my thoughts now concerning this interplay?  Well, I wish that I could tell you.  

The issues that I looked at years ago as being the biggest negatives are still around and getting worse.  But here I am anyway and my life and my children’s lives are not significantly worse for the fifteen added years of entropy.  Some folks seem to expect me to be embarrassed by that factoid.  But the hard truth of the matter is that I am pretty content and the judgements seem to cluster around how I could have had more.

What I criticize myself for is not watching and understanding the fragility/resilience dichotomy better.  But I am thinking that is always a gut-feel kind of thing and the answer you get at any point is an estimate of where you are on the curve.  

I think that I will spend the day thinking about the nature of the curve.