All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
Honestly, I don’t have a specific direction that I wanted to go from here, just a jumble of thoughts I’ve had in my head. My method of writing is this: I retrace my thoughts since my last post and pick out the few that seem interesting or profound enough to share, then try to connect them and translate them into sentences and paragraphs. Several thoughts converged on the idea of the future, but that means that since I used the future as a starting point, I can’t use it as a transition, because everything diverges from here. The last few posts have been more personal but I think a few choice sentences will bring you up to speed. Before July 11th, my future seemed too small. When I tried to look ahead at the rest of my life, I couldn’t figure out how to fit all the things I wanted to do into one lifetime even if it meant a century. Now one lifetime seems very long. If I knew I would see dad again in twenty years, I would squeeze a lot into those twenty years and make a very good use of that time. In a way they would be difficult, but in a way they would be easy. It’s merely the infinite mass of a lifetime that is such an exasperating obstacle. Of course it magnifies the image and desire for heaven, but it’s hard to catch a solid glimpse through the fog.
Sometimes I think our view of the world is too small. People like boxes. I think it’s interesting that people say they don’t like Math and Science because they feel too limited by the laws and calculations and formulas. They say that they like writing because they can express themselves in any way they feel like. I think that’s interesting because I feel a lot more limited working on an essay than I do in a science lab. In English, you have to follow very specific patterns of order, usage and punctuation and you have a limited set of words that you can use as determined by Merriam-Webster and his successors. As far as I can tell science means observation. In other words you can do anything you want and as long as you’re paying attention to what happens you are “doing science.” And the world is so big that you could go on observing it for a hundred years and still not understand it. In fact, you could pass your findings on to generation after generation of curious scientists and they would still find more and more questions to look into. One major difficulty is that people like to think in boxes. They impose rules on nature which look like they exist here but maybe they don’t exist there. Until quantum mechanics, every turn of progress in science became more and more logical. Every observation fit formulas and laws very strictly. So of course, when scientists couldn’t find rules for a layer, they assumed that everything beneath that layer was random, in other words, the castle of the orderly universe is constructed by the building blocks of chaos. There are libraries full of theories already written explaining this phenomena already. But is it possible that the rules for the next layer are just a different kind of rule? Maybe the next set of rules are written in a language more like English than a mathematical formula. Maybe the rules are more like commands. “Thou shalt act like a particle when thou art observed.” and “Thou shalt act like a wave when thou art not observed.” Having said that, I hesitate to press the publish button because several philosophical and methodical objections have already occurred to me. On the other hand, it’s about as likely to be right as any other theory, so it might as well be put down on the list of possibilities right?
