More Thinking

Previously:
an idea is the end result of a long messy process and is itself somewhat messy.

Understanding takes effort. The brain uses about 20% of the body's energy, more when concentrating on a challenging problem. Mental effort is expensive, so we ration it if we can. 

Understanding something requires understanding its parts, which means understanding the parts of each part, and so on in a regressive cascade. Having taken it apart, we are only half done. We have to imagine putting all the parts back together and see what synergies and new properties emerge at each stage as parts connect. We need to think ecology. If you read this article about ecology in Wikipedia, it's going to take some time and calories, so have a snack first and set your TV to record Private Eyes so you don't miss it. Or you could spend a pleasant 90 minutes watching a National Film Board documentary: Borealis by Kevin McMahon. Or just trust me: it's complicated. 

At some point we must leave off because things become more complex the more we understand, and the mind boggles. That means leaving it up to Dennis or Facebook or the experts or God. When we leave off, we must decide whom to trust, and whom to trust to tell us whom to trust, etc., and that must end in taking a chance, which means we act on faith.

One reason ideas are messy is that we take ourselves much too seriously. For fun, I went to Youtube and searched "forest ecosystems". I checked out a couple of videos that looked promising. A forestry lecture addressed ecology from the perspective of managing a forest as a resource, ecology for profit, you might say. There was no backing away and letting a forest do what it does because it had millions of years experience of which we understand only a fraction. Worse than that, we think of forests as possessions, our forests. Judging by how things are working out, a forest really belongs not to a land owner or country or a corporation but to the biosphere, which would be broken without it. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom dictates that if we're in business, it's all about us. Even if we aren't in business, we need toilet paper, so it's mostly about us.

Except it isn't about us. We are late arrivals on earth anxiously hoarding toilet paper while  rushing towards extinction. We are not the centre of the world, which is not the centre of the Milky Way, which is lost in a universe that has no centre. If we think we are God's favourites, it is because we quit thinking too soon and trusted a story told by a nameless shepherd whose entire world was a grassy meadow with him at the centre surrounded by his sheep, a story retold ever since because it feels good to be important. We like it that the story is about us.

But that's just me telling a story about a story. If you don't trust my story, it's OK. Tell me your story. I'm curious. 

Ideas are so diverse it's as if we inhabit different planets. The bad news: how our messy ideas influence the future is a gamble depending on how well we have understood, how many TV shows we skipped to read complicated articles, whom we trust, and what we do about it. The good news: if we do the thinking instead of trusting those who tell us what we want to hear, we have a hope of getting closer to the truth.

So, according to me

and my thinking about thinking,

God is sometimes a refuge from complexity.

After we have blissed out on grace for a bit,

God in us awakens curiosity, 

humility and reverence, 

affection and grief for the world,

gratitude for the miracle in which we find ourselves

and new resolve to respect it.

We have a say in what happens next.

If we do the thinking 

and do the work, 

things may turn out better than we fear.

There, I've had my say. 

Now, Private Eyes. What are Angie and Shade up to?