Leap to Wholeness by Sky Nelson-Isaacs

Author:Sky Nelson-Isaacs [Nelson-Isaacs, Sky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623175696
Publisher: North Atlantic Books

10

There Is a Purpose

When I was in sixth grade, the librarian took a few of us under his wing. Mr. Conway was a tall, wiry man. I don’t remember being particularly close to him, but we were a small community, and he lived right behind our house. I am sure he knew me much better than I knew him.

The year was 1985, and Mr. Conway had managed to purchase three personal computers. They were set up in a small wing of the library, and I was invited to join him once a week for a computer class. The computers operated on DOS, the rudimentary text-based interface used before the more modern desktop design came out. Computer class consisted of playing around with a program called Logo. You would program a list of geometrical commands like “move forward 100 pixels, turn right 20 degrees, move forward 50 pixels …” and then watch the “turtle” draw your commands. We could use loops to make it repeat our commands any number of times. Due to the loops, the pictures were always very symmetric. Patterns were repeated over and over.

I found the class somewhat boring, yet it had a dramatic influence on my thinking and life path. The patterns we created might look like little snowflakes, or trees, or crystals. This was my first exposure to fractals. A fractal is a mathematical structure that repeats a set of basic rules over and over again, often showing unpredictable structures and patterns in the overall picture. The pattern you input at one scale—the basic “forward, turn” commands—can show up as a pattern at a larger or smaller scale. They are incredibly beautiful and can be used to generate realistic scenes of nature in computer animation.

In college I became more deeply interested in fractals and the idea that large-scale structures reflect patterns at smaller scales. This is true in the way patterns of galaxies at the highest levels reflect patterns of neurons in the brain and arteries in the skin. I began to wonder if this can be true of human society too. Is it possible that the intractable problems happening at a societal level have their seeds in patterns at the individual level? This idea has become only more firmly implanted in my mind over the intervening years. If this is the case, maybe it can provide some new ideas on how to bring about change. Maybe the patterns that show up in society can be used to show us our own hidden wounds, places where we can heal and grow. Thus, maybe there is a purpose to the mystifying misdirections that happen in life. Maybe there is a pattern to our wounds.

It all starts with pain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.