An ocean of ideas

Alfred North Whitehead once proclaimed, “we think in generalities, but we live in details.”

I think that an individual’s life is like the ocean—an observer sees the vast expanse at a glance, but the eddies and currents that are the real engines of motion operate only locally.

In the ocean, when warm water meets cold, convection causes motion. The impersonal force of the moon’s gravity generates the tides. So, too, are individual ideas coming into productive conflict with each other the catalysts of activity. Individual activities make up a life. A glance at one’s life as a whole may not disclose the underlying activity, or the ideas behind them. The details may get lost in the vastness of the whole, but it is precisely the details that constitute the whole.

I once concluded, and have clung stubbornly to this notion despite many reasons to abandon it, that energy is a finite resource. I have thought that one has a limited amount of time, and finite energy. When one builds a building, it takes energy to prepare the materials, to lift them off the ground, and to stick them together to make the building. The building becomes a repository of the energy that was expended to create it, so that when the building falls (to a demolition team, or to terrorists on a plane) that energy is released back into the world. (Thanks to William Langewiesche for this metaphor).

My view has been that one might choose to spend these finite resources building a very few, tall, impressive buildings, or very many small, even insignificant shacks and shanties. One fritters away one’s precious energy through busy-ness, or one consolidates it by focusing on specific, visionary goals. I have seen these as the only two options.

It now occurs to me that I have had this all wrong. Energy, like love, is not a pool that one may drink from only until it is empty. In the ocean, water accumulates and water dissipates. Dissipation is not the enemy of creativity, as I have often thought. The sun evaporating water heats the remaining water and sets it in motion. Discordant ideas often generate insight. Unrelated activities accumulate value. To do many petty things is not inimical to life; it is the very stuff of life. We are homo faber—makers. While making things, we also make ourselves. One acts, then becomes the kind of person who acts just so. We might do well to adopt the new name “homo fritterer.” There is no eigen function for life, no algorithm for happiness, no pattern of success. All there is are thought and action. Meaning comes later.

For introverts, like me, the world of people is a drain on our reserves of energy. The counter to this is not to avoid all activity, but rather to find those activities that replenish the stocks. For some, this regeneration requires solitude. For others, it requires socializing. For me, it requires atmospheric surroundings of the kind that only nature can provide. A long hike in the wilderness or a two-tank dive on a reef will restore me like no amount of sleep or computer games can do. That is why Michigan is sapping my psychical energy. Energy, like love, cannot be hoarded. It must be spent to have any value, and in spending it, more comes back to us than we had at the start.

This post was originally lost, so what you see here is an attempt to recreate the original. As always, the inspiration that made the original more fluid and insightful vanished in a bath of the cheap acid of anger when I realized what had happened. If I recapture the muse, I may replace this post with a more poetic and insightful version.