We are Realty
Complexity is our destiny and our future.
We need to make peace with the complex. From childhood it has been the threshold to a different world. We called it school, or the future, or adulthood, or failure. Names only for the unknown, or say the world known only as the complex, the non-intuitive, the serious.
We stayed as long as possible in simpler lands. Most of us, I suppose, managed to preserve some secret places of simplicity where we imagined we found relief from what became “the day to day.” In the Blue Rock Candy Mountains, perhaps. With lemonade springs.
Simplicity is not your friend. If a guide, then a poor one. The life impulse rejects its appeal.
And, for all the good reasons in the world, our wars against complexity must end. We live in what for all practical purposes is a real world. We act foolishly or well. We abuse each other out of ignorance or we face painful choices—painful because we lay aside our own comfort and security when we join the compact of the living.
Head in the sand or head in the clouds is putting tomorrow out of mind. We give ourselves the worse insult when we happily claim that this or that subject or struggle is too difficult for someone like me.
We are made for difficulty. It is hardened in our DNA. It is the “why” of democracy. It is why technological advances, always a breakthrough into a new unknown, will be ruled by us, will not rule us, will not place limitations on our future, will instead provide us with the tools of greater freedom.
We are made for liberation. Our destiny was not set in the past. It lives in the future.
Emerson would excuse, I hope, our appropriation of his image. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Say all manner of things, technology if you want, economic structures, intellectual hobgoblins, the steel grip of political systems, they all aspire to “the saddle.” No. We are destined to ride them. Except…unless …. we fail to make peace with the complex.