The beginning of the year always prompts goal-setting and new resolves through which we evaluate our lives and try to correct our course. I feel like I need to peel away the clutter (both mental and literal) that collects around me as I live, but lately I've wondered if the urge to clarify doesn't have a dark side. I have always been drawn to clarity...even as a child I liked cartoons better than live-action because the edges were so easily discernable. It was comforting to have everything reduced to simple hard shapes that had no ambiguity. Fortunately I moved on from cartoons visually, but I still cherish clear glass, clear thoughts and a clear path forward. We need some of all that just to make the decisions that guide our lives, but I now think that clarity can also be a lure and a trap. I have seen people leap upon ideas with a certain sharp sense of relief that, at last, they have found a solid place to stand in the shifting sands of existence. Those ideas, while true, often only describe part of a larger truth and insisting upon them twists them into something fundamentalist and false. The crystalline edge of clarity rejects the ambiguity that is an equal part of the world and it has taken me a long time to appreciate the twining roots of the unseen and unmeasurable. We long to see the whole picture...we feel safer viewing our territory from the heights...but we never can. We can feel its presence though, and maybe that is as clear as we are going to get.
Going back to Christopher Alexander: he describes a theory that beauty comes into being by a process of unfolding. Each element of a creation proceeds from what has happened before, and the final product cannot be seen at the start. This unfolding is necessary to create a thing that lives. I have certainly found in my own work that what I plan (and I love my plans!) doesn't always come to pass as the project goes forward...that each project develops a trajectory of its own that must be respected if I want anything to come of my efforts. Reading the blogs of Jude and Grace has introduced me to Just Going in both life and work, which is unfolding by another name. It has helped so much to see them (and so many of you, really) apply this to daily problems both visual and intrinsic and intuit how it shapes them as people. Thank you again and again to my dear friends who share their lives with me here. May we all continue to Just Go together, in the dark if necessary.
P.S. My links don't seem to be working again. Sigh. Jude is at www.spiritcloth.typepad.com and Grace is at www.windthread.typepad.com. Good luck.