Phoenix Living

Today is one of those days where I hurt regardless of pain meds, slept most of the day, ate through most of the waking parts, and have no particular reason other than the obvious to be in a cranky mood, but am anyway. Nathan seems to react to my snippiness either with his own snippy returns or with hesitancy and distance, both of which are triggers for further grumpiness for me (which I’m managing to mostly correct for, but I still feel grumpy about feeling grumpy even if I’m not lashing out). I want to be grumpy but not have it affect anything around me, even though I recognize rationally that’s a fairly unreasonable wish.

I got up and stretched my arms (and hips and shoulders) this evening, even though I’m hurting, because it feels good to stretch. I admit I was disappointed that the people in the room didn’t comment much on what was, for the stage of healing, a fairly impressive bit of movement. I know I’ve been healing quite rapidly so far, but the verbal acknowledgements and cheering have definitely been helping that process along, and to have my efforts fade into the everyday background for others around me so soon afterward feels discouraging. I’m still my own cheering squad, of course, but it’s been interesting and tangible throughout the process how much the focus and energy of other caring people has made both small and large differences along the way.

Just tracking the process, it’s all interesting even if some isn’t fun.

One of the very common ways we humans learn things, from infanthood on, is an “engineering mindset”: we first break things down into enough component parts that we can gain a measure of understanding about the parts and how they work, then the cycle moves to the phase of putting the pieces back together to see what they now make (which is never quite the same as what it was, of course), then testing and studying and learning from the more complex concept. Physical, mental, emotional, even philosophical learnings can all follow this path of knowledge acquisition (not the only path available, but the one we’re discussing here).

Since the explosion of scientific progress from the Renaissance onward, it seems as if scientists have been engaged on a nice little run of reductionist scientific methods. This is not being criticized in and of itself; as anyone can see, we’ve exponentially increased our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world and universe we inhabit, in numerous different knowledge areas. My theory is that we are at or incredibly near the point where in order to make further large leaps in greater understanding we need a long period of interdisciplinary scientific explorations, where multi-discipline groups aren’t just allowed but actively encouraged, and a trend of larger-picture learnings is actively sought (and funded).

I think there are already the first signs of this trend now visible in some of the scientifically and technologically innovative research fields. I hope the rest of the 21st century brings the start of the synergistic renaissance. What do you think?