It starts when you’re a child. Lines become corners become squares. Some lines never have an edge, but find themselves in the darkness and become circles. Slowly we learn our shapes, and we see the patterns of geometry. Light dances at wavelengths to become color and we perceive differences in depth to create a third dimension. Finally we add time to the mix, and we begin to see what we believe is our reality.
Then we start to look for repetitions, patterns of reality in this obscure universe.
And we recognize repetitions of systems, sequences and behaviors. We come to think that the universe is something in itself that is sentient, following laws, procedures and probabilities. Nature structures itself by Fibonacci, ratios and determined outcomes on the availability of the rate limiting factor. We look for long enough, and eventually begin to see and learn and know.
And that my good friends is where the problem starts.
Because we start to believe all the patterns that “make sense”. Good gets rewarded, bad gets punished. Kindness begets warmth, cruelty begets isolation. The more patterns we see, the more reassuring our universe becomes, seemingly ordered by something that seems to make sense. And if it doesn’t, we make up stories to cover those as well.
And eventually our reality become circumscribed; limited and controlled by everything we believe the patterns can do.
If you were to see all the ways that you live your life in response to pattern structure, it would probably blow your mind. Sure, it’s a crazy universe and having some sense of predictability gives us something to hang our proverbial hat on, and feel like maybe there is a chance that we will find a little happiness. So we live according to the way we think everything works.
The very hubris of humanity to believe that we can understand can often become the prison that we prepared for ourselves.
I grew up in a country where the sense of “class” was still a specific thing. You needed to stay in your place, and not have “ideas above your station”. Medieval sociological patterns designed to funnel power to a very few and keep the populace in lockstep permeated down through the centuries into a sense of who you were by where you lived, how you sounded, the nature of the shoes that you wore.
Everything designed to suppress your life through a pattern that gave no respect to your individual abilities, and did nothing to respect the consciousness inside of you.
Because respecting others means giving them the right to break the patterns in which you feel comfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I like patterns. The older I get, the more I become a creature of habit because it makes life easier. Every night before I go to bed my clothes for the next day are laid out in a very specific sequence so that if necessary I can get dressed in the dark, so my sweet wife can sleep, and so that I don’t wake the dog.
But I’ve also come to realize that there are patterns that I believe in that I really don’t like.
Because some of those patterns make me feel like there’s no way a kid like me with my background and my issues could become “successful”. Some of those patterns whisper to me in the darkness that I’m not really worthy of that which I do have, and I have no right to hope for anything more. It’s like there’s some cosmic rule that I’m breaking if I step out of who and where I am, and embrace all the possibilities that I’m capable of.
It’s a very strange thing to realize that in order to become who I want to be, I may have to live at odds with what the voice inside my head says I should be.
Who am I to break the patterns of the universe? By what right do I claim a sense of value above that which I was taught? Is it possible that a child who came from so little can break that cycle to have more than he ever could of dreamed of? And in doing so, is that breaking the pattern of always giving and never taking that was drilled into me in word, in example and in experience.
So many patterns to break, both in view of what I see, and whispering quietly in the back of my soul.
I have come to understand that since nature abhors a vacuum, I need to substitute new patterns in place of the ones that I discard. The pattern of finding balance between giving and taking needs to replace the pattern that taking any more than the minimum is wrong. The pattern of respecting my own needs in balance with others must replace the pattern of never feeling like I’m important enough to worry about.
The pattern of allowing myself to have value needs to replace the pattern where that is considered to be wrong.
We all have these patterns that we live by. The more that you can pull them out from the dark into the light and examine them, the more you will change the limits that you place on your life. The better you understand what patterns are real, the easier you navigate through the universe.
Because patterns are real, some serve us, and some hold us back.
And some are very much made to be broken.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings