Reading Tagore, this thought a while ago that so much of what used to be household work a century ago is different, mechanised. It was perhaps drawing water, water related mostly, cooking fires, food cleaning, no refrigeration, most food processing - grinding grains, cleaning grains at home, sweeping, almost no plastics, not much packaging, sewing, mending, washing clothes by hand, domestic animals - milk, butter, raw and rough, most household work. No good or bad. Just different things perhaps come to people's mind when they are this century apart, when they say 'household work'. So much of human household work has changed over last few decades, so much processed out, industrialised or mechanised. A lot more convenience. But earlier perhaps there was a closer connection with living and work one does to help that living. Now there are steps in between and when the chain gets very long of means to end, one wonders more about purpose, meaning, questions, despairs. Always, pros and cons of anything in this world. Personal efforts and personal bests whichever time/space life drops you in.
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Later - as one thinks about this chain of means and ends, our conscious selves (the capacity of mind, now, our RAM if you may, the weight of Now on things, and the distance of time for sense, our inner fabric of balance), and then again, the modern world, and its long chains of means and ends. And I then read this about chaos theory:
"Chaos theory concerns deterministic systems with sensitivity to inital conditions a small change in the input might result in a large, unpredicatable change to the output. It's sometime called the butterfly effect: a butterfly flapping its wings might cause changes in air pressure and weather systems resulting in tornadoes elsewhere. Within a dynamical system. we observe periodic orbits - sets of points which, if one is used as an input, the system will visit each one of the others in a loop and return to the first. Chaotic systems contain periodic orbits of every period, filling the whole space of possible inputs."
When a small change to input can make an unpredictable, vast change to output, how does one consider human agency or the exercise of will? When one cannot see through the means chain to the end, or cannot understand the interplay of shifting weights along the means chain, what end is one working towards? Aren't we veering closer to chaos then? Then the end that happens is disassciated from the end that one works for, and this disasscoiation, brings despair, a sapping away of joy, delight, ownership, self-reliance, all the things that make life a gift rather than an automaton or chaotic system's pony.
Perhaps as water, life still figures it all out and makes its own path. Very soon it tires of the effects of long-chain chaos-like input-output, the darkness of mind it brings, the confusion, the tapping and trapping of free thought. One looks for simple joys, self-discipline, things where one sees the cause and effect working and not be disillusioned by a random set of potential outcomes which seem to encompass the world, but make the self a little plaything of chance. Little steps. One makes the choice to go 0 to 1. To begin something. Something small. And then lose oneself in that momentum, so either one doesn't encounter the question of long chain and will, restored to a pre-word state, or one wills the self, since rest of the world and its acts seem beyond reason.
Come to think of it, we are objective maximisers, all nature is, chosing lightening paths of efficiency. Chaos hides the objectives or makes the paths obscure. A moment, two, a day, two, a month, two, a year, a few, but then life, like water, takes over and calls chaos's bs for what it is, and lays out its board again. (At least in a lifetime. For nature, perhaps that period may be longer, and hence the decline and fall of parochial civilisations takes its time. Eventually all making way for a true cosmopolitanism, the way nature is, learning from the best everywhere, practising the best to the extent possible, continuously linear programming for objective maximisation, the best win-win solutions it can find. It tries. But then when things get too lopsided, it is water at the end of the day, got to make its way forward).
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