Dig

There is "dig where you stand" and there is "say Yes more often," and the reflective "que sera, sera," but these idioms all refer to what must be some fundamental principle of all systems theory: that in order to get anything, you have to start with something.

This sounds so banal that, if I wasn't in a hurry to explain it, I would not write it down.  Starting with something is actually a condition that many people eschew with.  We often think that, while we are wearing a red dress and eating a muffin, the thing we should really be doing is riding a train in a linen suit. Without any linen or a suit pattern or a train, we are to suddenly shed the somethings we have and acquire new somethings out of the blue.  The problem people then percieve seems to them to be a tactical one: how to get from here to there. 

I think that, in physics, if you were asking a particle how it might want to manifest itself as a collapsed piece of matter on a wall from its present state of being expressed as a wave function, it would just shrug.  It would not know.  The gap would be too big and the circumstances by which such a thing too numerous to even begin to build a plan.  The circumstances for the ways in which this may not happen would be even more numerous still.  So much so, in fact, that they would dominate statistically and would cause the current state of the particle's mind which would be that the plan for collapsing is not to be entertained at all.

The wisdom philosophers, writers and comedians throughout the ages and in our modern times echo this incredulity.  Stop trying to shape a future that is as far removed from you as a the opposite side of the canyon you're standing on.  In order to get to the other side - or to some other place - you need to just start walking.  No promises about the other side.  Only promises that, along the way, you will build a path that, in retrospect, will most likely seem inevitable, because, after all, it was built from every step that came before the previous one, a pattern that is not easily replicable and impossible to foreshadow at the start.

It's really like the simple principle of building:  one brick at a time, one cell at a time.  Nobody does it in any other way.  Nature does not begin with a cell and say, I want this to turn into a pumpkin and, somehow, through sheer will and ambition, make it so.  Or, even less so, by taking an alternate path from the one it had the germ of.  It doesn't throw away the seed because the seed is a daisy and it wants a pumpkin.  It doesn't know what it wants - a good lesson for people to internalize - so it just starts building on the seed. And sooner or later, it will get whatever was meant to happen from it.  Daisy or pumpkin.  Grass blade or dud whose rotting energy fuels the nearby blade. 

Nature does not have a plan.  It has a code and it has a history.  That is true and that is very important, for, without the past, the future extinguishes instantly, like the receding line of electrons from the center of an old-fashioned TV.  But a blueprint doesn't mean a path.  It only means a contour on top of which, that which is place will balance or fall off according to the shapes of the land.  This is the way in which biology appears to have directive and leads so many people to consider the need for a willful being as conductor.  Because of what happened before, what happens next has a certain natural trajectory.  It isn't perfectly defined and no one planned it any more than an unraveling weave plans the final snap of the straightening yarn, but because there is a chain link in human and physical events, at any point in the chain, looking back, one sees a straight and perfect path leading exactly to the point where he stands:  inevitable, meant to be, planned from the start.   Most of us forget what nature never even dwells upon:  that this view would be true under any and every circumstance in which time as we know it is the guiding measure of change in the world.

This is all to say that "dig where you stand," is not only good advice but is actually inescapable. You cannot not dig where you stand.  And all people who attempt to jump the cite where they are and leap over to a different position either never make it off the ground and use up all their energy just huffing up in an attempt at liftoff or, instead of digging, rent a backhoe, with the help of their ambitious parents, and bulldoze through everything the should have carefully dug around in their slow journey forward, reaching the point they had their sites set to, yes, but looking back and seeing a big mess, without a trace of the bridge that should exist between their position and where they came from.

These latter people often suffer from identity problems, because, again, they cannot see the path of their journey.  And we all want to see a path. We want to know that what we have done has a history and a purpose, perhaps because, if we were a photon, we could not avoid this fate.  It would be in the equations.  As people, in whom the photon's tiny error margin is collected one quadrillion times, the ability to err becomes visible and, through the bio-neurological mechanism of behavior, we exercise our right to control our environment incorrectly. 

But as behavioral economist Dan Arieli will tell you, in fact, people seem to want to want to see a lasting pattern their work. Something meaningful and logical. Something that came from somewhere and will go elsewhere.  And this always requires a scaffolding.  It is impossible to see a pattern in work if you drop the shovel you were holding and rent a backhoe much too large for you.  In essence, you have to start with what you've got and build on.  And there are no shortcuts.  This is what starting with something in order to get another something means.  I know the words do not suggest it, but the somethings are not random.  They are related, connected.  Inextricable. You must hold on to your shovel.  And only your shovel.  And you cannot exchange it, sell it or even buff it.  You must just grip it and dig.  The rocks and dirt in your way will tell you what next, and, it is only through this blind pursuit that you will get the pleasure of looking back at an orderly path.

That's why the wisdoms advocate the Yes and "que sera" and why the millions who try to soar over their yards end up building such elaborate psychological defenses around them that we begin to bump into their giant round dome-bot bodies everywhere and it is uncomfortable.