Science. Magic.

I’ve been ill again this week, which meant slowing down. I read a lot. I reread some, too. A quote from the YA novel Sophie’s World:

The only thing an astrologer can do is predict the past.

That is a call for magic if I ever heard one.

I have been thinking a lot again about the double slit experiment, and how nothing happens in the world until it has been observed. I have been thinking about where I put my attention. And what, by doing so, I help make happen in the world.

So I am off most social media now, which seems to me to be a place of ugliness, outrage and memes that are basically a processes of continual recontextualisation, in a quest to create the greatest possible divide between people.

A democracy can quickly develop into mob rule.

Also from Sophie’s World.

Looking back, I was most creative when I was without a television, and before personal computers. Sometimes lonely. But most often, in a place of solitude. In a place where I thought deeply before I said anything – had an opportunity to say anything – and had time to think twice about it all.

When I had them, social interactions were more than an exchange of witty sound bites. Or an attempt to control what people thought of me.

I had more questions than presumptions then. Even sober, I was more intrigued by the world, than I was suspicious of its motives.

I’ve been thinking about Shakespeare’s “sound and fury”.  All our fretting. And what futile noise we make.

I want to observe more in the space between the noise: more of the trees in the wind, more of the birds (who are sheltering in the bushes on this rainy morning).

A soft autumn is settling, and I am going to help conjure it into being.