Chicken and the Egg

Tonight I figured out one more source of my incapacity for organization – apparently my mind works like the chicken and the egg riddle. Try as I might to come up with any reasonable solution a puzzle, no one solution makes any sense. The system has holes. Everyone’s arguments sound like they’re missing something. And there’s little hope in ever completing an outline. I can’t make order out of the chaos. Not because I’m stupid (fine, throw your punches here), but because I just can’t ever see the clean fit.

It’s like a series of concentric circles moving out toward infinity, all laughing hysterically at the process which I cheerfully call "thought," but what may be better coined as "rubbish." There’s no end in sight, and there’s someone, somewhere snickering at the frustrations of a solutionless abyss.

But it makes sense in my mind that nothing could ever make sense. It’s just impossible, you see. There are too many variables. Even if one process – say, your family – is working dashingly within itself, there are other systems at risk – say, the degradation of humanity by perpetuation of a system that supports senseless violence. The funny thing is, I’m almost sure that you can’t even keep up with the processes that would support a healthy family. And you most certainly can’t be wholeheartedly engaged in pushing societal practices that would prevent harm to the poor downtrodden souls that the world has chosen to make a ritual of stomping on. You may try, but you just can’t keep up. There are too many variables. And your actions will never really make complete sense – not in the context of your family, and not in context of the larger world.

I know people with outline minds. I admire them. They seem to get things done. I try. I see a problem, and I’ll be the first to want to tackle it. But then the concentric circles start playing out their song, and I get lost in the skillion factors that be causing the problem.

It starts like this.

People in Honduras are hungry. We should give them food.

But then... there must be a reason why they’re hungry. So maybe we should teach them to farm.

But the farming isn’t working out because they have no water.

They have no water because someone has knocked down all the rain forests.

Let’s plant trees.

But wait – everyone is still hungry.

And now we have a bigger problem. Someone is knocking down the rain forests.

And those people are hungry too. And they need a way to subsist without knocking down rain forests.

But there’s a market for rain forest wood. And there’s a market for the cattle they graze in the fields after the nice old rain forest wood is gone.

So maybe I should stop eating beef. Or maybe I should avoid all wood products. But then, there’s still that minor problem of the people without jobs and food...

This could go on forever, and at the end I’d be like a deer in the headlights, stunned and motionless. And probably useless and depressed. Somewhere in my head I know that I should just begin with one variable. I should work on that and try my best even though I know it won’t fix the whole problem. But then the rest of my head screams back at me, ill-contented at my measly contribution. I could see the bigger picture (parts, at least). I just couldn’t solve the problem.