This morning I finished reading Brian Klaas's book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.
My impressions: well-written, highly original, thought-provoking, factually sound. His bio on the book's cover says he "grew up in Minneapolis, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College, London."
No wonder his book seems so smart. This is a smart guy.
Below I've shared some passages that I especially liked in his final chapter, "Why Everything We Do Matters."
Our journey together, alas, nears its end. We have now glimpsed a world that is entirely unlike what our intuitions and perceptions try to tell us, reinforced by conventional wisdom, stuffed into straitjacket models.
The new world may bewilder us, but at least it's closer to the truth. Our storybook notions of why things happen are a lie. Our perceptions evolved to deceive us. Reality is entirely interconnected, constantly changing, ever swayed by the minuscule and the minute.
That means that our trajectories, as we wade through the rivers of our Heraclitean world, are contingent on a near-infinite number of factors. If we change anything, we change everything. These truths lead inexorably to a mystifying revelation: the world is uncertain, unexplainable, and uncontrollable.
But what are we to do with that information? How are we to live?
As the essayist Maria Popover reminds us, "To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live." How many of us, trapped scurrying on the hamster wheel of modern life, have become unsmitten? It's time to let go of those false idols of mastery and control, and to marvel at the beauty that lies within uncertainty, if you only know how to look.
Perhaps our modern malaise is derived from an obsession with trying to control an uncontrollable world, an extension of a flawed worldview that traps us in an impossible quest for certainty. That quest always ends in disappointment.
The way we now live is entangled with the way we misunderstand the world, regarding the inevitable flukes of an interconnected world as mere curiosities and coincidences rather than the green shoots of an elegant, complex garden displaying its unknowable majesty.
...Life itself, in that futile longing for control, can morph into a solve-for-X slog, where we constantly feel that we are just one hidden factor -- one product or one promotion -- away from what we really want, which, when we buy it or achieve it, turns out to be yet another unsatisfying mirage.
...It's humbling to recognize that you're not the conductor of the symphony but are rather one vibrating string within it. That truth situates us within something vast and unknown. We can't know where we are going, or why we're here (if there is any reason). It leads to three of the most important words in existence: I don't know.
...The good society is one in which we accept the uncertain and embrace the unknown. To do so, we must make sure that each of our daily lives is full of exploration, simple pleasures, and pleasant surprises -- flukes -- and moments where the anxious futures embedded in to-do-lists are obliterated in our minds, at least for a time, by a feeling of joy in the present moment.
...The truth of this fresh worldview provides a more potent message than any self-help book can imagine: we may control nothing, but we influence everything.
...How should we live within this world of potent influence? Humans, like all creatures, face a trade-off between two strategies for interacting with the world: explore versus exploit. To explore is, by definition, to wonder, to not know where you're going. To exploit is to race toward a known destination.
...What happens when we give up a bit of control and let ourselves drift and explore a bit more without direction? We know -- with clear evidence -- that moments of diversion, in which idleness envelops us, and our minds linger away from directed action, are often moments of brilliance.
...We are each hitched to one another, which yields a profound gift: that everything we do matters, including whatever you decide to do now, when you close this book, and go out to explore that wonderful, maddening, infinitely complex world that we call home.
Thanks Brian,this is a very nice Post ...
This way of living life is nice and interesting...
Also makes us ´walk´in here and now..
Also as ´important´...without ´ego´ just important and interesting
and open.
Nice!
Posted by: s* | March 31, 2024 at 04:05 AM
Great summing up by Brian Klass; I quite like this bit: - "...The truth of this fresh worldview provides a more potent message than any self-help book can imagine: we may control nothing, but we influence everything."
It all has a Buddhistic (Zen-like) character.
Posted by: Ron E. | April 01, 2024 at 06:28 AM
Zazen is the best way I've found to see the world clearly. I mean that literally -- zazen cues the mind to enter into the experience of the world's things, feeling them, seeing them and appreciating them as they are in their magnificence.
OT: Was Charan right about Jesus being veg? New movie out about Jesus being a vegetarian. I will see it and may have to eat my words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17lo7W_ulPM
Posted by: sant64 | April 01, 2024 at 03:06 PM