on legos and life

i would never find such joy in anything as my child self could find in a pile of legos. i loved these little inter-connectable colored blocks. there was never a time that i had embedded myself within a levy available bricks that i wasn’t inspired by the discovery of new and exciting combinations of bricks. as i got older, the kits became more complex and more detailed and the pieces got smaller, more intricate and stylized. legos allowed me to build anything i could imagine. i could conceive of new technologies and imbue them into my creations. i could command whole armies, legions of dark and right, into an interplanetary armageddon. i could build entire cities and smite them only to rebuild them again and again, each iteration bearing some semblance to its parent, but having its own unique history and grandeur. no matter what scale i was working at, be it a tower or a city, a fleet or a flagship, there was only one fate for every creation – devastation. catastrophes ranged from dogfights to earthquakes to plain old crashes. whatever crisis the story called for, destruction of my creations was as much fun as constructing them.

although, i always took solace in the recovery and examination of the wreckage, taking time to examine every detached piece, every severance point, even the distribution of the pieces around the site. while many of my models bore predictable weak spots, no two events resulted in quite the same shape, quantity, or distribution of fragments, even when i compulsively reenacted the same story over and over. i could always count on the wings falling off, vehicle roofs separating, spilling the payload and pilots, and taller buildings breaking somewhere in the middle, but i couldn’t say how many buildings would fall, or if the nose of the aircraft would break away, or if any of the cars had built would exhibit any signs of impact at all. most of the time, i was too engrossed to really notice, but sometimes the details of the damage were crucial to the tale i was spinning, and i needed things to randomly break in a specific way. yet no matter how i manipulated the pieces to achieve the desired damage upon impact, every model seemed to break apart irrespective of the ways in which i had weakened it.

what i didn’t know then (but which enthralls me today) was that i was experiencing a phenomena we've come to call chaos theory. and it doesn't just sound cool, chaos theory is astounding in its simplicity, stunning in its implication, and keen in its universality. prior to chaos theory, conventional wisdom held that miniscule variations in calculating equations have insignificant impact on the final product (e.g. rounding .0012345 down to .00123). and to the extent that physicists and mathematicians implemented these operations, their relatively low level of precision was inconsequential. in fact, it wasn’t until the advent of electronic computers that automated complex calculations that we realized the shortcomings of rounding or truncating increasingly small numbers. complex computer models, like those used to predict weather for example, perform millions, if not billions, of operations to calculate the effects of weather elements on each other and ultimately project a future model to aid in forecasting. so while rounding down a couple of decimal points doesn’t amount to much variation in a small routine, these minor fluctuations factor outward, and small variations grow exponentially more consequential when applied billions of times in a single routine. the effect is that we are limited in how far out from a set of initial values (an observation or measurement) we can go to make any reliable prediction.

a second consequence of chaos theory is that, despite the uncertainty inherent in complex systems, certain phenomena tend to show up again and again. in keeping with the weather example, weather elements themselves are wild an unpredictable, but trends emerge over time (climate) and certain weather features (snow, hail, tornadoes, hurricanes) are routinely observed in a number of “unrelated” weather events. amidst the seeming randomness and unpredictability that characterizes a complex system like the weather, distinct, repetitive features become apparent – evidence of some kind of order within the disorder. repeating patterns found within chaos also appear to be scalable, taking a similar structure at varying levels of magnification. much like a mountain, jagged and rough in organization, is comprised of millions of smaller rocks, pebbles, and boulders, rough and jagged in organization. distinct repeating patterns exist in all complex systems, at all scales, including the most complex system of all – the universe. just as storms in any weather system tend to adopt a circular structure of motion around a vortex of some kind, so do electrons adopt a circular path around a nucleus; as moons tend to orbit planets, so do planets orbit suns; and as stars orbit black holes in the centers of their galaxies, so might galaxies circle some cosmic center.

now, you wouldn’t be thinking i would drag you through a crash course on chaos theory without relating it to something profound, did you? i hope not, because not only is chaos theory a fascinating and lucrative development in science and philosophy, but i’ve been able to apply it directly to my life. i’ve begun to recognize distinct, repeating patterns within my own existence. not the least striking of which is that my patterns of play with the most beloved artifact of my childhood continue to reemerge in my adult life. i build intimate relationships, i construct whole narratives based on those perceptions, i marvel at the depth and uniqueness of my architecture, but when the turbulence of everyday life shakes these fantasies, i willfully deconstruct them, sometimes gracefully, most often haphazardly.

i’ve known this about myself for a long time. i’ve always felt comfort in chaos; disorder always seemed to make the most sense to me; everything is entropic….everything.

the trouble is, i’ve usually recognized this tendency after the fact, after my world has crumbled, after my realities have decayed, once again, into their basic elements, and i’m left standing amongst half recognizable remnants of what used to be, while trying to piece back together something that was going somewhere, something that was working, at least moreso than the disarray.

so why does this matter now? well, i’m at a place i’ve never been before. not only have i embarked upon a relationship that’s beyond expression, but i’m nearing the completion of an academic goal and i’ve started to see myself for what i am rather than what i’m not, in short, i’m building what may well be the most stable, most supportive, most congruent reality i’ve ever taken part in, yet this path is wrought with uncertainty and fear. i’m staring down the mortality of my betrothed, which, in turn, reminds me directly of my own mortality and threatens to unravel the very fabric of stability that we’ve worked so hard to weave.

even with all that portends an eventual collapse, i can’t shake the feeling that it will be me that ends up kicking the keystone that holds this all together; that no matter how happy i am, no matter how fulfilling my life becomes, i will have this urge to revert back to the old ravaged landscape of my former self. perhaps i’m being paranoid, perhaps i’m truly changing, and perhaps this is the very conversation i had to have with myself to subvert the cycle. all i really can know at this point is how it has been and how i don’t want it to be anymore.

life is not legos. the building blocks of love don’t fall neatly apart and lend themselves to being reorganized and restructured to make a better whole. they are always weakened by the disaster, and never seem to fit together the way they once did. keeping it intact is the key to maintaining love’s stable structure.