As the summer winds its way to a close, I'm feeling that what I've learned - that is, learned to see, since it's been all around all along (for instance here) - is the regular irregularity of the world. There are patterns, rhythms, cycles all around us: everyone knows that, and I'd noticed it too. But these patterns are ragged. The rhythm comes not from particular iterations but cumulatively. A statistical average - and beyond it, a mystery. If things aren't precisely the same time after time, what makes it that their average stays the same, enough to keep the wobble from tipping things into chaos?I'd like to think I'd learned this from the surf - above is the tide calendar for these parts - but that's not it; my father and I have been referring to these calendars (favorite Christmas presents) for years, but I never fully processed what the wobbling line meant as a line. This was the summer I started to appreciate the wondrousness of regular irregularity because of the way it began: with the IMS meditation retreat where I finally got to square one, and observed my breath long enough to notice that it's not the same from breath to breath, but varies widely (while still keeping me going!). It takes me a while to absorb things, so it's taken until the last few weeks for me to start to notice that the surf, the breath of the sea if you will, is the same. And to connect it to the same thing all over everywhere. Wondrous.
One needn't be Buddhist to see this, or make sense of it (not that I think I've made any sense of it, or really expect to). I see now a deeper rationale for the medieval debate about universals and particulars (realism v. nominalism). I'd comfortably sided with the Aristotelians here, who think there's nothing but individuals, with universals no more than the generalizations of our minds. But now it seems way more complex. It may be by generalization that we arrive at universal ideas, but some kind of general tendency or consistency or commitment is at work in the particulars, too, in a way I can't fathom. The question about universals and particulars now seems to be about this: do the variations matter? Or: how do they matter, why do they matter? Are they distractions from universals, or do they constitute them through their very variation?
