the eloquent delinquent

Watching Complexity

The three panel window in my new apartment has endowed me with a gorgeous panoramic view of Cambridge: the tree lined streets (now radiating with fall colours) and the many steeples that dot this city all the way to Harvard square, set against the backdrop of the lush elevated hills that surround Boston. Every day as I work I occasionally look up from my desk and stare in rapt awe at the teeming intellectual capital before me enveloped by a brooding azure sky. I especially enjoy seeing the sun set on the weekends (on evenings that I'm not at the office) mainly because for a brief moment of my torrid life I become conscious of the magnificent complexity of our environment: the gravitational force that keeps the Earth rotating around the Sun which is rotating around a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the nuclear fusion occurring on the Sun's surface to emit the intense light that travels 150 million kilometres to reach us, the Rayleigh scattering of this light off the atmosphere that gives its blue hue, the ability of our retina to convert these photons into electrical signals deciphered by the cerebral cortex that ultimately enable us to have such an experience. The sheer complexity of it all is (euphemistically) massive and made bittersweet when certain neurons fire to cause our facial muscles to twitch slightly; and we smile :) Returning to my apartment, there is a dilapidated park that always seems to draw my attention which is a popular place for local residents to bring their dogs. The owners stand idle partaking in their usually bland dose of small talk, while their dogs delight in chasing one other and hunting down plastic balls. The intensity of their childlike joy is graspable in the ferocity with which their tails wag. It is as though in these brief minutes, the whole of their evolutionary ascendence has in some ways been realized. Though oblivious to the staggering complexity that has made them experience such joy, they can nevertheless delight in it with the utmost intensity. And I observing all this from a far away distance, cognizant of such things, delight in their delight.