Feeding My Ignorance

Reading the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson has got me once again thinking about the many different worlds that we each live in.  I have briefly mentioned this in a previous post, however now is a good time to expand on some of those ideas as well as to pull together what that means in terms of some of the other aspects of friendship and mental models that I have talked about.

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I won't spoil the book by giving away any of its plot, and anyway, it was only the trigger for these thoughts to surface - the thoughts themselves have little in common with the book.

It used to be that I worried a little about repeating myself in these blogs - however, my thought process has changed in that not only do I think that is inevitable, but it also means that the posts themselves can become a record of how my thinking is maturing and how I am indeed Feeding my Ignorance!

Everyone - to some extent - finds themselves in a situation where they are living in a number of different worlds at the same time.  Now, perhaps that would be better stated that we each are progressing along a number of threads of life and these threads interact - or more correctly, the worlds in which those threads are taking place interact - at various times throughout our lives.

Now - as I have said before in this blog (at least I think I have ;) I might just be imagining it) the thoughts that I am stating here are clearly (and importantly) about the world as seen through my mental model - if you don't agree with that, then that is fine - I only ask that you consider the possibility that we might BOTH be wrong!

What are these worlds?

Well - like I have said about systems - the boundaries around these worlds are (largely) arbitrary and are put there by me in order to make sense of things.  They are most certainly not the only boundaries that could be identified - as they say there is more than one way to slice a cake.  Since they interact, it is perfectly possible to claim without any problem that they could all be viewed as a single world - which is, I guess, the 'normal' way to view it.  However, I think that recognising the different worlds is a good way to help to highlight some of the difficulties we each face.

Now - for some people living, as it were, a simple life it would make sense to describe that life using a single thread.  For others, and I think that this is an increasing proportion of te population, our lives are getting so complex that holding on to any thread is often very difficult.  That is where it makes sense, I think, to look to simplify things by having (relatively) simple threads which might have complex inter-relationships.

Already given the size of this post I can see that this is going to require a bit of work to fully describe, so I will limit this post to an overview of my thoughts and try to hold fire on explaining things too much.

So, get on with it, what are these worlds?

For me, as for many I guess that life started simply with everything revolving around my immediate family.  I shall call this my private life - not because it is a secret, more because it relates to (I guess) the core of my life and it is the one thread that I can be sure of continuing until I die.   Every other thread starts as a branch away from that thread - sometimes running very much in parallel, and at other times diverging significantly.

At around the age of five I was sent to school to commence my professional life.  Sounds very grand - and at the time of writing I am not sure whether I should separate out education from work.  What I think I am heading towards is that my professional life includes all my learning and that my working life is something which eventually will run alongside.

A lot of my early life is, of course, only known to me through what I have been told rather than a direct memory.  Certainly soon after I was born I commenced what I would call my spiritual life and was regularly attending church.  This was also the root of my musical life which very much started in church and commenced when I was around seven years of age.

Although, this is incomplete - it is also long, so perhaps now would be a good point to publish and we can add to it in future posts.