Sorted & Unsorted Sand
A Thought on Complexity and the Need to Acknowledge Structure and Art as we Observe it.
In the past year or so I have undertaken a journey. A journey which I have only just begun. This has largely been in part and thanks to my experience within the Earth Regenerators Network. Which along with the podcasts of many Game B advocates (such as Joe Brewer and Jim Rutt) has lead me down many rabbit holes. One that I am taking increasing interest in is Complexity. Which I find, nicely accompanies Holism as discussed by Daniel Christian Wahl. It is through these experiences and lenses that I have been initiated and guided toward questioning my Engineering training and the silos that we all find ourselves within. These questions have given me much to think about, giving me much pause in myself and in nature.
On many occasions when I have stopped to observe the leaves making eddies on the pavements, the flight of birds or the crash of the waves on the shore, I am often drawn back to the following passage which I have adapted from Robert Pirsig’s, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (p75–76):
“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world… we divide the sand into parts… into separate piles.” Science & Engineering “is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them.” Whereas Art’s “understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins… What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding… Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand” and “will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken”
In Pirsig’s original text, the terms Classical and Romantic were used to describe those who sort sand and those who don’t. I have used the terms Science & Engineering and Art to distinguish these activities instead because the original terms seem to be outdated or at least unintuitive.
To give some further explanation to these two terms, those who sort sand are constantly trying to break things down into structures, hierarchies or processes to make better sense of things, or to work out how they may or may not fit within the current imagined structures (Cultural Scaffolding) built by those with the same viewpoint generations ago. In contrast those who observe unsorted sand may try to preserve their handful as best they can with a brush, chisel or camera in hand. It is the difference between concrete and abstract, left brain and right brain, thinking inside the box and out.
Once all of the handfuls of sand are combined, we happen upon the endless landscape, an analogy that perfectly describes the current ideas and thinking around Holism and Complexity.
The need to adapt the passage is a case in point, in that language, a structure, an abstract of the endless landscape, can never definitively explain this idea of complexity because each of us holds a different handful of sand, a different vocabulary. Alternatively a painting or sculpture may do an even better job of abstracting the idea. However no one person, structure or abstraction can ever hold the full answer because complexity is related to the interaction and relationship of those moving, being and living within it. Thus, our understanding of complexity can only emerge when we are in relationship to every perspective.
For the idea of Complexity and Holism to truly flourish they must attract everyone of every perspective and the only way to do that is to never lose sight of Pirsig’s passage. It is only when we embrace the whole, the wisdom, the playfulness of sorting and contemplating the unsorted sand hidden within all of us that we can hope to observe, abstract and apply a better understanding of the marvellous beauty of the complex whole. “Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.” (E. F. Schumacher)
From a practical aspect, this can be achieved through wisdom, a practice which I have dedicated a separate article to. Put simply though it is the act of living into our questions, being in relationship with ourselves and nature, by actually sitting, standing, connecting the dots within it. Too often we forget that “the map is not the territory” (Alfred Korzybski), in other words the answers do not lie in the data, the math or the statistics, they lie in the world, in the roots, in the song of birds and the clap of thunder. So the only way to truly appreciate the structure and beauty of the complex whole is to touch the rock face, to taste fresh fruit, see the sunclipse and smell morning’s dew. Alternatively another practice is to have a number of thinking hats, lenses and tools in mind such as Pirsig’s passage when observing our handfuls of sand. One such lens which accommodates Pirsig’s passage and holistic thinking is the Four Quadrants of Integral Theory as uncovered by Ken Wilber.
So I ask that when we write about the endless landscape of complexity of which we are in relationship to, that we do justice to as many of the perspectives within it as we can by considering the hidden beauty of both Sorted & Unsorted Sand.
