Twelfth Insight - Patterns
Confusing in their profusion, calming in their ubiquity.
With a return to work looming next month after over a year without it and nearly a year hunting for it, I find myself thinking about patterns. Specifically how they have power over us but also can be used as tools. We can be caught in them or we can work to create them. It’s also hard not to see the impact of them over the course of the pandemic, and how easy it is for us to forget about how they work.
On a personal level, it’s hard not to feel like this re-employment is a bit of a failure, or at least a concession. Over a year of intropection and attempts to reframe my place in the workforce results in…a return to the job that is unsustainable in a pandemic. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about learning the ins and outs of a new position (though I will be tackling some new tasks when I return). I don’t have to decipher a whole new array of interpersonal politics and social structures. I don’t have to wonder how I’ll be as a remote worker because I’ll be there in person. I can go back to the comfortable and known patterns of the past despite my mental fortifications to take on new and unknown ones of the future. It’s both an enforced and a created pattern; a trap and a refuge as one. A perfect reflection of what patterns can be.
On a larger scale, I continue to be wearily amazed at our ability as a collective to forget the patterns of things like a pandemic. Which is, of course, a pattern in and of itself. While it can be understandable to want to leave something like a worldwide shutdown with millions of people getting sick and dying behind, this is currently not something in the distant past. In fact, we are still in it. And of course the needle moves constantly, which is unnerving and exhasperating. Still, it’s darkly fascinating how quickly we’ll default to what we prefer to be true, and how easily we demonize the things that were helping us not so long ago, simply because we prefer it that way. It’s such an odd tendency of humanity to always tend toward a pattern which is, essentially, as close to pure chaos as you can get without actually being it. In that I mean that we prefer what we perceive as the known even if it makes no sense to. We’d rather bend the reality of what is to the reality of what we think should be in an attempt to create order. In doing so we make chaos that we then have to work out how to somehow fix. Another pattern arises. And we all do it. I do it. No one is truly exempt from it. So is that a failing or just a quirk we’ve managed to somehow make into some sort of odd strength since it hasn’t resulted in our mass extermination?
Anyway, patterns are everywhere, without a doubt, and they reveal themselves in the most fascinating ways sometimes. Just don’t go looking too hard for them.