Life as we know it is a constant, narrowing process, a myriad possibilities falling by the wayside at every moment, none of them ever to be returned to or met. Beginning in the open expanse of the infant mind that witnesses too much to distinguish one thing from another, and ending in the Alzheimer’s patient’s wasted brain randomly selecting memory from a full but disorderly storehouse, we whittle away at life, pare away at ourselves, learning what is dangerous and not doing it, finding out what is improbable and not trying it, seeking out the rare at the expense of losing the common, clustering near the normal at the expense of losing the rare. Whether we be princes discarding beautiful maidens who don’t have the proper pedigree, princesses refining ourselves into a perpetual state of displeasure, pragmatists dismissing the improbable but possible, or aesthetes seeking the perfect and bypassing that which falls short, we add our own manners of prejudice to the brain’s filtering process, always shrinking the possibilities existence sets before us.
This is a good thing—to some extent. We need order. Though some have glimpsed briefly the state of all-seeing and experienced a glowing omniscience that can’t be described in human terms, most who go there crumble into despair or madness. We cannot survive in a state of too much stimuli.
But neither do we live well in a world made too orderly. A stagnant existence is a bland one; as moving creatures, we need to move—and not just physically. Either the objects of our attention must shift to give it exercise and interest, or we must shift our attention so we look at those objects differently. We need change, not just novelty, to keep ourselves from petrifying.
We live best in a somewhat narrow range between the brain’s unconscious filtering and the mind’s overzealous categorizing, a place where we develop strategies that either hack away the unwanted and intolerable from the overwhelming life we’re offered or tear down the dikes and walls we’ve already mistakenly erected. Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity—all religions try to give a blueprint on living between too-much and too-little, and science has recently joined religion by manufacturing psychotropic drugs to restrain us in the band of behavior that medicine terms “normalcy.”
But we don’t really want to be normal—unless we’re not. Instead, we want novelty, the abnormal, the unusual—until we have too much of it. We fluctuate between the poles of the common and the rare just as we do between order and chaos, always wanting one when we’re at the other. In the everyday world of normal existence, we live in a constant state of tension between these opposites, with most of us abandoning big strategies in favor of smaller, more immediate tacks, grabbing at the closest security object when we become anxious, reaching for the first bit of novelty when we’re bored.
This is what moves us from place to place, time to time. We look at where we are and it disturbs us, so we seek to go elsewhere. Or we look at where we might be with dread, turn our backs to it and gratefully stay where we are—for a moment or two. From the beginning of our lives we start gathering and eliminating, the less stubborn of us moving away from the parts of the world that don’t respond as we wish them to, the more tenacious butting heads with just those parts. We flit about as much as does any dragonfly or moth, the differences between each of us residing primarily in two things, our length of stay in a single place and the extent of our attention on a single thing, with our methods reflecting the nature of those differences—and those methods eventually merging as a variation of a statistical process.