It occurred to me today that even the simplest things are ultimately complex.
They say that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What this means, when you stop to consider it, is that the journey is actually significantly complex.
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Last week, I tried to run a 5K in the hills between Branson and West Branson, Missouri. It was amazingly similar to, and also completely different from, running at home in Southwestern Michigan. Put one foot in front of the other, do it quickly enough to take about 180 steps per minute, head in a certain direction, turn around when it’s time to head back, etc., etc..
What made it different was the hills.
If you’ve never been to Branson, Missouri, some people swear by the place. I, as far as places go, could have taken it or left it. I enjoyed my time there because I enjoyed being with the people that I was with, but there wasn’t anything about the place, necessarily, that I fell in love with.
Quite to the contrary, I didn’t appreciate the hills.
I didn’t appreciate running (or trying to run) on them. I didn’t appreciate driving on them. I didn’t appreciate hiking on them, which we tried to do once and it didn’t work out so well for certain members of the family in less than peak physical condition.
Just about the only thing that I liked about the hills around Branson was looking at them, and also watching the sun rise up from behind them and set down behind them.
The real problem was this:
Back home, I’d become accustomed to running on fairly flat stretches on land, punctuated by the occasional rise or drop in elevation. Having gotten used to doing that kind of running, I was wholly unprepared for the kind of running that I was to face when a hill –a real hill– loomed before me. Some of the hills that I faced in Branson were steep climbs of a hundred feet within a half-mile, while other hills were sixty foot climbs stretched out over a mile.
Running in my home town is simple running. Running in Branson is too complicated.
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According to Google just now, the journey of a thousand miles is actually comprised of two million steps, based on an average stride length. Therefore, if the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then that first step is merely .00005% of the journey. Another way to look at it would be this: you have to take twenty thousand steps, on the journey of a thousand miles, before you’ve even completed one percent of the journey.
Dallas, Texas; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Augusta, Maine; Jacksonville, Florida; Denver, Colorado; each of these locations is about a thousand miles, give or take, from my home. To walk to these places –a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step– would be ridiculous.
So instead, let’s drive.
It’s going to take multiple tanks of gas, multiple meals at restaurants, and probably also an overnight stay, to be able to finish the drive in the morning. That involves dealing with about a dozen places of business along the way (food, gas, shelter).
Or maybe, it would simplify things if we flew.
Buying airline tickets, shopping for the best price, checking luggage at the airport, the Transportation Security Administration, pre-flight checks on the plane, learning how to find a flotation device in the event of a water landing.
Maybe I’ll just walk.
The average person walks about three miles per hour, and will need to rest and eat, as well as doing other things, in any twenty-four hour period of time. If you worked hard at it, you could walk thirty miles in a day. I’d estimate the journey of a thousand miles, beginning with that first step, will take you five to six weeks.
So complicated.
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I think we fool ourselves into thinking that things are simpler than they are, to make ourselves feel better about the massive complexity of life. If you really stop to think about it, everything that is going on around us is so complex as to boggle the mind. Even the simplest of things are themselves comprised of intricate networks of atoms and molecules, particles so small as to lie beyond the sight of all but the most powerful of scientific tools. These particles are linked together through bonds and cohesions that are strong enough to hold everything together, without us having to worry much about all of that.
Or, maybe we choose to focus on the simplicity of life because it helps us to feel as if we have more control than we actually do. Shall I point out that the global society has recently been ravaged by a virus? If you took a meter and broke it down into a billion smaller pieces, each of those pieces is a length called a nanometer. The coronavirus is only 125 nanometers wide, on average, including its little spikes. That small of a thing has given billions of humans, in all of their glorious egocentricity, many moments of pause.
As complex as life really is, maybe we just aren’t equipped to think about that level of complexity for very long, or very often.
It Occurred To Me Today 