We take eyelids for granted. Without them, your eyes would quickly cease to work. Eyelids do their job quietly, thousands of times per day, clearing debris from your eyes and lubricating singularly sensitive tissue. At bed time, they close precisely over the eyes, shutting out the world, its stimuli and tiny intruders. Eyelids don’t get in the way. They don’t interfere. In fact, they somehow fit perfectly – just one of millions of finely-tuned design features that allow you to be you. Imagine an eyelid that was too big or too small, either drooping clumsily over your eye socket or stretching painfully, never quite able to close. Life would not be the same. Much of your functional existence owes a debt of gratitude to your exquisitely optimized eyelids. Eyelids contribute to a rich, complex context that makes life possible. They also require context to do what they do -- and for what they do to have any meaning.
But eyelids are but one letter of one word of a long book series. Everything that you can imagine requires context. A peace symbol. The local supermarket. A college application. The float inside your toilet. A ribosome. The word “the”. All of these things rely entirely on context for their value or meaning. By themselves, they are nothing: images without conveyance, symbols without substance, objects without purpose, predicates without subjects. We do not conceive of things this way because we are so accustomed to living in a sea of context. If something lacks context, our brain provides it. When we examine more clever works of double image art, we find it difficult to see the second image after our brains have established the context for the first. The brain requires context to interpret the data being fed to it -- and, once satisfied, it is reluctant to admit to alternate contexts for the same data. Such is the importance of context to all our interactions. We seek it. We hoard it. We don’t relinquish it easily. It is precious stuff.
Context creates meaning, working its magic in subtle ways. Your interpretation of this book might differ slightly if you skipped the first chapter. The puzzling actions of the motorist in front of you might have different meaning if you knew what the person had been doing or feeling fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes earlier (and because we demand context, we create that information, which often means assuming the worst in people). Gourmet food can elicit revulsion if taste or texture strays outside the context that our brain assigns. An uttered expletive can be funny or offensive or frightening, depending on who said it, when, and why. Context is king.
But context is not cause; context operates at a broader, more diffuse level. The morality play engine in our brain often demands causal explanations, and so we often substitute simplified causality for more complex context. For example: “That driver who cut me off is a bad, selfish person.” Or: “My tomatoes were yucky because the soil lacked calcium.” Or: “The quarterback must be benched!” The relationship can be difficult to untangle sometimes. The driver could be a selfish person, but it is likely that a larger context led to the unpleasant event. Your soil might lack calcium, but it is likely that a broader soil context conspired to produce the failed tomatoes. The quarterback of your favorite team might have looked awful last Sunday, but it is also possible that his rookie receivers are running bad routes, or his linemen are confused by the defense. Or maybe the opposing team got a copy of the playbook. Myriad possibilities.
Sometimes the difference is subtle. If you grow hydrangeas, your results will vary considerably based on soil acidity, or pH. Acidic soils tend to produce blue flowers, and alkaline soils tend to produce pink. It is a cause-effect relationship in principle. But living systems are always more complicated than our horticultural brains prefer to imagine. Many hydrangea bushes produce blue and pink flowers on the same plant, often with a range of beautiful ‘tweener shades on a single flower head. Soil consistency and mineral content are factors, among other issues. Like most people in most walks of life, gardeners crave simple explanations. We want a simple cause to be the source of our success or failure with this or that plant; do this thing, and magic will occur. Sometimes experience even reinforces the illusion, and then the remedies beget their own folklore …prune the suckers from your tomato plants and your fungus problems will disappear ...don’t touch your green bean plants when they are wet ...put a tray of stale beer on the ground and solve your slug problems forever.
All of these ideas, along with thousands of other garden memes and heuristics, are grounded in some degree of truth. And all are, to some extent, lies. Such statements mislead when they imply singularity -- that this or that thing, and only this or that thing, is the way out of woe, the path to perfection. And this is never the case, in gardening and in life. Your garden is an awesomely complex, interconnected system. It is impossible to know or understand the full context of what occurs every second of every hour in your green oasis. But the more that you appreciate the richness and depth of the system, the more entwined you become with it personally. You become part of the context. And this is when you discover that gardening is not about planning and doing. It is about being, absorbing, experiencing, communing. You begin to understand that soil is not dirt; it is a complex context for root growth, and you must nurture it and interact with it with care. You begin to see that a newly-germinated seedling is a complex context in rapid transition, and therefore vulnerable. You instinctively know that spraying this or that substance on this or that plant will spawn a cascade of unintended side effects, both to the plant and its surroundings. You are not just spraying some bugs; you are rebooting an entire context, ushering in a new equilibrium.
So how are we to function in such a world, where every situation is an inscrutable set of relationships, and every decision reverberates through fields of secret possibility? In the real world, we must make decisions. We must take action. We cannot be frozen by fear. The answer is not inaction, nor is it an unending loop of analysis, chasing ghosts and demanding the unknowable. I believe the answer starts by simply accepting one’s role and responsibility in every context. By recognizing that we are players in a broader game rather than puppeteers imposing our will unilaterally, we begin to appreciate the other players on the field. We begin to broaden our observations. And it becomes an instinctive way of thinking and behaving. We might not be able to anticipate the full effect of a particular decision (life would be very boring otherwise!), but we develop a wisdom and respect that causes us to pause and consider before acting. Or speaking or writing.
We live in a strange and wild universe. Just about everything of consequence demands an alignment of contingencies that we cannot fully understand, and therefore mostly assume away. This includes thousands of systems in our own bodies that permit us to live and breathe, aspire and dream. They are the context, the scaffolding, on which we build our lives. Each of us is a vast, complicated system that itself contributes to complex contexts of other systems. In this existence, we cannot see or understand that big picture, or how many even bigger pictures are in play. But the beginning of wisdom is recognizing that they are indeed out there, feeling the impact of every decision that we make.
Seek and respect the context of everything in your life.