Dirty dishes
I can't cook when there are dirty dishes in the sink. On the one hand, our kitchen is fairly small, so every square centimetre counts. But more importantly, it's about a state of mind. Doing the dishes is a meditative process, where you rarely have to think much about what you're doing - you simply go about the business of doing it. That said, it's not a thoughtless or careless process - you still pay attention to what you're doing, you're just not solving any hard problems. You don't have to think too far ahead - whatever needs to be done is right there in front of you. There's no anxiety about what's going to happen within a few minutes or hours - you just scrub item after item until it's done. Anything else on your mind dissolves away.
A pile of dirty dishes is representative of chaos. It's a pile of dishes and spoons and forks and pots and pans, and we don't know where everything is, in what state it is, and how it got there. That's not to say that I can't deal with chaos, or that chaos needs to be overcome.. Indeed, chaos does not need to, or sometimes cannot be, overcome.. Let's take, for example, a memory dump. Dumping memory from a computer results in something that looks rather like random garbage.
Here you have a pile of random garbage from memory. It's a chaotic, incomprehensible mess, and there isn't much use for it. But if you knew the about the internal structure of the data therein, you could do something useful with it. If you knew the precise locations of various data structures, you could read or write to them and possibly do some useful work. If you even studied a random dump of memory and came to an understanding of its internal structure, you have not overcome the chaotic nature of the object.
Indeed, the object hasn't changed - what's changed is your understanding of it. What used to be a random, messy pile of garbage now has elegant structure; though not because the pile transformed into a beautiful shape, but because the observer's knowledge and perception of it has changed. The inherent complexity is still exactly the same.
So in a way, you have overcome chaos, but you haven't. The chaos is still there, but you know how to navigate it. It's like having a messy room but knowing where practically everything is. It's like working on a software project with hardly any documentation but knowing practically which subsystem does what. It's like knowing where every single item is, in the kitchen, and what state it's in.
Doing the dishes isn't just a process by which the dishes are cleaned - it's a process whereby I can ascertain the location and state of every utensil that could be used in the cooking process.
A pile of dirty dishes is representative of chaos. It's a pile of dishes and spoons and forks and pots and pans, and we don't know where everything is, in what state it is, and how it got there. That's not to say that I can't deal with chaos, or that chaos needs to be overcome.. Indeed, chaos does not need to, or sometimes cannot be, overcome.. Let's take, for example, a memory dump. Dumping memory from a computer results in something that looks rather like random garbage.
Here you have a pile of random garbage from memory. It's a chaotic, incomprehensible mess, and there isn't much use for it. But if you knew the about the internal structure of the data therein, you could do something useful with it. If you knew the precise locations of various data structures, you could read or write to them and possibly do some useful work. If you even studied a random dump of memory and came to an understanding of its internal structure, you have not overcome the chaotic nature of the object.
Indeed, the object hasn't changed - what's changed is your understanding of it. What used to be a random, messy pile of garbage now has elegant structure; though not because the pile transformed into a beautiful shape, but because the observer's knowledge and perception of it has changed. The inherent complexity is still exactly the same.
So in a way, you have overcome chaos, but you haven't. The chaos is still there, but you know how to navigate it. It's like having a messy room but knowing where practically everything is. It's like working on a software project with hardly any documentation but knowing practically which subsystem does what. It's like knowing where every single item is, in the kitchen, and what state it's in.
Doing the dishes isn't just a process by which the dishes are cleaned - it's a process whereby I can ascertain the location and state of every utensil that could be used in the cooking process.