From Particles to Perceptions
Navigating space and time via immersive exploration and achieving agency via feeling our way through reality
Parts and Particles
In the early fall, something cool happens to the lake water: it becomes heavily saturated with particles of all kinds, so much so that it changes the perceptual experience in quite an interesting way.
The water becomes potent with pollen-like fibers from the aged and unobserved fields of seaweed below; with grains of wood and stone that it erodes from the shorelines confining it; with acidic bits of matter from the teal pines all around, along with all of the other oils and spores of the surrounding woodlands.
The potency of all the particles is such that the rays of light pierce pretty vividly through the cold emerald dark that fades into obscurity below. Almost like a more transparent smoke, the density of the water blurs the perceptual lines between liquid, solid, gas, space and even time, as the photons of light from the sun above seem to float inanimately suspended.
At lake bottom, there are boulders scattered about, abandoned by nomadic glaciers that have long ago melted. A particular species of seaweed chooses to remain curiously organized on the sandy floor below; another more bold form of aquatic fauna reaches as high as it never can in awkward assemblies that lean into whichever way the currents flow about.
The surface of the lake, as seen from underwater, is rippled in a complicated kind of way; from below the waterline, it seems as though an entire force (air, wind, pressure) dynamically [or thermodynamically] impresses down upon the water, the same way clouds seem to do in the sky above.
Everything’s a part and particle of something, something both infinitesimally smaller and infinitely bigger than itself.
As cliché as it is to realize this, logical deductions that carry this idea can only carry it so far, as there’s something more to it that can only be felt via real-time immersion and sensory observation.
Explorative Agency
We’ll often become saturated with worn phrases like ‘own the moment’ or ‘be in the present’ but how often do we stop to consider what this kind of ownership really entails? And how often do we wonder what the most potent form of such agency is within the complicated orchestra of surrounding time and space?
If we extrapolate the phrase — to own a moment — and apply it spatially as much as temporally, and then stretch that further across past and future tenses, we realize a need for a common denominator.
If we so try to identify one, the answer becomes ironically obvious in the question itself, like some kind of koan or paradox that echoes a powerful but annoying idea: less is more.
And it’s only recently that I’ve begun to realize the way by which an answer can be wrangled out from this nonsensical riddle — if not at least occasionally felt.
It’s an answer that I figure to be only a small drop in a big bucket of autumnal lakewater: owning a moment, or assuming a supreme kind of agency through space and time, relies on an exploratory kind of observation, one that hinges upon meaning and feeling more than anything else.
Sensational Observation
Biking through the woods — to get to the above and over-described lake — offers a uniquely visceral way to both explore and observe the surrounding space. To feel it.
The tubular sound of the rubber-saddled wheels on reinforced alloy rims — rims that have somehow held up for almost two decades— smacking the rocks that jut out from the leaf-covered path through the woods.
The impermanent screeches of disc brakes, audible only after the dissection of small puddles, reverberate through the canopy, helixing with the occasional but incessant rattle of the muddy chain (still sometimes jumping gears despite being replaced recently) that hangs tensely above the grainy trail below.
That trail itself weaves through the forest, coursing around a series of lakes, the most admirable of which remains off limits for being situated on the crown property of the prime ministerial cottage estate — they guard it well from everything but an occasional glance.
As it’s autumn, the leaves above have taken on an ochre and amber look. The sun drips from the few open holes in the vaulted canopy above head, landing lazily on the defiantly-green ferns that fill the lower space.
Far away, distant caws are silenced by a more distant small engine plane, and the occasional wind gust can be heard approaching for a few moments before finally arriving to once again shake the decaying foliage.
The cathedral-like canopy that overhangs this segment of forest isn’t far from an abrupt gully that provides a subconscious kind of enclosure, highlighted by a felt proximity to the best shore of a large lake (next to that of the Prime Minister’s, connected by a labyrinth of conifers and cattails).
It’s a different feeling to be here in the fall, one that becomes more potent in this unique modality of observation; one that, in essence, boils down to exploratory curiosity and perceptual engagement.
This contrast in seasons, in this particular case, makes it easy; the novelty of the distinct effects of autumn impressing upon the surrounding space breeds an attentive kind of immersivity, one that can be felt and one that propagates intensive awareness. The mind is enthralled by the differences of and between organisms.
In reality, this feeling can be cultivated in any way or in any forum, so long as the right perceptive criteria are met: a willing curiosity; an attentive form of observatory cognizance; a fulfilling sensory experience; an exploratory state of mind.
The feedback looping of neurochemical deployments in the brain; the mathematical reverence for thermodynamic life; immersivity into shared social wavelengths; it really doesn’t matter the context so long as a hyper-awareness of the present moment is spurred into being.
Observation is observation, whether done from surfing a lonesome couch, a popular social channel, or atop an ocean wave. But when that observation is supplemented with either sensory experience or with novelty of some kind, it evolves itself into something more meaningful.
In other words, our exploration of reality is bolstered through our intrigue, and it’s when this intrigue is most peaked that we seem to be the most immersed in our surrounding space (and time), experiencing those really meaningful moments and accessing that supreme style of agency.
Feeling the Waves
Even the way that the sun flickers atop cresting waves seems different in the fall than in the earlier portions of summer — somehow more viscous and important.
The distant hills have all succumbed to the autumnal gold that spans the mountain-straddled horizon. Loons call rather chaotically and the usual incessance of horseflies and deerflies seems long over. Missing too is the steady hiss of the cicada and the cacophony of diverse bird life all around.
Despite an impending sense of closure to another seasonal cycle, the crayfish seem to still take their time scavenging around the shallows, unwaveringly searching under an endless sun that promises — or assures — some kind of inevitable eternity.
Curiously, to be a part and particle of something is to ultimately mean something. And this connection isn’t just something that can be deduced from the collapsing wave functions of reason — it can be felt.
We judge what’s meaningful by our feeling associated with an action or presence, both in the tactile sense and in the ideal sense. A brutally cold swim still somehow feels good; accomplishment, especially on the heels of failure, feels good.
Feeling is directly engrained within the coding of our observational capacity — guiding us through the swirls of space and time towards those things we deem most meaningful.
Our neurochemical dispositions, as an example, are fully indicative of this fact — they’re but one of the capacitors and conductors behind the systems that we use to transmit and receive data about our surrounding world; we’re physiologically and emotionally rewarded for our achievement of those things that we most feel.
We ride these waves of our world atop our sensory experience of reality and through our observational capacity. We then dress things up with our patterning minds in whatever ways we want to.
It’s why we’re pulled by our curiosity to learn new things; it’s why the healthy mind pursues a kind of progression or transcendence of limits and uncharted territory of any kind. A thirst for novelty, or a tendency to explore, is encoded within our very being, often rewarding the senses by delivering that which they seek.
Exploring the potential of space and time; exploring potential and what’s possible; exploring ourselves — not only within our surrounding reality but also as an integral part of it.
