Order

Order is important. Without order there would be chaos. Duh.

In a more spacy sense, order is the fight against entropy. The universe always seems to want to return to chaos. Buildings get dusty and crumble, bodies die and decay, suns explode and disappear. Oh, and software always stops working after a while unless you fix it, reinstall it or download a patch. Things have to be kept in proper working order in order to be in order.

Daily life rhythms. Wake up at 8AM. Take a shower, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, go to work at 9AM sharp. Some people love this (live this, actually). I hate it. Sometimes, unconsciously, a pattern appears in my daily life. Can't avoid the lunch break at noon, of course. But weekly patterns, like always eating sushi on Friday, or always having curry on Monday, that I try to avoid. When I notice the pattern I immediately feel an urge to change it. I wonder if that's just me or if other people do this. I know for a fact that my father loves his daily life patterns. Sometimes he pretends to complain but I know he's really quite proud of his regular life. On the contrary, I feel quite proud of my irregular life. Must be some freudian thing, I suppose.

Letters arranged in the right order form a novel. Machine code instructions in the right order are a piece of software. Thoughts arranged in the right order are a scientific theory or a brilliant idea (or instructions to the hand for writing that novel). People arranged in the right order are a profitable company. Musical notes played in the right order are a product of the ordered thoughts of people like Beethoven and Bach.

Can there be too much order? If a computer program plays Beethoven, a true knower of music might argue that it's played too 'mechanically', or too cold. If a real person played it there would be more feeling in it. But isn't that feeling created from the disorder in the person playing it? If he could play it perfectly (that is, exactly according to the musis sheet) then he would sound exactly like the computer. And isn't the idea for the music itself a result of the random thoughts of its creator? Perhaps we need the right amount of chaos to create the right amount of order. Too few order, and no coherent idea will appear. Too much order, and we might as well be computers, running our little machine instructions one by one, not comprehending or understanding why we do what it is we do best: creative thinking.

Posted in Thoughts

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