Understanding environments

For those who seek to define themselves by the things in the world which we take and transform into something which gives us pleasure, life can often seem to digress us from that point of transformation. When creativity takes a back seat, a short break quickly becomes an unending hiatus and imaginative thought, like an unpractised language, becomes strained and self conscious.

It is not always practical to be prolific. No philosophical ideal is more concrete than pragmatism. But when we can see the world as an object that has been transformed and retransformed countlessly throughout history, life can be entirely pleasurable, in the way that we might practice a kind of admiration for the enterprises of others.

In any great city, it is the achievements of the entrepreneurial mind, which make those cities resonate with palpable evidence of life. There are those great ventures which challenge the laws of physical probability, and quite often aesthetic sensibility, and those humble immigrant-owned establishments which, like some tree which springs forth from a stone wall, evokes awe of such tenacity in such incredible circumstances.

I could use this plant analogy ad nauseam to describe the ways in which people subsist between the cracks in subway stations, survive in the crumbling landscape of condemned buildings and dominate the skyline hundreds of feet above the population. But I won't.

I only mention this because I am beginning to understand now, just how important it is to be able to weave in and out of this social layering, perceiving every echelon in an attempt to grasp exactly what strangeness I am moving into. For one cannot exercise the limitlessness of imagination until one begins to understand the vast context of their situation.

Innovations may come from knowing a few ideas about many things, or many things about one particular idea, but I cannot veritably believe that they could ever come from knowing little and caring less about the world in which we live.