Symphony

It always feels good to be the one of the first ones to “get it”, whatever it is. It could be a joke, or an idea someone is explaining. For many of us, probably the pleasure of “getting it” has a lot to do with other people recognizing that we got it. For someone who really has mastery of the concept of symphony though, maybe they are often, at least initially, so far out in front, they don’t get that satisfaction, whether they are seeing patterns of human behavior, or patterns of planetary motion. People who really see the big picture probably have to wait sometimes for others to say “great idea”, and by the time they do, people may already be saying “of course it works that way,” as though it has always been obvious.

Gardner talks about lumpers and splitters. I probably lean more toward being a splitter, and an idealist, with hopefully some ability to bridge my islands. I admire people who seem to naturally look at things in terms of cause and effect and see people and situations as they are, rather than as they would like them to be. Being able to see things accurately seems fundamental to being able to connect them well; and being able to put those two skills together probably offers a life of both more realistic expectations and greater peace. But maybe people who really have that ability just have to get their satisfaction from knowing inside that they get it, even if no one connects with their idea at first, and from looking forward to more things they will be able to see as they have more pieces to put together.

When I started to write this, I remembered a quote about people starting out seeing everything individually. I couldn’t remember the whole quote, or even the writer, but in the age of computers and automation, it took about two minutes to find it on Google:

To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
from The American Scholar – Mere Thinkers and Men Thinking