Best quote from a nice night out in a loud restaurant:
A: I listened to Mahler 5 at work today!
J: Oh, you listen to...Maroon 5?
Yesterday's train ride was filled with slow progress on my current read, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, an absorbingly philosophical book on the nature of evolution and the implications of design. I had reached a point in the book that was describing a Game of Life developed by mathematician John Conway, which allows for a basic system with a simple set of rules to grow and develop. He made a fascinating connection between this seemingly minimalistic foundation and the way that life itself could have developed, breaching the daunting barrier between nothingness and the very trunk of evolution from where all organisms branch.
Aside from being a beautiful analogy--and a compelling one--it reminded me of how simplicity so often underlies complexity. This was one of the very things that I loved so much about pure mathematics: simplicity is one of its core values. A complicated proof, no matter how rigorous or accurate, is deemed less worthy than one that is elegant and concise. The overarching principle may be the same, but to explain it effortlessly is the aim. It seems as though there is truth to that in living as well. Sometimes life gets cluttered: too much to do, to see, to have, to know. What if we simplified down to the core? When I visited my brother last weekend, his friend described a man who "had ten things in his little box, and cared about nothing else". He had trimmed away the superfluousness of his existence, concentrating in on only the small selection of things and people that mattered. Yet it is difficult to achieve this mentality and maintain an innate desire to want to take in everything, to experience the world in entirety. Perhaps that is the challenge.
As for now, I'm just dreaming of little pixels floating around my screen in utter simplicity, flowing in and out, merging, suppressing, expanding.