Making Actionable Sense II

Gary L. Murphy responds eloquently to my posting on how to turn more of the ideas generated here into action.

Gary is not so sure we fail in the way I suggested, and also argues that loose ends are not valueless, nor lost. He also would not want to see his sense of wonder, of possibility be replaced by plans and deadlines:

The loose ends offer me a sense of the possible, a landscape that can go anywhere, a sense of adventure that keeps coaxing me back to explore a little more. I wouldn't want it tidied up in a tight focused and deadlined bundle because I know, philosophically, to do so would require closing off many of these possibilities, discarding the undiscovered territories. It's an ongoing story, a story of ideas, a story of what's needed, what's possible, a story of senses where there's no way to end the plotline, no way to limit the cast and no way to cut it off in time for the capping colophon. Unhemmed as it is uneven.

Yes, I too love what Gary calls the landscape of possibilities. In fact I think I'm very much addicted to it. To the feeling of that sudden spark in my head where I feel thoughts and ideas are connected but still just out of reach to be able to put it into words well, but I already sense that it is there.

And I certainly would not want to give anything of that wondrous feeling away, nor would I want to replace it with something as hideous as the description Gary gives of what a book is :

[...]diligently ironed out droll, flat and linear, partitioned by topic domain, bound to a dead tree and offered on a shelf with a price tag.

Also I agree that loose ends are not lost. They've been added to my outlook on the world and can't be undone. They might even fall into place somewhere in the future. We don't know.

Nevertheless I do have a feeling that I'm not responsive enough in picking up the thoughts we dream up here in the blogosphere and turn them into action. The blogs reveal emerging patterns, and we can nurture the memes we think important, and block or criticise the ones we think are not.
But I seem to be less succesfull at moving stuff from the complex and un-ordered realm (to adopt some of Dave Snowdens vocabulary) where my addiction is fed, to the more ordered realm of the knowable and practice.

One of the barriers in doing that and that might be turned into an attractor, is the people with whom I try to bring that transition about, from the complex un-ordered to the more ordered knowable. Why would I try to do that with people who never been to the complexity realm, when at the same time I know lots of people who have and are in part neatly listed in my blogroll?

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 29, 2003 10:44 AM)