Knots

Last week, I wrote about untangling a psychic knot. It's strangely similar to untangling a physical knot.

What's fascinating about physical knots, like a knot in a piece of string, is how easily they form.

Physicists Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith dropped strings into boxes and shook the boxes. They found complex knots could form in seconds. Here's where they explore the physics and math. The short answer is, it's a mystery, but it's not random. From their experiments, they found tangles form in primes: 2,3,5,7,11 and so forth more than divisible numbers.

It means in a few weeks, I'll put away a neatly coiled hose, and in the spring I'll untangle it. Don't get me started on chains for power saws.

All of us with garden hoses, power cords and jewelry chains have experienced the phenomenon.

What's a further mystery, but still reliably predictable is how tangles tightening into knots show up in our thinking, our relationships, and our workflow.

Drop a few projects into your favorite project manager, and a couple of shakes later you have some knotty problems.

Every time something enters that dynamic box we call life, even what looks like a simple and straightforward thing like lunch, it gets shaken around with everything else in that magnificent movement of those uncountable strings, and now lunch is complicated by an email from one string, a text from another, a project deadline from another. And Christmas is coming.

While we can wait for Raymer and Smith to find the formula for dropping our knots in a box that shakes them loose, it doesn't look likely. It's that Second Law of Thermodynamics. All order moves to disorder. Knots are easily resolved when they're moved into a fourth dimension, but we'd have to do the risky trick of leaving this physical world. There's no sequential formula for untangling a knot. Knots are a consequence of the universal movement toward disorder.

Nonetheless, there's hope. While there is no sequential formula for untangling a knot in the physical world, there's an Associative process. Pull on an exposed piece of the knot, then pull on another. Turn it over and over, tugging where you can get a grip. It looks like nothing is happening for a while, until it suddenly falls apart. What's hard is it looks like futility for a while. There's no obvious movement toward success, and it takes an indefinite amount of time and energy.

I, and many of you, have a complex life with lots of entanglements. My work with people follows what I've learned from a lifetime of confronting a physical, intellectual, moral, or spiritual tangle. It starts with observing it, finding an exposure to tug on, walking around it, tugging again. The hard part begins here: holding the faith to keep tugging on it. I've been tugging on this writing for several days. In between, I've tugged on multiple others of my life's knots, including breakfast.

At the same time, there's no equation for what makes a knot worth untangling. It's the cognitive application of context and experience: judgment without certainty. Some strings will be abandoned because of judgment that the investment of time, attention, and energy, isn't worth the outcome. Other knots will be cut loose and discarded. A lot of the work of my personal life is taking care what strings I put in the box. Next is to spend time with people whose life's context and experience has accumulated as wisdom. We often associate wisdom with age, but I find important wisdom from much younger people whose experience comes from a different context than mine. There's another important learning here, often someone of any age whose context and experience is different from mine, can walk around the knot and see an optimum tug that I will miss seeing.

One more thing: I stayed out of the fourth dimension, but I found energy for my work this morning from The Fifth Dimension.

Warm regards,

Francis Sopper

REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:

Last week: https://www.kairoscognition.com/blog/d71d117b67f386c4

Explore: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0611320104

Coming: https://www.vermontcountrystore.com/holidays/category/christmas-shop

Second Law of Thermodynamics: https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/second-law-entropy/

The Fifth Dimension: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlrQ-bOzpkQ


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