If you recall, you have lived two different kinds of lives, one random and the other patterned. There’s a pattern to lives when caretakers control—think of going to school in the fall—and when responsibilities are unavoidable. Then there’s the randomness of thinking and lifestyle as one finds a Self. After such discovery, pattern again sets in, but it meets with variation and disruption at times, including semi-permanent and permanent adult relationships.
 
In times of pattern, some long for randomness. In times of overwhelming randomness, some long for pattern. How do you see your “lives”?
 
“What? You want me to say more? No, you don’t care because the point seems trivial and well known?”
 
Sure, pattern makes us feel secure and gives us a sense that the world is predictable—that the future is knowable. But that’s not the way of the world. Randomness and complexity are our lot, even during times of seeming patterned living.
 
Maybe the duality of randomness and pattern starts in the brain, where researchers have discovered through RNA studies that “62 neuronal subtypes [produce] glutamatergic, dopaminergic or GABAergic markers for synaptic neurotransmission and [harbor] the ability to engage in task-dependent neurotransmitter switching… [A] catalog of neuronal subclasses provides new understanding of hypothalamic organization and function.”*
 
“Say, what!” you exclaim—if you haven’t abandoned this particular blog.
 
In short, deep within your brain there’s more going on than we’ve previously either known or even imagined. It seems that we are simultaneously in control and out of control, that we impose patterns at synapses through complexes of neuronal subtypes that are not, ironically, in our control. Think of the role the hypothalamus plays in our makeup: It is responsible for homeostasis, a pattern of a healthy body, mind, and emotion. And now we know that there’s so much going on with 62 neuronal subtypes that upsetting the balance, the homeostasis, the healthy pattern, probably doesn’t require more than an imbalance in a few of the 62 subtypes.
 
In shorter, we’re not as much in control as we think we are—even when everything seems to be under control. Don’t fret. Maybe at times of seeming chaos, of apparent randomness in our lives, we should recognize that it isn’t that the world is against us as much as it is that we are ourselves against a patterned world. Maybe in times of disturbing randomness we ought to look at trends in our lives and in our capacities for at least temporarily imposing (at least as we think we impose) order on chaos.
 
As I have said elsewhere, “Give me chaos, and you make me a god.” That’s not meant, I hope you understand, as some blasphemous and prideful comment. It’s a statement of the way we operate to impose Self upon non-Self. If all were chaos, the world would be Self-less, and in the ironic nature of life, if all were pattern, the world would also be Self-less as everyone would simply lead a robotic existence. We can, at times, impose patterns on seeming chaos, at times, find Self, and with it, meaning and purpose. 
 
There are, in fact, identifiable trends in our lives. They are difficult for us to see because, were we to graph them, they would look like squiggles on a seismograph or like sunspot occurrences. Seismograph squiggles are large during earthquakes, but settle into little squiggles during periods of quiescence, and although sunspot activity seems to follow an eleven-year pattern, it, too, fluctuates. Both exhibit trends and apparent randomness.
 
Last, and in shortest, sometimes you are a Brownian movement; sometimes you are a Hurst exponent. Sometimes you exhibit a randomness; sometimes, a pattern. Look back; and look now to see your current condition.
 
*Nature Neuroscience (2016) doi:10.1038/nn.4462; Romanov, Roman A., et al.,  Molecular interrogation of hypothalamic organization reveals distinct dopamine neuronal subtypes http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4462.html 

What are you doing? I mean, what are you doing at this instant? “Reading you,” you say.
 
So, here we are, separated by space but connected by cyberspace, two minds somehow enjoined; yet, one has already moved on to something else, leaving, as it were, part of his mind for a connection only to be guessed out, rarely to be known.
What’s language?
 
Better: How did we come to this? We’re not just sending grunts through the vibrating air, not just chiseling runes in stone, and not putting pen to parchment. Yet, here you are, by yourself and not by yourself.
 
As insightful and as scientific as we wish ourselves to be, we still don’t know why we have the ability to communicate. We even use the word communicate in widely different contexts but accept a common understanding: Cells “communicate”; dolphins and birds “communicate”; humans “communicate.” All have “ways” and “language,” but no one can trace how, specifically, any two organisms arrived at the ability to link through “language.”
 
“Not so,” you say. The Foxp2 gene is the answer to why we can communicate. But that doesn’t seem to be the opinion of Robert Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics at MIT. As reported in MIT News online* almost a decade ago, Berwick suggests that the “Foxp2 connection is based on a whole chain of events, each of which is speculative, so there’s little chance of the whole story being right.”
 
Speaking about the difficulties associated with understanding why and how we communicate, Berwick says, “There are some things in science that are very interesting, but that we’re never going to be able to find out about. It’s a sort of romantic view some people have, that anything interesting can be understood.”
 
Seems that for all our use of it, both the nature of language and its evolutionary history are sill mysterious. Then there’s the question of how you are doing what you are doing at this moment. Berwick proposes that an “underlying sing-song beat” might connect poetry, music, the songs of birds, and how “our brains process language.” That is, there is a “metrical structure” that might lie not only under the control of Foxp2, but also under that of other genes.
 
So, let me end this piece with you / a real communiqué for two / in music that we both can hear / without vibration in an ear / In some strange way that now combines / in different places, different minds / Some hidden metric and some rhyme / Now crosses space and transcends time.
 
* http://news.mit.edu/2008/aaas-language-0217  
 

Physicists and mathematicians tell us we might live in a universe of many dimensions, in a multiverse, or, at least, in a universe among universes. Their hypotheses, based on clever math, make some sense and even suggest that a multiverse is arguably undeniable, even though it is as largely unimaginable as a third dimension is to the fictional characters of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). Like Abbott’s doubters, we crave a demonstration; reasoning alone leaves us as perplexed as the Chief Circle, a two-dimensional resident of Flatland who cannot understand what Square tries to explain as “height.” Yet, now more than a hundred years after Abbott’s novel, many accept the undemonstrable and take the word of the physicists and mathematicians: “Yes,” we say, “there is a multiverse, and even now researchers are working not only 'to prove' the hypothesis, but also to demonstrate the shapes of other dimensions.”*
 
So, let’s assume a proof obtained. Assume that we can both reason and imagine through computer simulations the shapes of other dimensions. Assume, also, a sophistication of worldview that admits to such variety previously satirized in works like Abbott’s. Now look at our hypocrisy.
 
Within this “multiverse” many of us still see a one-dimensional world in those who live differently or with whom we disagree. Is there proof of this?  Look at the bulk of politically-oriented comedy—if not all political comedy. While holding themselves to be multidimensional, almost all—if not all—political comedians see those with opposing political leanings as one- or, at best, two-dimensional. Jokes are always “aimed” at the other side of the “Political Center,” a side much like a number line that separates positive from negative integers, but is different in kind. The dimensionless number line is always perceived to be “thicker,” to have more substance on the “positive” side, the favored side the comic takes in ridiculing the negative side, so easy to satirize because of its simplicity in a recognizable flatness.
 
And the principle holds for more than political comedy. All the while many of us recognize our own “multidimensionality” and “multiverses,” we rarely recognize such multi-dimensions or multiple universes in those with whom we disagree. We see width, length, thickness, and time in our own worlds but fail to see the same in the worlds of others. Yet, the physical, emotional, and intellectual realities of all of us reside in the same universe.   
 
 
*University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Physicists Find Way To 'See' Extra Dimensions." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 February 2007. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070203103355.htm

For some reason, we have some need “to go back”: Revisit, reiterate, resolve, return, renew, remember, rejoin. Re means “back,” and with every New Year comes a promise to resolve. For most, resolutions are unattainable promises based on previous shortcomings in will power. They are more focused on looking at past failures with a goal of avoiding them. For many people resolution means a re-solving of problems past.
 
We can’t avoid thinking about what we have been when we go about thinking what we wish to be. The wish is always in the context of a past. “To fully start anew” is difficult. That’s probably why most advisors would suggest looking to achieve small goals, the baby steps of progress. Even in light of some grand epiphany—some insight that seems like a gift from the gods—few human changes occur without the context of and tie to the past. Breaking with the past is more like pulling taffy than it is like breaking glass. Even during the “change” the past imposes an elasticity of return.
 
So, if you are one who has given yourself a list of resolutions for the new year, ask yourself how each promise is more rooted in your past than in your future.