PIÑATA

April 7th, 2021

It’s very unusual for someone to sit down and write an entire book in one sitting.  And even the people who can pull this off can’t necessarily repeat the feat.  It’s a fluke, it’s a grand slam, it’s the exception that proves the rule about how books get written: you have to take a lot of swings at it.  

Tinkered Thinking engages in the same kind of practice.  There are perennial topics that weave in and out of episodes, and in some sense, the fairly sizeable output of Tinkered Thinking is an attempt to take as many swings as possible at such topics despite how tired, behind or uninformed, or ineloquent. 

When it comes to this universe that we seem to be inside of and somehow simultaneously a part of, it’s a bit of a piñata.  We’re not sure what it is, much like being blindfolded, and we’re not sure what exactly is inside of it, much like ourselves and all this matter that we as blobs of some of that matter seem to find ourselves surrounded by.  And we keep taking swings at it.  To figure out what it is, how it works and how to be a part of it.

Everything is like this.  At first we saw stars ad animals and characters of myth, and then we envisioned the world as the center of the universe, and then with another swing we displaced ourselves and finally came up with a heliocentric model of the solar system.  Who knows what another swing will reveal about the cosmos with just the right aim.

This process is learning.  When confronted with a new subject, you take a guess about what you’re looking at.  It’s like swinging at a piñata.  You might miss, so you come up with another idea and test it.  Perhaps there’s contact, and some candy spills out.  But the process is never ending.  Even when it seems like this or that subject has been exhausted and knocked out of the sky, there’s always another piñata to swing at.

It’s piñatas all the way up.