Crazy

The more you look at something, the closer to chaos it gets.

The stars, for ancient civilisations, were ordered and patterned. They could be navigated by. They drew pictures in them. They were simple from a distance. More and more powerful telescopes have complicated things. Stars are now chaotic. Made up of matter and particles that can barely be comprehended.

I think most people have an ancient civilisation's approach to their own personalities. They only look inwards from a distance. It makes things simpler. They get up, go to work. They follow the crowd. They do the conventional things that conventional people do.

Once you start looking at yourself through the telescope, then things become chaotic. We start questioning everything we do. We realise how crazy the world is and how much more crazy our behaviour is.

You only have to spend a day watching TV or listening to the radio, listening through a telescope, to hear it closely; The world is seriously messed up.

And yet we defend the very habits that have messed it up. We have become voyeurs, glancing briefly at everything but looking closely at nothing. If we look from a distance then what we see is order and order is good.

That's why we like lists.Spotting car number plates, collecting and cataloguing. Alphabetising our CD collections, ordering our books by genre. Our work lives are ruled by timetables, our diaries are full. The mobile devices we buy all come with calenders and to do lists. We no longer need to look closely at what we are doing with our lives.

But looking closely is fraught with danger. We are not very good at thinking for ourselves. What on earth would we wear if adverts didn't tell us what was cool. What music would you listen to? What colour would your room be. Where would your room be?