Inflection Points

 I have commented more than once how much I enjoy the good folks at Chant de Depart and their writings: Old AFSarge with his (very good) historical fiction, Juvat with his weekly updates of just life/running an cabin rental business/Wine cruises, Tuna with his occasional very thoughtful reflections, and Beans with a cornucopia of random subjects, some surprisingly deep.  I have said it before, but if you do not follow them, you are missing some fine writing.

This week there was a back to back set of postings that had me thinking:  one, a posting by a long-time comment Pawel Kapersky on the view of the current Russian -Ukrainian conflict from Poland, and the other a daily update in the ongoing series Sarge is posting about early World War II, in this case France just before the invasion.

This two contrasting pieces - one current, one about events 80 years ago - got me to thinking about realizations of the world changing, and how seldom it is a process that we seem to realize is occurring until, looking back, we always realize that it had happened.

It is not just confined to the sort of world shaking events the authors above are writing about: it happens in simple things as well.  The relationship that breaks that one realizes had fallen apart years ago yet no-one commented, the business that failed because it failed to take advantage of technological change and thus doomed itself, the religious organization that eventual fell apart because it made a key decision on a principle of faith that eventually dissolved its purpose for being.  The day you realize you will never regularly drop your children off at school again.

Most of the world and indeed, even ourselves, often do not notice that these moments are slipping by.  We realize it after some point of course, when the divorce paperwork is filed or the business goes out of business or the religious organization simply dissolves.  At that moment, we can look back and clearly see that point at which everything turned to a new direction; the old one simply ended.

I think there is value in coming to understand those moments, a value that our world scarcely places on such things - the world, of course, would simply tell us to be in the moment and follow the river wherever it leads, which of course presumes that the river is going somewhere that we want or need to be.  That is a pretty big assumption which can be more impactful in some cases than others:  knowing that Box store is going out of business in the future may be inconvenient if they have our favorite brand of crackers; knowing that the international political system may be reset has a slightly different impact.

The moments are difficult to catch - if we become caught up with and involved in the system to the point that we are always doing, and not observing and pondering.  History is a help here, from the history of states and how they act to the history of individuals in our lives and how frequently they break relationships and which dating relationship they may be on.  The signs are there for those that can see and think on them.

The benefit of realizing such moments is, I think, threefold.  One is simply that forewarned is forearmed, and to the extent we can see these sorts of changes, the better prepared we can be.  The second is that in knowing them, we are much less surprised of the changes in the situation as we always have a constant sense of awareness (zanshin  in Japanese).

The third, though, is the most important though perhaps the least relevant: it allows us to realize those points of changes and denote them in our mind, for the sake of memory or remembrance.  Knowing when something changed, we can look back before and think of those memories and events not colored by the new outcomes (which may have changed how they are viewed) but rather by the events in the fulness of their time and place in history.

A world that too often seems to value exclusively the stream of progress and future, where visual images and current interpretations come to dominate the way the world is viewed will be a world which, in every sense, no longer can understand how it came to where it was or even why it got there.  And to not know how one arrived at a point makes it all the more difficult to either move forward meaningfully or retrace one's steps.