Yesterday, when I was having some Christmas lunch at a sushi restaurant with my 16-year-old son Aaron, the conversation turned to fractals.
I’m curious. Do you know what a fractal is?
If you look up “fractal” on Wikipedia, this is the first thing you’ll find:
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.
I don’t know the meaning of that little cleaning brush,* up there on the left. Is Wikipedia warning us that the “Fractal” article needs to be cleaned up and de-technicalized, so most people can understand it? Or is Wikipedia suggesting that readers should brush up on their knowledge of fractals, starting now? Or is that brush actually an example of a fractal?
Here’s what inspired the discussion of fractals yesterday: Aaron was folding paper, like so, while we were waiting for our food.
While he was folding, Aaron asked me if I knew what a fractal was.
Do you ever think you know something, until somebody asks you to explain it? As I tried to access my memory of fractals, I was imagining interesting, intricate patterns involving branching and lines getting smaller and smaller. I wasn’t sure that was correct, though.
Aaron told me that a fractal
- contains itself and
- is repetitive.
I wondered, to Aaron, if I were a fractal, because I can contain myself and I am sometimes repetitive. (If you don’t believe me, just read more of my blog posts.)
According to Aaron, I am not a fractal. I’m not sure what Wikipedia would say about this, since I stopped reading that article once I saw the cleaning brush.
I wondered, at the sushi restaurant,** if these things were fractals:
I then said something, to Aaron, that I’ve repeated before. That is, I mused out loud that the topic under discussion might be a bloggy one. To my surprise, Aaron expressed an opinion that “Fractal” WOULD make a good title for a post. I’ve never heard Aaron repeat something like that before, and I could hardly contain myself. So I knew I HAD to write a post, today, titled “Fractal.”
That brings us up to now.
This post now contains a dilemma, that my other blog posts** repeat and contain. How can I write a blog post which
- has the chosen title,
- contains myself (truly and authentically),
- repeats, in a contained way, enough of my previous insights, for continuity, and
- contains and repeats a worthwhile experience for my readers?
This post contains something else that repeats for me: Once my mind contains an awareness of something, I see it repeating, wherever and whenever I am.
That is, once I was aware of fractals yesterday, I saw them everywhere. When I went for a Christmas Day walk, I looked for and saw fractals:
Are those really fractals? What is your fractal impression?
When we visited my boyfriend Michael’s family** later in the day, were there fractals there?
That last photo not only contains curves (which Aaron names as an important component of fractals), it also repeats bongos (seen previously here, here, here, and here).
I don’t think YouTube** contains any repeating song named “Fractal,” do you?
This was as close as I could get:
That’s “Fragile,” in a live performance** by Sting (who created that beautiful song) and Stevie Wonder (found here on YouTube).
Because I’m a psychotherapist AND a human being who has dealt with medical challenges my whole life, I contain more repeating knowledge and understanding about “Fragile” than I do about “Fractal.”
But that didn’t stop me from writing this today, did it?
Before I end this post — so I can, perhaps, go see fractals at cardiac rehab** and at work,** too — here’s another photo, which I just snapped:
Regular readers of my blog** might have expected that photo to contain and repeat one of my cats, Harley or Oscar:
I’d explain that photo, if I had time, but I’ve got to fractally and fragilely run. Any guesses why I included that photo here (and whether it contains fractals)? Any fractal-post-related questions?
Thanks to Aaron, to Michael, to Michael’s family,** to Wikipedia,** to Sting, to Stevie Wonder, to Genki Ya Sushi,** and to all who read these posts, no matter how fractal or fragile you are.
* Apparently, your experience of this post may or may not contain one picture of a cleaning brush.
** Which may contain those who may or may not understand fractals, like me.