Recursion

I wondered aloud with a co-worker about the ridiculous degree to which events, phrases, circumstances or any number of things seem to happen over again and to what extent. It was one of those moments where we were thinking the same thing. One person voiced it and the conversation began.

It's so bizarre how life can spin out in circles like that, though. And I wonder a lot at who or what is to blame.

Is it possible that we are not fully aware of the power our minds possess? Could we be inadvertently venting out into the ether all these thoughts and feelings that settle on another person in any given period of time?

Why not? Stranger things have happened. I'd argue that there's got to be something to that theory for a number of reasons. One example would be married couples sounding more and more like each other as the years go by. They synch to the same wavelength. You might argue that each is just picking up on the behavioral and thought patters of the other, but that would be arguing that thought is a learned behavior.

Sure, you have to learn to think deeper than just superficial action/reaction, but if you argue that these couples have learned to agree with the thought patterns of the other, then you're acknowledging the very level of thought that would suggest they're fully aware of what they're doing. I think most would tell you ... they're not.

Then again, what if it's simply that we're all too stupid to recognize a mistake the first time it happens and this recursion is nothing more than the same lesson over again?

It's possible, too. I would certainly argue that people are stupid and can't recognize when they've fucked up. Plus, if the same things happen to other people, then it's easily arguable that we all have the same shortcomings. We all don't want to admit we were wrong.

I think that covers only a fraction of the recursion we experience, though. Life isn't all punishment. We're not all working our way through the same maze that has just one solution. If that were the case, conformity would be much more rampant. School would be about "learning the cheat codes" rather than ideally learning to think for yourself.

It would be boiling life down to a series of "problems" that we apparently haven't solved because they keep recurring. How would you account for the entire bell curve of the population encountering the same thing? Are we really more the same than we think?

This is my Pandora's Box of circles and tangents. Similarities are all-too rampant. Disparaties are strikingly unique to the individual. For me, there's always another side to this argument, another facet I'm not sure connects to any previous arguments at all. That ruins the possibility it's a combination of both.

I still hate considering each quasi-déjà vú event within it's own separate box. My life isn't a jumble of unique events, it's chronological. It's bound by rules of cause and effect. But it's not systematic either. There's no tracing every event in a concise pattern.

Until I figure it out, I think I'm going to go slug someone in the arm.

Jinx.