Heroes Not Zombies

I can’t look at this photo without seeing what seems to be this flower gesturing “come hither”. It just looks to me like it has an outstretched hand with fingers curled and the index finger beckoning.

Well of course that’s really what flowers are about. The plants make themselves beautiful and attractive so that their preferred pollinators won’t be able to resist them.

A few years ago I discovered some of the philosophy and science of complexity and it hugely increased my understanding of the world. If you search my blog for “complexity” and/or “complex adaptive systems” you’ll find several articles about it. One of the features of complex systems is the presence of “attractors”.

Attractors are like organising nodes. They influence the flow of energy and information in the system and partly influence the physical forms and shapes which emerge.

These knots in a tree are the kind of pattern I visualise when I think of attractors.

There are three types of attractor – point attractors which organise around a single point (think of whirlpools or black holes), loop attractors which have two points which interact (creating alternating states, polarities and interlinked opposites), and chaos, or “strange” attractors, where a number of points are active together creating complex, and often perplexing patterns.

I think you can see the effects of attractors in natural physical forms but I think they also exist in our psyche. Certain events, experiences and habits develop the features of attractors, keeping us stuck in the same place, cycling around and around established loops, or pulling us into feelings of chaos and confusion.

Maybe you’ve come across the idea of describing stepping stones in your life or chapters in your personal story. We can also use this idea of attractors which are related to significant life events. That can help us make sense of things.

But more than this I think we can use attractors positively, through deliberate patterns of thought and behaviour. That’s how we create new habits, and break free of old ones.