I haven’t returned to what I was saying about fractals the other day because every time I sat down to write I found other stuff to write about, and anyway, although it seemed very clear to me at the time when I had the initial thought, it had got hazy by the time I was at the keyboard..
I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.
It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.
Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).
I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC