The In-Between - Writing 101 – Day 46

I have so many other things I should be doing right now. The urge to write is too strong. Sometimes my muse gently taps me on the back. Other times he uses a sledgehammer. Then there are the occasions, like now, where I just can’t focus on anything else. There is a major writing project that I need to get a first draft finished in the next three days, but my focus keeps drifting. I can’t seem to focus on anything. I finally decided to just give up, do a little blog post writing, and see if that satisfied the muse. Maybe then he will let me get back to what I need to be doing.

I have been thinking today about some special places in the world. My day job is in computers, and when you boil it all down, it is ones and zeroes. When dealing with this kind of code, there is nothing else. If you are not a one, you are a zero. No questions asked. This is incredibly useful for machines, but incredibly difficult to use to depict the world around us. I have friends that work in Artificial Intelligence and, from what I understand, that is one of the difficulties in training a computer. So much of what is around us doesn’t fit into an either-or category.

Painting program and graphics programs, for instance. In the early days the colors were very absolute and simple. Things were either red, or blue or…well, I don’t remember the other original color. Color theory gets complicated when dealing with light versus pigment and I don’t want to get all the color aficionados mad at me. Suffice it to say, there were a handful of colors, but not many shades. Shades were tough for early computers, because they were not one thing or the other. They were yes AND no. Or yes AND yes. What color is purple? Is it blue or red? It is both? Well, how much of each? There are so many colors in the middle, depending on how much of each you add. And then you add a bit of some other color and you end up with so many beautiful shades. Colors are so much more than what zeroes and ones can tell us. They are not either or. They are yes, and.

This happens so much in nature that it is easy to forget. We are creatures very much inclined to break things down into a duality. We talk about day and night. We talk about light and dark. We talk about good and bad. We like to live in a land of absolutes. The problem is, this world, is full shades of color. Honestly, that is what makes it so beautiful. The old computer graphics programs struggled to capture that beauty. Without those shades, everything looked cold and false, static and machine made.

We can find these shades all over our lives. I like them and call them the In-Betweens. For example, day and night. I love the daytime. I love the sunshine and the blue skies and all the things I can do during the day. I also love the night and the moon and stars. Nighttime is one of my favorite times. But some of the greatest photographs, some of the best times, are in the In-Between. Sunrises, sunsets, twilight, dawn, that beautiful in-between time when the land is not ruled by day nor overtaken by night. It is in the in-between when we can see the beauty of what is and what is not yet. Many animals only live their lives during the in-between. They sleep and hide during the day and night, but come out during the in-between, the crepuscular, to feed and mate, to run and jump and live. Their domain is the In-Between.

Animals are very much creatures of the In-Between. We designate prey and predator, but usually, an animal is both. This one is predator on that animal, but prey to that much larger. The food chain is full of them. Oh, there are some that are all predator or all prey at either end, but the vast majority fit somewhere in the middle. Today, you may be my food, but tomorrow I may be someone else’s food. I wonder, if the cow I eat today, sees the worms that eat me tomorrow as predators or if they are really prey to the early bird that eats them in the morning?

Another of my favorite In-Between animals is the penguin. It has feathers and wings and lays eggs and its body structure is such that everything in my logic tells me it is a bird. And yet, I have never seen it fly. It swims in the water and eats fish. In a either-or world it could be categorized as a feathered fish, but we call it a swimming bird. It is not one or the other. It is a beautiful master of the In-Between.

Birds do that a lot. We expect them to fly, but there are so many that don’t. I mean chickens can fly a bit, but I don’t see great flocks of them soaring through the sky on their way to warmer climes. Turkeys, well, they aren’t much for majestically gliding through the clouds. Then there are ostriches and emus. They don’t zoom around on their wings much, but they are amazing at running. I don’t know how any of these can be classified as birds of the air, but as creatures of the In-Between, they are magnificent.

Good and bad is a tough one. There are some ideas that I would say are completely good, and other concepts that are completely bad. The problem is, those concepts tend to be that way, but the people that hold those concepts don’t. This is something that has become increasingly difficult in the last number of years. I don’t know if it was always this way, but to my eyes at least, people have become more and more quick to separate people into groups of ones and zeroes. If you agree with me on whatever is important to me, you are a one. If you disagree, on even one thing, you are a zero. The thing is, the more people I talk to, the more I see they are really in-between. We are all people of In-Between, more penguin than parrot, and it is those shades of color in us, that brings out the beauty of our sunrises.

It reminds me of a story. There are two young brothers and one slice of cake left. The wise mother sets the piece of cake down and has the oldest cut it in half. Then the youngest chooses which slice he wants. The oldest does the best he can, but he doesn’t do a perfect job, so one half is bigger than the other. The youngest chooses the bigger piece for himself, but then the mom gives the knife back to the oldest and ask him if he wants to even the slices out. He quickly cuts some off his brother’s piece and places that little bit on his mom’s plate. Now the youngest has a smaller piece. So, the mother gives the youngest the knife and he proceeds to try to even it out, placing the sliver he cut on the mom’s plate. This goes back and forth, each brother cutting a little bit off, trying to even the pieces out. In the end, the kids end up with a pile of crumbs and the mom ends up with a plate of slivers. That is what we are doing. We keep cutting people out of our lives because they don’t line up perfectly with our way of looking at the world. They are not aligned exactly with our beliefs, so they are a zero and must be cut. Pretty soon we are going to end up alone with a plate of crumbs.

I am not sure if I am being clear at all. All I really know is that, I like the shades of color, I like the sunrises, I like penguins. And I like people. People sometimes frustrate me, sometimes anger me and sometimes I one hundred percent disagree with them. But in the end, I’d rather include them in my circle, than end up with a plate full of crumbs. So I guess, what I am really trying to say is, I want a bigger piece of cake. Here’s to having a big piece of cake and eating it too.