There are certain ideas that I find myself endlessly revisiting, ideas so flexible that I end up appealing back to their analogies on a weekly basis. One such idea is that of Zeno’s Paradox, which goes thus: In order to travel a given distance, we must first travel half that distance, then half the remaining distance, then another and another and another half – so how is it that we ever reach our destination, given this infinity of halves we must traverse? This is perhaps a bit of a silly question, but the underlying concept of continuum, of an infinitely divisible whole, is the foundation of calculus. Just as often, though, I imagine this parable in a more literal and literary sense – each destination we have we must reach by successive half-measures, each journey beginning with a single step.
This has lead to the formulation of what I like to call “Zeno’s Pep-Talk”: In order to travel a given distance, all you need to do is to travel half that distance twice – and in order to do that, all you need to do is travel half of the halved distance twice, and so on and on, increasingly tiny distances that you could traverse easily and at any moment while hardly noticing. The same is true of any large endeavor – it can be regarded just as easily as a succession of narrower and narrower slices, each individually trivial to tackle. This can be helpful for regarding large monolithic tasks – though perhaps less so for those already requiring many discrete steps, since slicing those up into a manifold array of smaller steps may only serve to make the problem more, rather than less, intimidating.
Some flexibility is required. Learning the route must come to be understood as a necessary part of the journey. All those little tasks that break down into littler tasks will have to be found and tagged like endangered animals along the way. This can be a dizzying number of things to keep track of – but, once again, the mere tasks of understanding, cataloging, pondering, and planning that you’ve probably been doing all along the way without even noticing are all a part of this vast progress bar. In many cases the solution to a tricky problem can be reached simply by describing the problem in sufficient detail.
All for one, one for all: Every division contains infinite sub-divisions, every set of contiguous divisions comprises a whole, and the eye is a lens that can choose which of these to perceive at its own leisure. My tendency is to knit together, to combine ideas like Lego, one to the next, until their combined mass becomes too much for me to handle and I get overwhelmed. Others tackle little ideas one-by-one as they arrive, and perhaps find them easier to work with but are never quite sure what it all adds up to. Some dream of forests, some dream of trees, but eventually to understand the landscape around you you will have to learn both.
Everything is conditional. Planning how to proceed is only progress if one subsequently proceeds to proceed; planning a route is only part of the trip if the trip is taken, a journey of a hundred miles only begins with a single step if a hundred miles of subsequent steps are taken afterwards. That’s not strictly true, though: What if somewhere along the way you find a better plan, a better route, a better place to be? You’ll be glad to have taken that journey step-by-step, and to perhaps only need to travel fifty miles after all – which that first step will serve just as well as a basis for and which, if it is in the end unsatisfactory, can itself serve as the first step on a longer journey, piece by piece, half by halved half by halved half-half.