Elasticity

“I look in the mirror and what I see is that part of the problem is me”. This is the words of a honest reflexive manager describing her/his inter-relations with colleagues.

I am so convinced that I have seen “elasticity” somewhere in positive psychology, but I cannot find it and that drives me insane. So, for now, I shall have the joy of defining it my way. The nice thing about dialogue is that it is a double string of soft actions, almost like a DNA-helix, but it can move mountains. Like others, I fear my reflection in the mirror of inter-being, because only narcissists are the fairest of them all. The rest of us see the flaws in our lived lives. But a mirror is an advertiser’s dream because it can do so much more than reflect the true picture. Not only can it distort reflections in any elastic way you may wish, but it can also deflect light rays. In this case, it gives us the joyous power to deflect incoming messages to wherever we want them. This is why I have a fear-joy relationship with my mirror. I am not forgetting the horror of the seven year curse if I break it, but that is a different story.

Elasticity is the ability to look in the mirror of life, become aware of a flaw and then morph into a flawless gem. Elasticity is also an advertiser’s dream because it is more than the flexibility to take the knock, and mock your own flaw. It is also more than the adaptive behaviour where you use your flaw to your competitive advantage. You hide it when it spells danger and use it when it can knock the competition over. To unlock the secret of elasticity we need to investigate the realms of complex and quantum science. Just a word of caution, the mind is not a continuation of the quantum universe because there are no quons flying about. Complexity theory says that simplicity at a lower level creates complexity at the higher level. If you stare down the funnel that links the two levels, you see that simplicity is aesthetically pleasing. If you study the higher level you will notice how the aesthetic values carry through to the themes generated in higher levels of complexity.

I apply it like this. We have opinions about ourselves, others and things. If my local narrative is inherited from my community narrative plus, any bits and pieces I generated myself, my narrative is two dimensional and rigid. Any damage to it is almost permanent. Ex. I think apartheid is a good policy and everybody around me agree with me (Remember we are self-centred. It is not they know and I agree, it is I know and they agree, even if I only bought into the idea yesterday). Now that apartheid has been trashed I must deal with it in flexible or adaptive ways, because I do not have a deeper level to generate a new different narrative. I’m stuffed. However, if I have bought into the narrative that evolutionary pressure changes the pigment count so that humans can survive sun exposure, then I have the tools to regenerate higher level complexity. The lower level beliefs are elegant with a soft symmetry between meme and deed. This narrative can take a bashing. Similarly, if I perceive all creation as curved space-time and creatures as temporary areas of peculiar atom density the differences between all creatures fall away. This multi-level narrative unravelled my inherited narrative completely and is woven into a background reality.

This is how I see it, and this is how I do it, for now. I live my life like a rubber ball and my mind jumps around like a super elastic ball. I reflect and reject or recreate. My consciousness and conscience deepens.