Good buddy Richard Sandford don’t post often, but when he does, it’s always good. Here he is having one of those very blessed moments when the abstractions of one’s theoretical concerns are suddenly made manifest in the actual world one moves through:

… term has started in Bloomsbury, and while waiting to cross the road next to a guide dog and their trainer, looking at the crowd of new students opposite, I was struck by the fact that both the students and the dogs were each likely to be going through some kind of transformative pedagogic experience, one that would leave each of them a very different being, and, further, that they will share a particular time and place during which this happened. It seemed marvellous, really, that you could be on the street briefly accompanying two beings going through some sort of transformation, each utterly incomprehensible to the other, but meaningful to each of them. What other transformations were taking place on the same street?

What other transformations, indeed? Countless billions of them, every second of every day…

We are very much Team Heraclitus around these parts, so transformation is perhaps the only certainty available. This makes mock of any aim to control; the cybernetic steersman can only ever be put in charge of a polder, and the sea of externalities will always leak in eventually, no matter how optimal his algorithm. Thinking in systems is useful, until it isn’t. What to do when it isn’t?

Maybe nothing? That feels like the most blasphemous possible answer. But blasphemies are a truth of sorts; they highlight that which has been heretofore unthinkable.