![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Nov. 1st, 2005
(no subject)
Nov. 1st, 2005 07:16 pmLast bit of displacement activity before starting my Nano. Apart from food and the washing to be done, of course...
I am currently working in an office that faces onto a primary school playground - last week they were on half-term, but this week the kids are back...
I always say that it's impossible to imagine how much noise 70 primary-age children can make until you walk past a playground at break-time. Watching them (intermittently, of course - I have no desire to be carted off by the rozzers), however, has made me realise something slightly deeper. In the midst of all that shouting, screaming, tearing around and falling over, there is a _vast_ amount of information being exchanged. It's almost like a human brain - a snarled-up synaptic scramble in may look at first glance, but somewhere beyond the details, something unified is being born all the time. In the playground, the friendships that are won and lost every day, the thoughts that flash like tiny sparkling fish across the infant mind, the crazes and the games and the enormous swirling mass of movement - all that is, little by little, creating human personalities, and some sense of the individual as part of the group. It's inspiring, even when it's giving you a headache.
I couldn't cope with being in the middle of it, any more than I could cope with being in the middle of a giant human brain. But it is extraordinary to see it all happening from outside, and to realise that, like the strange attractors at the heart of chaos theory, out of the unfathomable is emerging the known...
I am currently working in an office that faces onto a primary school playground - last week they were on half-term, but this week the kids are back...
I always say that it's impossible to imagine how much noise 70 primary-age children can make until you walk past a playground at break-time. Watching them (intermittently, of course - I have no desire to be carted off by the rozzers), however, has made me realise something slightly deeper. In the midst of all that shouting, screaming, tearing around and falling over, there is a _vast_ amount of information being exchanged. It's almost like a human brain - a snarled-up synaptic scramble in may look at first glance, but somewhere beyond the details, something unified is being born all the time. In the playground, the friendships that are won and lost every day, the thoughts that flash like tiny sparkling fish across the infant mind, the crazes and the games and the enormous swirling mass of movement - all that is, little by little, creating human personalities, and some sense of the individual as part of the group. It's inspiring, even when it's giving you a headache.
I couldn't cope with being in the middle of it, any more than I could cope with being in the middle of a giant human brain. But it is extraordinary to see it all happening from outside, and to realise that, like the strange attractors at the heart of chaos theory, out of the unfathomable is emerging the known...
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}