Ahhh, you know the periods when things are running smoothly and what you’re doing seems to be working, falling into place like a clockwork symphony. It’s a welcome rest from the continuous challenge of adaptation and a nice utopist phantasy to daydream of any permanency of this state.

The constant unavoidable breaking down of the well-oiled machine, due to individual cog malfunctions, may be frustrating but it’s not really bad in itself. We don’t live in the world as a whole in its infinite complexity and fullness of everything going on at the same time. The processing power demanded and burden imposed to be aware of every single miniscule occurrence would be far too great to remain sane and functional and you’d be pretty much paralyzed by the muchness and multitude – all the time. Options here are burnout, madness or a sort of supernatural omniscience, but we reserve this for our imagined deities, as to at least have an idea that someone out there is aware of it all. Being aware of all that complexity is not even necessary. “Sufficient” or “enough” is just fine (we covered this in the post on “satisficing” concept). We create models of the world where some things are important and we pay attention to them and others just become background noise or we completely overlook them. So we don’t live in reality, but our version of it. This may be why you can’t understand how your partner doesn’t see the pile of dirty dishes, but goes mental about a few crumbs on the car seat. Dishes and their need to be cleaned to be reused might not even enter in their concept of “things to be taken into consideration”, but a car is a useful object that helps you get around and get things done and needs to be perfectly clean. There is a reasonable chance that, without you, your partner would own only plastic plates to be thrown away after use, and that you’d treat the car as a hoarders nest without him/her. It’s what you focus on and how you model the world and not everyone sees everything as important, but we’re all very sensitive to something that rocks the concept of the world we’ve created – anomaly.

Anomaly causes negative emotion – things throw you off the tracks by not going as you want or expect them to after investing time and energy to make things go your way. The anomaly might be an accident, circumstantial thing or a sign our model of the world is wrong somehow and we’ll keep falling in the same dumb pit over and over again, because there is something we’re missing or have a wrong idea of aka – reality does not match our expectation. Basically the recipe to be happy is to have low expectations, but that’s a story for another time. Back to the anomaly now. Our model of the world is by no means a simple 2D thing. It’s a mobile sphere in 4D (time included) which regulates how you orient yourself in the world and what you take as known. It’s also not uniform but full of concentric spheres nested within each other. So if an anomaly peeks it’s ugly head and something that should have worked doesn’t, you’re betrayed by a loved one, something crashes even if you’ve given it your all and were confident of the outcome, the whole sphere gets broken reverting through the established globes depending on how deep seeded was this belief, was it a core belief or something closer to the surface.

If what you want happens the model is sufficient enough to work, although it is not perfect. If it doesn’t work, something is wrong in your model and you don’t know what and anomaly, in most cases, makes you question multiple things if not everything. And that’s all right. You should reevaluate your beliefs and actions. This is how we change and mature. It may really be just an anomaly caused by circumstance, one of chance that something could go wrong, or it is a deep issue, a paradigm shift. We don’t know if we don’t examine, and sometimes we can’t know even if we do. So if the same “anomaly” keeps popping up for you, there is a fairly large chance that we are doing something wrong, and not the world, that we’ve misconceptualized some aspect of it in such discord with the real that we need to look at it again.

Change never needs to be perfect, just good enough to get the desired result. When things go right we’re prone to ignoring and taking them for granted, and why shouldn’t we? The system is obviously working and nothing is in our way here. That’s just energetically wise. Anomaly is what shakes us up and opens a new exploration space, which is energetically expensive, because a solution may be one or there may be infinite variations and we might need to try a few out to find what works. Where to begin? No one knows, so we just do and make a few (or more than a few) mistakes before we get it right, circling closer and closer to the solution and building a new model of the world. That’s ok, that’s life and figuring it out. Anomaly is here to help, no matter how frustrating at first.