Silent Perfection

I broke my wrist a few weeks ago.  The whole process, especially since I got a cast, has been surprisingly non-debilitating.  Typically I don’t even notice until people ask me something about it.  But occasionally, tasks are just annoyingly difficult.  Some are just about normal.  Most are just slow.  Some are impossible; I give up and find others to complete them.  But a special few are infuriatingly possible, yet terrifically difficult.

Tonight, I found myself trying to clip my nails.  Of course, my cast hand was done in a flash.  But my still healthy hand—making that look nice and proper and up to the standards of society—led to a performance reminiscent of an incapable animal desperately trying to manipulate a human tool.  I was barely able to complete what I had understood before to be a simple task: trimming my nails.

I began to see how much I take for granted, if such a mundane, expected task is rendered near-impossible by what is essentially one digit’s lack of mobility.  How arbitrary and high must our standards then be, if this is all it takes for them to be nearly unattainable?  I know so many people whose normal contains problems that so outstrip my own temporary hardship that I feel guilty writing this sentence. While I would agree that we should all be more grateful for what we have, that is not the intended direction of this post; I would certainly not consider myself an expert on the subject.  I am writing about the silent perfection that surrounds us.  Our world is powerful and intricate, and we often focus so much on its flaws or mishaps that we fail to see that which hasn’t gone wrong.  My point is not to be appreciative of this perfection, however.  You must merely acknowledge its existence, in your body, computer, government, infrastructure, and almost every other system around you.  That these systems work so well is not surprising; if they didn’t, you wouldn’t be here to be unappreciative.  The important part—what led me to write this post—is the different ways that these systems respond to stress.

Perhaps more subtly, neither am I trying to incite fear about the delicate nature of our society, as plenty of books, movies, and save-yourselves-quick-by-buying-this do so well already.  I am simply asking you to consider the origin of these systems.  Some were invented recently and others have gone through years of testing in the field.  Can you tell the difference?  My body was well on the way to fixing the failure of a crucial structural component before I even put on a cast.  Meanwhile, I recently read that apparel stores lost $572 million from slightly warmer weather this season—in a taxi with hundreds of moving parts, that calculates my fare with ease provided by years of advancements in mathematics and computation, which I pay for with currency through my bank supported by my government supported by the world economy and the taxes the cab driver pays.  The animals, plants, and ecosystems we see exist because they rebound in the face of change; they can, will, and have weathered the storms.  While individuals—or entire species—might go under like a coat store in the summer or the VCR industry recently, the same cannot be said for the systems at large.   Genetic adaptation and evolution have succeeded in difficult and changing environments for as long as we can see into Earth’s history.  Our body’s predecessors have weathered more than storms.  The same cannot be said for our culture today.  We are changing at a rapid clip, more to outdo the present than prepare our future.  Monoculture crops, large computer networks, our global economy—these cannot withstand the failure of single components.  To build such a system without millions of years of trial and error requires effort and foresight to the extreme, but I would argue that this is a worthwhile effort.  Our current, silent perfection is a necessity.  In a system so delicately wired to the constancy of itself and the world around it, we struggle with change.  We live in fear of it, because while life is change, change might be the end for life as we know it.

I have seen how a tiny fracture in normalcy can dramatically change my ability to function.  It is a consequence of almost any complex system.  However, the ability to recover and adapt to such a change is crucial.  My nails are shorter now, even if it took a little longer.  Can we build a society that works as well after its infrastructure breaks?