It’s difficult to control something that wiggles
It’s notoriously difficult to get control over something that wiggles. A fish, a cat, a worm, a snake—the more wiggly, the more fluid, the less it can be controlled, contained, or even measured.
When you want control over something that wiggles, it’s pretty difficult. A fish is extremely wiggly. When you try to grab a fish, it slips right out of your grasp; so how do you get a hold of it? You use a net. In the same way, we use nets to hold on to the wiggly world. If you want to control a wiggle, you’ve got to throw some kind of net over it. That’s our foundation for measuring the world: nets with so many holes across and so many holes up and down to help us determine where each wiggle is in terms of the holes in that net. And this is how we break up wiggles into bits. This part of the wiggle is a thing, this other part of the wiggle is an event, and we talk about the bits as if they were separate things unto themselves. But in nature, wiggles don’t come “pre-bitted.” That’s just our way of measuring and controlling patterns and processes. —Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind
- previously: we are wiggles!
- see also: be like a cat and let go of yourself—the more control you exert the more you break