What a thought-provoking perspective. This hit me on a few cylinders.
Especially:“we want the person who broke the container to help us sweep up the glass.”
Oof.
There’s something strangely comforting about hearing someone say maybe closure isn’t the goal at all. Maybe learning to live, love, grieve, and still keep building a life inside the uncertainty is the work.
This was a bittersweet read with parts that will stick with me. Thank you.
The idea that we're waiting for the person who broke the container to help sweep up the glass is such a good way of describing it. I think a lot of people get stuck believing they need one final conversation before they can move forward, when sometimes that conversation never comes. What I've learned is that unanswered questions can take up less space over time even when they never get answered. Life keeps growing around them.
Hmmm Gabriella. This feels like such a powerful & enlightened way to look at closure & grief. It's soooo much closer to how real life unfolds: messy, unresolved, both/& --- instead of either/or
&& I love how you name living with unanswered qs as an act of relational capacity, instead of failure, & the framing if hope not as a feeling that magically arrives, but as building a life that will most likely always feel unfinished
Against the Flattened Enlightenment: On Waves, Spirals, and Reality Orientation
The contemporary West still carries a silent inheritance from the so-called Enlightenment : an orientation toward reality that privileges detachment, mechanism, and dualistic clarity. It is an orientation that assumes the world is fundamentally made of discrete parts whose interactions can be fully mapped, controlled, and predicted. Reason, in this framework, stands above nature as its transparent witness; the mind surveys matter from a safe, conceptual distance.
But this “Enlightenment” vision—celebrated for liberating inquiry—has hardened into a cognitive posture of negation, weakness, helplessness, tyranny and resistance to change that now constrains and threatens to destroy humanity. In a world understood only as assembled components, processes become problems, organisms become machines, and feeling and self-regulation becomes noise to be destroyed. The cost is not subtle but profound: a misalignment between the way life actually forms and the way we imagine reality is structured and felt.
To see this mismatch, one only has to look at the beginning of biological life—not metaphorically, but literally.
The World Begins in Spirals, Not Points
When an egg cell is fertilized, growth does not begin with blueprint-like instructions flowing down a linear chain. Instead, what unfolds is a choreography of waves: spirals ripples sweeping across the egg’s surface, billions of proteins cascading like microscopic weather systems, tiny hurricane-like vortices emerging, colliding, dissolving.
Some spirals co-arise and then swirl away in opposite directions. Others crash against each other and vanish instantly. All of them—organized yet indeterminate—tell the egg where to fold, where to divide, where to differentiate. The organism is not assembled; it is in-formed from within, shaped by dynamic patterns that precede and exceed any stable “thingness.”
These waves are not unique to embryogenesis. Their behavior mirrors other systems across nature: vortices in quantum fluids, atmospheric circulations, oceanic eddies, even the propagating electrical spirals that animate heart tissue and neural networks. Spirals show up wherever life, motion, and coherence meet.
In other words: reality is not built from hard pellets of matter but from patterned flows. It is not a machine but a field of resonances – the feeling and self regulation.
Toward a Post-Enlightenment Reality Orientation
A new orientation would begin with different assumptions:
that matter is fundamentally processual
that organisms are dynamic fields of self-altering – self regulating constraints
that feeling is not outside nature but one of nature’s recursive patterns
that understanding is not dissection but attunement
This shift is not mystical but empirical; not speculative in the pejorative sense, but speculative in the precise philosophical sense of expanding our conceptual repertoire to match the patterns nature actually exhibits.
The Enlightenment taught us to seek universal laws. Today, perhaps, we must learn to perceive universal dynamics—the spirals that organize life from the quantum to the cellular to the cognitive to the atmospheric.
What a thought-provoking perspective. This hit me on a few cylinders.
Especially:“we want the person who broke the container to help us sweep up the glass.”
Oof.
There’s something strangely comforting about hearing someone say maybe closure isn’t the goal at all. Maybe learning to live, love, grieve, and still keep building a life inside the uncertainty is the work.
This was a bittersweet read with parts that will stick with me. Thank you.
It's almost like permission to keep going, even if it doesn't make sense. To gracefully back away from the idea of "this has to be fixed."
Not easy, but necessary sometimes, unfortunately.
Thank you for sharing what stayed with you! <3
The idea that we're waiting for the person who broke the container to help sweep up the glass is such a good way of describing it. I think a lot of people get stuck believing they need one final conversation before they can move forward, when sometimes that conversation never comes. What I've learned is that unanswered questions can take up less space over time even when they never get answered. Life keeps growing around them.
Hmmm Gabriella. This feels like such a powerful & enlightened way to look at closure & grief. It's soooo much closer to how real life unfolds: messy, unresolved, both/& --- instead of either/or
&& I love how you name living with unanswered qs as an act of relational capacity, instead of failure, & the framing if hope not as a feeling that magically arrives, but as building a life that will most likely always feel unfinished
Against the Flattened Enlightenment: On Waves, Spirals, and Reality Orientation
The contemporary West still carries a silent inheritance from the so-called Enlightenment : an orientation toward reality that privileges detachment, mechanism, and dualistic clarity. It is an orientation that assumes the world is fundamentally made of discrete parts whose interactions can be fully mapped, controlled, and predicted. Reason, in this framework, stands above nature as its transparent witness; the mind surveys matter from a safe, conceptual distance.
But this “Enlightenment” vision—celebrated for liberating inquiry—has hardened into a cognitive posture of negation, weakness, helplessness, tyranny and resistance to change that now constrains and threatens to destroy humanity. In a world understood only as assembled components, processes become problems, organisms become machines, and feeling and self-regulation becomes noise to be destroyed. The cost is not subtle but profound: a misalignment between the way life actually forms and the way we imagine reality is structured and felt.
To see this mismatch, one only has to look at the beginning of biological life—not metaphorically, but literally.
The World Begins in Spirals, Not Points
When an egg cell is fertilized, growth does not begin with blueprint-like instructions flowing down a linear chain. Instead, what unfolds is a choreography of waves: spirals ripples sweeping across the egg’s surface, billions of proteins cascading like microscopic weather systems, tiny hurricane-like vortices emerging, colliding, dissolving.
Some spirals co-arise and then swirl away in opposite directions. Others crash against each other and vanish instantly. All of them—organized yet indeterminate—tell the egg where to fold, where to divide, where to differentiate. The organism is not assembled; it is in-formed from within, shaped by dynamic patterns that precede and exceed any stable “thingness.”
These waves are not unique to embryogenesis. Their behavior mirrors other systems across nature: vortices in quantum fluids, atmospheric circulations, oceanic eddies, even the propagating electrical spirals that animate heart tissue and neural networks. Spirals show up wherever life, motion, and coherence meet.
In other words: reality is not built from hard pellets of matter but from patterned flows. It is not a machine but a field of resonances – the feeling and self regulation.
Toward a Post-Enlightenment Reality Orientation
A new orientation would begin with different assumptions:
that matter is fundamentally processual
that organisms are dynamic fields of self-altering – self regulating constraints
that feeling is not outside nature but one of nature’s recursive patterns
that understanding is not dissection but attunement
This shift is not mystical but empirical; not speculative in the pejorative sense, but speculative in the precise philosophical sense of expanding our conceptual repertoire to match the patterns nature actually exhibits.
The Enlightenment taught us to seek universal laws. Today, perhaps, we must learn to perceive universal dynamics—the spirals that organize life from the quantum to the cellular to the cognitive to the atmospheric.
https://vegetativetraining.wordpress.com/against-the-flattened-enlightenment-on-waves-spirals-and-reality-orientation/
You vividly and perfectly explain the painful closure process. Thank you for writing the piece.