Rhino Ramblings

A Patterned Rhino

A few months ago, I was getting dressed and my right foot was in the perfect position for me to put the sock on first.  I hesitated.  Something was off.  It just felt wrong. And then, over 68 years into my life, I realized I had a set pattern.  My left sock always goes on first.  I contemplated this realization and whether I should continue with the right sock first this time. But I mentally and physically could not do so.  I switched leg positions.  The left sock went on.  And then the right.  Then all was correct and good with the world.

This was a pattern that I was totally unaware of.  if I really wanted to, I could one morning put the right sock on first, but I have not tried.  It is not a compulsion.  It is not a ritual. It is not a good luck charm (i.e. I do not need, for luck’s sake, to put my left sock on first).  But it is a pattern.  And there is a comfort or certainty or just flow of activity that patterns can bring.  Maybe I should consider it a ritual – from the Frazer Consultants blog, What are rituals, and why do we need them?:  “Rituals can serve many purposes. They can calm our anxiety or increase our confidence.”  Patterns can have various levels to them from “just a pattern”, “useful activity”, “personal ritual”, “psychological dependency”, “OCD symptom”. My sock pattern (not the pattern on my socks) is mostly at the low end of “just a pattern”

The “useful activity” is demonstrated in a pattern I follow when making a pot of tea.  There are three essential steps and I have managed in the past to at one time or another make a mistake in all three.  The dumbest mistake was not putting the pot under the filter.  Not filling the water reserve is a second key factor.  And fully engaging the filter in the correct manner is the third step.  I have deliberately formed a pattern of touching each of the three components (pot, water reserve, filter) before turning on the machine.  An assurance that I did not let carelessness and/or moving too quickly once again cause a messy or inconvenient error to occur.

One of my earliest memories of noticing non-human patterns was walking through the woods behind my childhood house.  There were clear human made trails – some probably made by myself.  I remember noticing the animal trails – the patterns used to move through the woods always along the same path(s).  Of course, is turns out nature is filled with patterns – some are part of the ritual of life (like the animal trails I noticed in my youth).  Others are patterns that humans create.  I love when an attempt is made to create a pattern or find a pattern that is not really there but we seek out anyway.  Patterning the random collection of stars into constellations is one such case.  Outside of possibly Orion (the arms, legs and belt are indeed natural patterns that can conceivably be seen as a man), are there any real constellation patterns that meet whatever criteria the ancients used in “creating” them. Bear (pun intended) in mind that the big dipper – which is one heavenly pattern that matches the name – is not the constellation: Ursa Major is.  And I for one do not see an outline of a bear up there.

Humans seem to have a love/hate relationship with patterns.  We seek them out, in stars, in the structure of our lives, in the donning of socks.  We celebrate patterns of success in sports, business, life.  We assign pattern-ness in our religious and spiritual rituals.  And yet, we also celebrate when a pattern is broken.  We enjoy a book or movie in which the unexpected derails the expected.  In fact, we would be quickly bored in life if patterns were so constant as to be unbreakable.  One of the games most of us have played is the “what’s the difference between these two picture” game.  We rejoice when discovering the change in pattern.  On the flip side, I have been doing jigsaw puzzles lately – and the enjoyment there is in  finding the pattern so the pieces fit together in the right place and pattern. 

Beyond the obvious difficulties when pattern interaction reaches the OCD level (From the Mayo Clinic Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) site: “Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) features a pattern of unwanted thoughts and fears known as obsessions. … These obsessions and compulsions get in the way of daily activities and cause a lot of distress.”) there are lesser negative side-effects to our patterns and pattern breaking actions.  Returning to the stars, trying to find patterns and creating constellations from those patterns might be just a fun activity but can also led to misleading beliefs in patterns in our lives – i.e. astrology.  As William Shakespeare noted in Julius Caeser: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings”  Forcing something random (stars in this case) into a pattern and then taking those constellations and manipulating  a pattern based on random human created dates and overlaying a set of generalized human personality patterns to create a grid of “meaning” as manifested in horoscopes, is so many layers of artificially created order in patterns that even so somehow are accepted as guidelines to be referenced, cited and acted upon.

I am not advocating a rejection of pattern recognition.  It is our fate as humans and as animals, I suppose, to search for patterns, to put on socks in patterns, to celebrate patterns made and patterns broken.  I only advocate for my own pattern of contemplating such matters and occasionally taking the time to blog about them.