In blindfolds and balls, part one, we left a spooked to grandma. She’s seen balls go through open windows and hit a wall. When she’s watching the pattern they make is what you’d expect. Multiple balls equal a big clump on the wall. But, when she’s wasn’t watching that big clump is not there and when she goes to look there is a wave-like pattern mark, multiple ridges, on the wall. Scary behavior from a ball! 

It is an analogy, of course, for particles and waves, at a micro-scale, and ourselves as more than individuals at human scales. It’s like seeing in color when all we previously knew was black and white—how we make sense of what we see and what we are actually seeing is new.

Timewarp

That’s easier to grasp as a physical phenomenon. However, it’s just as relevant for time too. That is liberating, it doesn’t mean we are changing the past in the sense of reanimation or anything like that. It rather means past and future are open. That’s confounding so back to grandma!

Bayo continues his story in his next letter to his daughter, Aletha:

Where we left your grandma last night was near both windows, recording which particular window each of our old balls went through. Because we aren’t so sure that grandma isn’t meddling with the throwing balls before they passed through the openings—even though she swears on her life that she has nothing to do with the queer results we are obtaining—we decide to move the poor woman outside the house, in between the windows and the freshly painted wall (I know this is stretching the metaphor but stick with me). 

Her job is like before… she is to carefully observe which windows the balls are coming through, after they’ve already come through it. Her eyes are wide open as the balls sail through either of two windows. As they land on the wall, the two ridges of stain marks (not the diffraction pattern) emerges. She shouts this out to us—telling us there is no diffraction pattern.

But alas, the thing we most feared happens: one of the balls hits grandma in the head, and she staggers away, calling it quits with our nonsensical game. We were blindfolded so we couldn’t tell where the balls were going through—and now, the only person that can tell is out of whack. 

Wild

We remove our blindfolds. Instead of two ridges—we see endless rows on the wall. Remember we had established an order to this madness before: when we don’t know which window the balls go through, we get only two. Now we effectively “switched off” our ability to know after the balls had already struck the wall, and even though to ridges formed, they disappeared after grandma walked away—it is as if they were never even there before. As if the moment grandma walked away, the balls went back in time and altered their behaviour, exhibiting, the diffraction pattern.

Yes, this is wildly strange. It is as if we changed the past. That’s rather uncomfortable creating fantasies of our nearest and dearest departed coming back to life or the second world war finishing differently. 

Fortunately there is as much better explanation. What matters is what is in the whole system. When grandma is part of that system and watching we get the particle behaviour at the time we pay attention to what’s happening. When she’s not there, at the time we pay attention to what’s happening, wave like behaviour is found.

It is close to what occurs in our world. For example, the Second World War was not the Second World War for many of its initial years. Yet, we refer to the whole period now from 1939 to 1945 as WWII. Did we change the past? Time has been articulated and re-synchronized through our current thinking patterns, individually and collectively. As we are part of the system, entangled with others who think of this time as WWII, that’s what it was for someone on the Maginot line in 1939.

Matters

Our (intra)actions matter­ each one reconfigures the world … there is no “I” separate from the intra-active becoming of the world. Causality is an entangled affair. Karen Barad

Seeing the world in color like this, shifting our thinking pattern to a new less determined world where you-I-we create complimentary circumstances and phenomena—matters.

Limiting ourselves to a causal determined path—we won’t change things as we’ll continue to behave the same way—forgets much collective brilliance, mind-shifting problem solving and new patterned answers. For example, current realities include:

• Flourishing next economies—see The New Possible here>
• Just societies overcoming prejudice—see We’re better together here>
• Community resilience overcoming stereotypes—see Hidden stories here>

These sit alongside our recent outpouring of collective local support systems on a global scale in response to covid this year. Plus reconnecting with our collective memories, a silver lining granted to us through the plague, e.g.:

• Richard Walley and Nyungar universal language here>
• Samhain: A halloween festival of change here>
• Standstill here>

Nevertheless, while this all makes sense, simply because it is common sense why is our global story—the current ‘rational economics’ meta if you like—so enduringly powerful? 

Being stuck on old thinking patterns can’t be helping. Thinking patterns such as the past is determining us and the future in largely inescapable ways.  And/or discounting the many localized pieces of brilliant positive shifts while disregarding traditional and local connections—the power of our deep collective memories/past-in-the-present. 

However, embracing colored thinking, this next thinking pattern, may help such local pieces become joined-up answers to our complex interconnected crises.