Weird Place of My Mind

 My mind is strange place. Since my wife if gone at work, fighting the dreaded Covid-19 dragon, I find myself alone in the house on yet another cool,rainy and gloomy morning. At first my thoughts busied themselves with contemplating the evolution of the fishes of this world and then the more general evolution of life. (Did you know that 75% of fishes in today's world evolved in fresh water?)  In my mental model of life, I see all life as existing in an eddy in the river of time. It exists in the counter-current flowing opposite to the universal headlong rush to entropy, the lowest energy state. Like all the water in a river it can flow backwards to the main current, perhaps due to some obstruction, but it eventually rejoins the unrelenting rush to oblivion. Perhaps, and most likely, this analogy applies not just to life but also to existence itself. I think of existing in terms of mass and matter, but are not mass and matter not also just eddies within this steam flowing to oblivion? Matter eventually "degrades" to energy, but energy itself eventually expands and dilutes until it is nonexistent. A photon emitted from a star like our sun, streaks through space, getting less intense until it exists no more. Indeed, nothing can be said to exist unless there is an opposite state we term nonexistence. An immutable duality that that seems to permeate everything. There is no such thing as nonexistent without there also being existence and vice-avcercea. There is no good without there being evil; no god without there being a satan; no life without a death. Is the ultimate peace nonexistence?

My mind can not handle contemplating such deep trains of thought for too long before getting distracted by more mundane activities; before returning to the comfort of the circular flow of the eddies of existence. An object that my wife gave me snapped me back into more comfortable thoughts. The object is a wooden rectangle about 10 inches in length and 3 inches of width. Its sides are constructed of 3/4 inch boards with metal pegs inserted into the wood sides, so that they protrude upwards out of the sides to a height about 3/4 of an inch. The two long sides are separated from each other by end pieces of about 1.5 inches long wedged between the long sides of the rectangle and a similar piece supporting the middle of it My wife had given me the object as a way to support my cell phone in an upright position for the duration of a vides call I was expecting. I was intrigued as to what purpose this object was built to perform. It was obviously engineered for some reason but I was at a loss as to what that purpose was. Examining it closer I noticed that it was stamped with the words, "www.knittingboard.com." Like any good twenty-first century man I immediately got on the internet and navigated to this "location" in the digital world. There I found video instructions on how to use this device to tie specific knots in yarn around the metal pegs to create fabric and form it into socks or hats. The ingenuity of humans amazes me! 

From this point my mind wandered to a myriad of other directions in this eddy I find myself trapped inside. Why do I know so little about textiles and the processes of creating them? Why in my current society are these processes relegated so much to the female gender? Have they always been primarily so relegated in human history? Could knot tying be a form of communication? The Mayan culture sure made an attempt to do so. Communication, at its core, is an attempt to pass our information on to "others", both through time and space. Even our genes are attempts at such. But time and space is nothing without the duality of existence and nonexistence. I'm trapped in this eternal eddy so I might as well enjoy however it flows. There is no alternative.