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Forests and trees

I am, at some level, waiting for that magical moment when being a grown-up happens. Theoretically, it happened over twenty years ago. But I don't specifically remember feeling any different on that day, and I don't know if anything specific ever arrived which made it "official" so to speak. The only thing which has changed — and this was a gradual change, which makes it all the more frightening — is my level of responsibility.

There are actually two definitions for the word "responsibility," and subtle shades of meaning between the two. One is more a state of being, an active effort toward making things happen — or suffering the consequences when that effort fails. "He shows great responsibility." The other falls more in line with being a regular noun, and it refers to the things themselves: "Here are your responsibilities." And yes, it's almost always going to be pluralized in that instance, because you can't have just one responsibility. Society doesn't work that way.

I feel like there should have been some master plan or design behind it all, but that hasn't been the case. Most of the time, life throws things my way, I deal with them, and plow on. I guess you could call it being task-oriented. Most of the time, it works pretty well... but it feels more like the "dealing with responsibilities" aspect than the "showing responsibility" aspect. I'm just doing what needs to be done, not exerting any real control over the process.

The phrase "emergent phenomena" refers to an unexpected result which arises from several less complex interactions. The flocking behavior of birds is a good example. Each individual bird uses a very simple set of rules to determine how close to fly to its neighbors, how fast to move, and so on. And to the individual bird, nothing else needs to be known. But what happens is the birds end up in a flock, which is nowhere in those rules, and is something you can't easily predict if you examine the rules.

So maybe there's something else at play here as I go through the motions of daily life, pay bills, work. Maybe from the outside, all these responsibilities add up and form something much more grand. If that's the case, I'd appreciate it if someone would point out to me what it is, exactly, and whether or not it looks like it's moving in a decent direction. Sometimes, it's really hard to see the forest with all these damn trees in the way.