A recent conversation spurred this post.  It was about the continually-increasing levels of specialization in things.  I’ve covered this topic in a previous post with regard to Olympic games, but I think the trend is a little more insidious.

Our culture tends toward analysis (breaking things down into component parts), specialization (focusing on a single aspect of a larger whole), and compartmentalization (keeping component parts of things isolated).

This tendency extends straight through every aspect of our lives.  It is our culture.  It’s found in schools (no cross-disciplinary courses), sports (smaller and smaller skills broken down into individual events, or, the mind-boggling world of meaningless sports stats), economics (see current economic crisis – very much the result of a missing of the forest for the trees), work (my admin needs an admin), and exercise (most of my posts about exercise touch on this in some way).

For me, it’s the strange attachment that we have to statistics and numbers in our society.  As if they change anything.  The ground of our existence is still the Earth.  Nothing happens without it, yet we look at it less than anything.

Look for the whole picture more.  Going out into natural settings (woods, deserts, anything devoid of the touch of humans…hard to find, I know) is a good way to learn how to do this.  Being in nature confounds our sense of “order.”  It is completely orderly.  Nothing is out of place, yet, nothing is really “in place.”  Everything is beautiful, but not on purpose.  Just because it is as it is.

If you need a reason – read this paper.  Simply “taking in nature” will lower your levels of stress hormones.

I’m not saying we should reject the things we’ve learned.  I am saying that we need to relearn science.  We need a science that will embrace the total picture.  We need to adopt an inclusive, synthetic, generalized, and open view to balance the one we have now.