My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life.  I aim to edit for smooth transitions but there's a bigger problem than prose styling. 

I've invested decades in research that trains my mind to follow abstract patterns.  I'm doing what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as solving for patterns.  The details become background; the abstract patterns become foreground. In this article for example, I'll make a connection between love, unemployment, genetics and our changing attitudes about God. Some readers will think I'm comparing apples to oranges to shoelaces but there is method to my madness or at least my colleagues and I think so. You decide for yourself.

Abstraction has a bad reputation. I remember once early  in this work I described it to a real estate developer friend.  He said "sounds very abstract" and I assumed he was being critical.  He said no, he meant it positively because "there's nothing so practical as a good abstraction." 

Pursuit of practical abstractions has a long history. Take the 2,500 year old Tao Te Ching, which Alan Watts once described as an attempt "to know the patterns, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy dealing with them."  In other words, if you recognize patterns with greater accuracy, you may make fewer mistakes, which frees you to enjoy life more.

Solving for pattern is itself enjoyable. Familiarity with the abstract patterns can make your life more like art,  a microcosm for the cosmic. Art exposes the abstract patterns that show up across arenas. Think of the way we savor the calligraphy of music or the metaphors in poetry and fiction. They satisfy a natural human desire for what I'll call pattern sensuality.  

As a pattern sensualist cultivating pattern fluency, I get to read my life like good fiction. No matter whether I'm winning or losing, hurting or happy, I'm always harvesting abstract insights into the patterns and structures of human and natural affairs.

A friend claims I saved her career once by drawing cosmic parallels. She's an intellectual property lawyer and about ten years ago was thinking about quitting because the work was so dry and soulless.  I laid out the ways her work addressed one of the meatiest toughest judgment calls in all of life, the question of when to be open.  I drew parallels between her work and central themes in evolutionary biology, romance, politics, friendship and warfare. The conversation inspired her.  She thanks me to this day.

Indeed, here's a Christmas gift offer from me to you. If you find yourself feeling flat about your career, I'd do the same for you. Just respond here with a short description of your work and I'll write you back something about its relevance to profound abstract patterns.  I've long wanted to write a series of books on the meaning of life as revealed through different career paths. Accounting as a source of general wisdom--that sort of thing.

Still, I don't let my friend's gratitude go to my head. That's because of the pattern I want to talk about today. My cosmic re-description of her law work may have helped her stick with it for a few months at most, but I've watched her over the years and her commitment is less about the meaning of her work than the immediate incentive structure built into her daily interactions.  People expect things of her that she succesfully delivers. She is like a reciprocating engine. She produces; clients demand more; she produces; clients demand more.  She may occasionally wake up to doubts about her work, but by the time she gets to work, she's just in it. As with all of us her self-motivation is less a product of cosmic patterns and purpose than of her inbox and outbox.

We're creatures of habits--habits reinforced by what people expect of us and how they perceive us. Others' expectations become the compelling do's and don'ts that drive us. Our jobs may feel like straight jackets sometimes but they're also the cylinders that make us effective pistons. They constrain us into specific focused vectors of motive force. Without them we go all floppy.