Proofing the Bread

I am reading Letters from Murray Enkin over the years, handwritten letters written in airports, quick notes scrawled with wet hands after long thoughtful baths, letters that the biographers have not seen, letters that exist in one copy, letters that I have saved, even though ostensibly many of them were just written to help me with a decision or dilemma that has long long been resolved. The content has ceased to matter, but the philosophy of how stays with me in Daddy's words all these years. Messages? That the things that count can't be counted, that a decision has so many many factors, each factor entangling the others, changing the other's shape and colour until the big picture is not at all what the parts would suggest. Like the flour and the little granules of yeast that somehow danced with the gods of complexity and became croissants when we baked together for a brief but intense kick. In a study, the numbers are not each one unit, as each subject carries a different weight, and sometimes factors laugh: "We had a democratic vote. Daddy and Susie voted for Trocadero, Mommy and Janie for Pagoda, and Randy for Steak and Burger. And so we dined at Steak and Burger and wonderful time was had by all." The pleasure of little Randy happy and sitting through a meal without climbing carried a larger weight than the promise of delicate spicing in the fettucini. Evidence based research could be valid if we were able to weight the myriad factors and the way they shape and alter each other, if we we're able to step out of rational-mind, monkey-mind, linear mind, one equals one mind, for a moment and think with our complexity mind, our big sky mind, our multifactorial, sparking radiant mind. Should Randy and Janie get a Eurail pass and take efficient, cheap trains directly to all the places on their list, while visiting Mommy and Daddy in Oxford at the peak of Daddy's quantifiable years? More efficient, more reliable, quicker and cheaper may be the dependent variable you can isolate. But in real life the pleasures will come from the getting lost, from the unexpected little Newton Popplefords you'll happen upon when you're rained upon and shivering, from the friends you'll make when asking for directions you wouldn't have needed if you had followed a preplanned and efficient itinerary. Daddy's letters teach me that we can use the evidence and the available information to make our decisions, as long as we acknowledge that many of the factors can only be accessed by our wise, intuitive, nonrational, superrational, clever, dancing mind that naturally takes into account the differential weightings of factors and the way they intertwine, little beads of yeast and cups of dry white flour not lining up linearly but interacting according not to the arithmetician's rules, but according to the baker's rule, that the outcome will follow a logic of rising and surprising.