Small Things Are Big Things, Big Things Are Small Things

Beauty as we understand it is a heuristic arising from human perceptual limitation, easily illustrated by the act of zooming in or out of a thing one considers beautiful.

A painting is a painting when viewed at an appropriate distance.

We do not typically perceive or think about the brush strokes.

Zoom in and you begin to see the individual brush strokes.

Zoom in further and we begin to see the colors as being tiny particles of organic and synthetic minerals in a carrier medium - these reflect particular bands of light more or less effectively due to their chemical composition.

If we started at this point, you might not even perceive that you were looking at a painting.

But as you zoom out of the tiny particles, you might perceive paint.

As you zoom out of the paint, you might perceive brush strokes indicating intelligent design.

As you zoom out of those brush strokes, you might begin to perceive the painting.

As you zoom out further to accommodate your personal history, culture, emotional state, and environmental context, your observation of the painting may result in the creation of transient moment of beauty.

This is an experience comprised of so many discrete elements that our human minds need to zoom out and use the simple shortcut of ‘beauty’ to understand its complex truths.?

That, to me, is art.

Everything in the known universe is likely to follow the same principle - the small, comprised of the even smaller, becomes the big, which makes up the enormous.

Human beings are a conglomeration of cells.?

This is undeniable, and yet, this is not all that we are.

Cities are conglomerations of human beings, and yet, this is not all that they are.

The planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the galaxy clusters, and so on - increasingly incomprehensibly-sized things that are at once the combination of smaller things and yet something else entirely.

They are at once individual and legion.?

The drop becomes the ocean, the ocean becomes a drop.

We understand music as being comprised of sounds arranged in time.

What is the sound of water rushing through a meandering river or the tranquil ambience of a forest in the morning if not the musical improvisations of nature?

But we have been born into finite lives and finite bodies, with finite means of understanding the objective realities of the universe around us.

To us, the tiniest, most infinitesimal event, occurring in the space of a blink within a blink on a speck of dust within a speck of dust in the context of the universe, seems gargantuan in its importance.

We are zoomed in.