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At the The Guru’s Handbook, Asher Bey writes:

Determine to study botany, and you will discover entomology plays an important part in botany. Determine then to study entomology and you will discover that insects and the soil of the land are intimately related. Such is the tapestry – the ecology – that is the study of the world: everything is connected.And so, how can you study one thing, knowing that any deep investigation of the matter will touch on other subjects that are just as deep, require just as much study, and that those will touch on others and so on?If you lucky and you are a good teacher, one day one of your best students will, in one form or another, ask you this question. Why, they will ask, should they study so hard, if there is always more left unrevealed, if there is simply too much to know, if nothing can be truly understood by itself?This is a fine moment: your student has realized how deep and connected is their world.How will you answer?

Asher’s writing is very dangerous for me. The Guru’s Handbook indulges my already far too philosphical tendencies, my affinity for abstractions. But because With (this blog) is devoted to exploring the topic of connection, I think I should essay a response.I’m going to conflate Asher’s questions as follows: Why learn anything if – because everything is connected – you’ll never really be done? (This isn’t an entirely complete translation, but I’ll address those nuances below.) I offer these answers:First, why do you care about being done? Do you believe that there is such a thing as “complete” understanding? Completeness is a judgment that’s made by teachers, learners, communities of practice, and institutions. Each has their own ideas about what lines in the sands of knowledge are useful to them and there’s plenty of room for disagreement. Those judgments are part of what makes up a paradigm in a field. As people reach the edges of the lines in the sand, some of them turn back, and take advantage of the notion that they are “done” (at least done enough) and others keep going. Those people either transition to new fields, or – because it is useful to them somehow – they spend increasing amounts of time in the areas outside the lines. If enough people do this, we arrive at the kind of large scale reshuffling of turf that comes with a paradigm shift.Second, why not see this neverending quest as a good thing? The fact that you are never really done can be seen instead as the great delight of the pursuit of knowledge. There is always another mystery, always another enlightenment, always another thread to pursue, always another unravelling. As I think Asher and others often teach, the greatest joy is in learning, not in learnedness.Third, not everything is connected in equal degree. If you look at some of the network graphs that are popular these days, you may see a path from any single node to any other node, but the paths are not all of equal length. You may see that everything is connected to something else, but some things are more densely connected than others. Paths of connection loop back upon themselves, the way dictionary definitions do. All of which allows you to see clusters in all this connectedness. A cluster that has been given a name becomes a field of study.Fourth, you’re done when you say you’re done. All of these considerations create a kind of provisional nature to any field of study, any topic of interest. This provisional nature means that we each get to decide when we’re done and in so doing, tell the story of our own learning, in our own terms. To tell that story ourselves, rather than to hope for and then accept a sanctioned one, is to be authentic. This makes the vast interconnectedness of things a fundamental blessing.I’ve saved the fifth, most radical answer, for last. It may not be quite right to say that everything is connected; rather it is useful to say that everything is connections. Tim Berners-Lee draws on the dictionary example that I cited, when he describes the role of his insights about connection in the origin of the World Wide Web:

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related…. What matters is in the connections.

This brings us full circle to the ironic title of this piece. Frustration with the interconnectedness of things missed the point. It’s not that it’s hard to engage in making sense when everything is connected; it’s because everything is connected that anything makes sense at all.

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