Insight

In time and place

My intention to tell about a moment of insight immediately reminded me of where I was when I had the insight. But why should anyone care where I was or when that thought came to me? True, but I found I couldn’t tell the story without including the details of time and place. That got me thinking about the stories of other people.

If I go back to Biblical stories, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, he marked the place with a stone. Jesus was in the desert, and for a specific amount of time, when he was tempted. His mother, Mary, was at home when she was told she would give birth to Him. When important things happen, the location seems noted, as if it holds some significance. Perhaps only as a marker for our memories, I’m not sure.

Years ago I was taking an accounting course at UBC in Vancouver. It was winter and I ran across a large intersection in the snow and arrived at the other side, out of breath. In that moment I knew if I did not stop smoking, I would eventually get lung cancer. Even though I’d tried to quit many times before, that time I managed to struggle through. My new insight didn’t make it any easier. It remains perhaps the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. But eventually life without smoking became normal and I remain forever grateful that I no longer smoke.

The point I want to make here, however, is that the location where I came to my realization seems connected somehow to the actual insight. Insights happen in time and in space. It wasn’t that previously I thought smoking was just fine. I was aware of the information out there. It’s just that, in that particular time and place, the information became personal. A moment of insight.

But the time I want to tell you about was during Covid. I went on a road trip as an alternative to the isolation in the city. I was driving in Alberta, north of Calgary, and it was a perfectly ordinary day. Silence inside the car, nothing to distract me from the scenery. I had my camera on the seat beside me, stopping often for a photo of the Alberta skyscape, or of the road in front of me. Almost no traffic. I passed a field. Pasture land, I suppose, surrounded by a fence. So I began to imagine how the fence came to be. Perhaps a farmer in the winter deciding to put in a fence, thinking about where he would divide the land. First measuring it so he’d know how long the fence had to be. Then choices about what specific kind of fence he wanted. Then he’d think about how far apart the posts should be. What kind of wire would be strung between them? I kept driving and imagining all the decisions he would have made. Where to buy the posts? Delivery or would he have to pick them up? A lot of thoughts that winter before he actually dug holes and installed the fence.

More clouds. More sunshine. Then a barn. A barn—before the barn had been built, someone had to imagine building a barn. Thinking about what size. Where to situate it? What exactly would it be used for? How much would it cost? On and on.

Nothing but the hum of tires on pavement to distract me from my line of thinking. Back to the fencing. The cost of fence posts, wiring, renting a post hole digger, etc., all could be calculated precisely. We knew the specific items that went into the fence and the cost, but no one knew how much thought and planning had been part of it. And the barn, same thing. There was an unmeasured integral part that gets no recognition. The barn could not exist without the thinking/planning part that preceded the construction. The fence could not have existed without the same.

My thoughts then focused on the road I was driving along. A lovely secondary road. Perhaps the thinking of many people had gone into the final construction. An item never acknowledged on a balance sheet. Next I considered the rental car I was driving. Now it seemed generations of thought had been involved in creating and modifying vehicles until the car had changed into the current version I was using. No one knew how much thought had gone into any one item in our world. It simply didn’t exist as a measurement. And I had gone from overlooking it completely to being astounded as to why I had never considered it before. It was like a secret ingredient of everything—thought!

I realize I may be sharing this with people who have always been aware that every item we have created has incapsulated thought/planning/intention. Invisible! Intangible! Incalculable! I may be the last person on earth who has realized this, but that is the way with insight. It’s the moment when we finally see or understand something. It’s individual. And it happens in time and place.

So I drove along with the sun breaking through clouds, my camera at my side, feeling slightly euphoric about my new understanding. Looking for aspects of the landscape that would make a good picture. A grove of trees, a hill off in the distance, wildflowers, a ray of sunlight highlighting some grassland.

Then another thought surfaced, related to the first. If everything we create requires thought, what about everything else? The land with its mountains and valleys? Trees and grasses? Animals, domestic and wild? What if thought is an integral part of creation itself? Not merely evolution blundering along blindly.

This has particular significance for me as I spent many years as an agnostic. Part of my problem was the whole question of evolution. I gave that topic much of my attention and energy for a long time. I finally concluded that I could believe in God because of my personal experience. But as to whether God created the earth I was standing on or whether it had just evolved, I felt I couldn’t decide until I knew the answer to every evolutionary argument, pro or con. And eventually I gave up on the possibility of that ever happening. I did not, and I would never have all the answers. I had my personal belief in a creator God but that was a privately held opinion. Now, what do I do with this new thought that has appeared? Share it or keep it to myself? I’ve mulled that question over for two years and have finally decided to send it forth.

I realize this is very similar if not identical to the argument for Intelligent Design. But the points made for and against the case for a deity have always seemed abstract, far removed from me. And I had never considered at the same time that everything we do requires intelligence. It seems too obvious to even mention it. So I had no internal link between God creating and us creating.

But my moment of insight, on a highway in Alberta, brought everything to me, inside of me. What if thought is an integral part of creation itself? I share this for those of you who might have similar questions.