By focusing on the fundamentals, one can then be enabled to dig deeper into everything else that is above it. Things that are obvious to us, fundamentals anyway, are things like time or cycles. There is a constant and consistent exposure to these things, and since we take them in at all times, we don’t even consider them as something to make note of. With increased amounts of time spent focusing on what we actively perceive on a daily basis, one can begin to see, within their consciousness, what they normally see under an external light. In this particular case, it ends up being structures. We are surrounded by a world that is made up of structures. Just as with anything, to finalize your awareness of the fundamental, you have to understand how it is fundamental, what that actually means, and then investigate different ways the fundamentals are prevalent in life; essentially taking a pragmatic approach to this search. Alongside these qualities, finding the additional variables which make structures distinct from one another, such as the difference between stable and unstable structures, enables one to see how the structure will affect all that comes after it.
A structure is something that is built up from many different parts. When someone mentions the word “structure” to me, the first thing I think of is a house. That is a relatively complex structure, and it is built up from many different things in order to be what it is. There are many qualities about any house that could be altered or changed, such as the internals. It doesn’t matter what the kitchen looks like, or how many bedrooms there are, or even what color the walls are. A house is a dwelling for someone to rest in, and along with this expectation of what that label means, I also think of a house as something that is strong and can withstand weathering. Under my expectations, if it’s storming, a house won’t instantly collapse; it will be able to hold onto the ground and protect you from whatever is happening on the outside world. Yes, we know that with enough of a disaster, or with a lack of stability, this won’t always be the case. The main takeaway is that a structure is something that has many different qualities that build up to create the whole, and those altogether create the larger label.
Instead of focusing on a structure like a house, one could use something more abstract, like the parts of a story, as an example of an abstract structure. An exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion are all parts within a story which label the structure of the story. There is a beginning, middle, and end, and without these, it wouldn’t be so much a story with structure. It would be some arrangement of words that holds no meaning because it is only through the structure that one is enabled to understand why something is happening and where it is going. One could even look further into the structure of a story by thinking about choices made to create the story, why characters act a certain way, and perhaps how some aspects of the story are weaker or stronger, like a less or more obvious climax depending on the story. To take it even further, one could analyze the structures of grammar and words to understand why certain words are chosen over others, and how the structure of the language affects the structure of the story and whether or not it will make sense when translated to a different language.
Being able to identify these structures is great, but it probably begins to upset you when you don’t exactly know when and where these structures began. Why did we start utilizing structure in our actions, and how did we know how to do that, and how long did it take for us to identify structures that made logical sense rather than one’s of absurdity? It’s hard to say, but with many of the fundamentals, we can look upon nature for solace. While not the most satisfying answer, we have had no choice but internalize the outside world, and thus nature, and there is no lack of structures from within nature. The equivalent to a house could be a tree, and many of those build up a forest, which then plays a part in many other ecosystems, and so structures, being able to exist. These things are built up from many other things too, a tree needs the sun, water, soil, and then other forms of life rely on the tree to survive, and the reoccurring cycle continues indefinitely.
You could notice this pipeline continuing on and on, and it probably doesn’t have an end as we know it. Yes, in the case of nature, eventually there will be an end to the resources that create the life and allow it flourish, however, you can always build more upon something else, whether that’s something you notice or not. How many structures have we not been able to identify in the past that we take for granted today? How many structures can we still not identify and believe are impossible to know in the present? There is likely an indefinite number of structures present in our world, and we won’t have enough time to take all of them in, nor create all of them, but what we can do is know how to utilize what a structure is and then utilize that to increase our understanding, of which will hopefully be used to make our lives better.
Structures can be so plainly utilized as a tool for understanding and as a means to act. In my own life, I would say that 3nps scale structures are exactly this. You have three main shapes, a specific order to the shapes, a logical path to where those structures go, and relationships can be made between those structures. It’s learnable, repeatable, and allows the person playing guitar to quickly find relationships between notes without irrational levels of memorization. The only thing that needs to be memorized are the structures, which are just a few, but in that, the person unlocks and learns many other things that they aren’t even aware of until further poking and prying of music theory.
All things are made up of structures; things only exist as a result of having structure. Without structure, there is chaos, and chaos might be a reality, but it’s a matter of where you look, how you look, and what you make of it. We would like to say there is order in chaos, but it’s not always that simple. However, what we can say with certainty, is that in order there are structures. As this is the case, we can continually find more structures held within other structures; another case of recursion. Each structure has another structure within it, and each time you look for what builds up that structure, you find only more structures. It would be great to find the “core” structure, the most fundamental of all structures, but it’s quite the fantasy, and one shouldn’t fantasize about the impossible. Instead of trying to search and find the bottom of the bottomless pit, it would be more practical to identify the ways in which structures apply to our lives, and of course, why we would care about them in the first place. As already described before, you could have a structure, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be a stable structure. I want to focus on the stability and instability of structures within people, places, and things, and then onto more abstract concepts.
Human beings, just like all other things, are built up from many different structures. Within the biological view, we have structures that build up all the different parts of us; which facilitate our ability to function. Within the psychological view, we have all the things we have internalized and the people that have brought us up have influenced, if not decided, how we think structurally. These structures require maintenance, too. You have to eat, drink water, exercise, and many other things for your physiological uptake, otherwise, your structures will become weaker, or more simply; unstable. The instability of your structures goes beyond a biological perspective, and can just as easily be applied to how you are mentally.
I have experienced a large variety of unstable people. Their mental instability stems from a variety of things, and could go beyond what caused them to be that way in the first place. Sometimes, it’s just because they were genetically predisposed to a certain mental illness, or it could be because they were raised in an environment that led to them becoming unstable. Whatever the case, their structures could be known as confusing or inconsistent. It’s like the house example; an unstable house is most definitely still a house, undeniably so, and definitely is built up from structures, but many of the structures that make it a stable house are missing. Just the same, a human can have the structures that make up a human being, but be missing the structures, or have damaged structures, that cause their instability.
Examples of mental instability extend far in my own life, and I’ve described many of my experiences with those minds before in other pieces of writing. Recently, as when talking about the terribleness of drugs, the person mentioned would be plainly noted as someone lacking stable structures. The person was built up from instability ranging from their environment, their job, their drug use, their health, and all of these things mixed together to create someone who is completely and utterly broken and inconsistent, or simply, unstable. He was not able to notice how his behavior was contradictory to his interests and wants, which continually put him in an unstable state. This world is inherently contradictory, and we are a part of the world, but we create distance between contradictions, so that they might not be too obvious; we want to hide away from them. Yet, in the context of the instability of people, these are immediate to an outsider, but the person experiencing the contradictions stemming from unstable structures is usually ignorant to what is happening.
Mental illness will also demonstrate instability within structures. In many cases, it has to do with things that the person had no control over. Many are born predisposed to having whatever mental illness their parents had, or there are factors that impacted them, which they had no choice in, which led to them forming the illness. Most of the time, the person had no control over this, although there are times where it was their choice. To clarify, it was their choice in the sense that; they could have stopped whatever it was they were doing, and it was obviously having negative impacts on their body and mental wellbeing, but they didn’t. Yet, it’s not like they were aware of the specific detriments, such as a mental illness, would come as a result of their actions. This all goes to say that there was instability before the illness, and there was further instability thereafter. The structures that made up their mental health were unstable, and thus, we probably would be in rejection to them.
Rejection in the form of viewing the illness as undesirable, I mean. Yes, in many cases, we reject these people, and have done so to an unreasonably extreme level in the past. We would seclude these people into places that even nightmares wouldn’t be able to conjure up, but now, we’ve gotten a little better. There are more ways to give people who need support the help they need, and this helps the person function. Therapy, pharmacological drugs, and other forms of support help the one who is unstable become stable, and that makes their structures stronger, and makes the people around them lower their guard and feel more comfortable than before. There is a natural urge to get away from the unstable structures in our lives; we want structures that have stability and we require the feeling that those structures can be relied upon when needed. There are a variety of places that we hope have stability, because otherwise, we wouldn’t use them.
The example already used but worth mentioning once again is your home. It doesn’t have to be specifically a house; an apartment would just as well be an equivalent. What one would call a dwelling, or place to rest, requires some level of safety. Well, it doesn’t require it exactly, but it is desirable, and when it is not present, we feel unsafe. We likely will not sleep or our sleep will be poor for whatever reasons can be assigned to make the dwelling unsafe. This is a form of instability. A dwelling we know to be stable is one that we feel safe in. There aren’t people screaming, or fights within the place we live in, nor general violence on the outside that we believe can get inside. The structural qualities are to do with protection; these are usually physical, but in the context of the mental-world, it’s more-so to do with what individuals are present, or in some cases, what animals. To some extent this is something physical, but you could have a structurally-sound dwelling that is unsafe because of the people within it.
If wanting to focus purely on the physical state of the dwelling and its relationship to structures and safety, there is a focus on whether or not it can even standup. Whether it is from natural disasters, simple weathering, or from the person within the dwelling, these are all focused on the relationship between the physical world and the structure being able to hold up to whatever environment it is in. A dwelling we consider safe, and thus stable, is one that can handle a storm, and an incredibly safe one, and thus as stable as one can be, is one that can hold up to natural disasters. Of course, the opposite is true. In the case that it can’t hold up to any of these, it would be seen as varying levels of instability, and thus, losing how safe it feels to us. We have a natural association between stability and safety, and whether it be in a person or a place, we want it to be consistent and orderly, something we can rely on to be the same way whenever we return back to it. Just the same, we want this in places beyond our homes, such as things like public services or stores.
We want a place like a USPS location or a grocery store to be consistent whenever we come back to it. Imagine if every single time you went into a USPS location, it was always arranged in a different way, and prices were different, and the people serving you were different. Yes, we experience these changes, but they do not commonly all happen at once, every single time we are perceiving the place. The stability is from within the static-ness of the structure. If it’s always changing, it probably doesn’t have stability, just as one who has erratic and inconsistent emotions and feelings is something we believe not to be stable. The one who claims to see things we do, and then seemingly is lost in an entirely different world, and then comes back to ours; they are unlikely to be labelled as static or stable. Especially in a capitalistic society, if the prices are always changing for how much it will cost to send out a letter, whether increasing or decreasing, there will be confusion and fear. We want something to be consistent, and stay the same, and if it must change, that change must come slowly.
A grocery stores, as much as I hate them, are relevant and important. It’s a place that is required for functioning; you need to eat. There are ways to work around it, but the point is, it is the location where you will purchase food. If there is volatility in the prices of food, people will be very upset. Not only does it demonstrate change in the market they shop at, it also shows instability in the economy that they are a part of. This, once again, will breed fear, confusion, and a generally negative feeling. If the structures that build up their society don’t work; the ones that have allowed them to exist, why should they continually partake in them? Sure, this would be an extreme thought to have based on only the volatility in food prices, but it could be expanded to many other things. However, the point is, if the structures do not have stability, we are upset. This is most definitely true in both people and places, and things are just as relevant.
Things that have structures that are relevant to us mostly are the things we use on a daily basis. For me, this ends up being things like: my phone, laptop, desktop, and all the things interrelated with those things. Just like how one might become upset if there is volatility in the prices of food, if there is no consistency in the things we use, we distrust them and find alternatives. If my phone is consistently unable to call, text, or browse the internet, what do you think I’m going to do? Well, I’ll try to fix it, but if I don’t know how to do that, I’m going to get a different phone. If I need something to work and it doesn’t, and if I can’t alter the thing to make it work, then I’m going to use a different thing. Many of these things, like computers, are made up from many complex structures, and when on the bleeding edge of things, there are many opportunities for those structures to lack the stability one might want. Most opt to use the things that work without issue the longest, before moving onto the next thing, or in most cases these days, being forced to move on.
Instability could also be seen as chaos. I rely on my water bottle to be able to hold water, but if it were to suddenly have a hole through the bottom, how do you think I’m going to react? Obviously, I’m going to freak out! That’s chaotic and something that is not supposed to happen. What is supposed to happen, in my mind anyway, is things being consistent according to the patterns I know rather than random and unpredictable. Not only are structures a fundamental, but they are also based on our fundamental ability to perceive structures. We want to be with ones that are stable and consistent, with relatively little change. Things that aren’t even on a physical level; abstracts; are just as important as the things we can directly see and feel.
The structures that build up me, mentally, even on the most basic level, are important to both me and others who have to interact with me. Imagine if one second, I enjoy eating a particular food, and go out to eat with someone, and right before I start eating, I hate that food, and can’t imagine why anyone would want to eat it. Seems chaotic and irrational, right? If we expand this outside of the context of a person, we can speak of structures like government. They do have literal places to congregate and discuss, and there are structures identifying where particular government officials reside, but the system itself, perhaps written on paper, is also an abstract. One chooses to believe in government, and in many cases, it is to their benefit, but one may choose not to because they find that what currently is believed in by the majority is actually to their detriment.
A system like mathematics can be a powerful tool in reality, and it can lead to many real results, but as a result of being a system, it can be abstracted and altered for new purposes. This then can lead to errors which need to be corrected. There are also other fundamental issues, like using a system of mathematics to explain and understand recursions, which only leads to more recursions. There are always going to be limitations to systems that we want to use, and while they’re great, systems are built up from structures, and if the structures are not completely stable and unchanging, the systems built from them are also lacking that stability. There is not a complete stability, or complete consistency, or 100% of anything; there is always some amount of deviation. With that awareness, how might we identify the point in which there is too much instability?
This is usually dependent on the person. There is no set standard or known exact limit for a person to be upset, confused, angry—once again, any negative emotion—in reaction to a lack of stability in the structures they are focusing on. The moment when someone considers there to be too much instability is when what was once normal has now completely been altered, even if for only a moment. An easy example would be if you had a job, and then were suddenly fired. This took you from being in a state of stability (having a job) into being in a state of instability (lacking a job). Perhaps you have savings, and the fact you’ve been fired doesn’t cause an instantaneous issue. Is it still not unstable to not actively have consistent income when it is required? If this is particular situation doesn’t accurately depict instability, how about one with parental figures?
Suppose you’re a child, minding your own business, for let’s say, ten years. Your parents have never hit you, or even performed any kind of violent action in front of you. Then, suddenly, they are violent. Whether it be towards you, the objects around them, or between the two parents themselves; this, in your mind, must be considered unstable. What once was, no longer is, and it is seemingly unheard of, or really, unexpected. Expectations arise from what stays the same, and if something changes, our expectations are altered. The longer something stays the same, the more surprising such a change can be to us, and thus, we deem it to lack stability. What this leads up to is that, as beings who recognize patterns, we have to do the same thing with structures, and instability can hinder that, while stability strengthens that ability.
Stable structures are consistent. They are repetitious, and it’s hard to see them in any other way than what they already are. Can you imagine a sun but not actually a sun? Or a person but not actually a person? Okay… imagine a person suddenly combusting. Gruesome, but far from expectation, and based on all that you’ve seen, and all that you know, this is something unstable. It deviated from the mean, and now you’re in a state of shock. If it only happens to one person in particular, you’ll probably keep the system of thinking that people won’t combust in place, however, if more people combust, then your system will be altered. It’s unstable, yes, but as the instability becomes normalized, what was once unstable is now stable, because the instability is stable in its chaos. The instability broke our pattern, and created a new one.
Once we have something that is stable, for the longer it goes on, the more stable it will become. The longer you have a job, the more likely you will think you won’t be fired. The longer you work-out, the more muscle you will gain. These are linear expectations of what is to happen; once again, based on knowledge and experience. Something new and fresh to us will always be considered unstable, as we don’t know it, and then those structures will seem chaotic to us. However, bit by bit, we break them down, and what was once so chaotic is actually orderly, and from there, we continually dig deeper and deeper, to find more chaos, to then understand it, finally make sense out of it, and then repeating the process indefinitely.
Structures are a fundamental. They are unavoidable, and because we’ve perceived them, allowed them to become a part of us, and then execute them, we are then surrounded by our own structures. Some of these structures have stability, while others are lacking in such a quality, making them unstable. Whether the structure has stability or lack thereof; it matters not, as it can be still labelled and known as a structure. The pathway to knowing what that is, or what is once was, or what it will be, maintains. Structures can be identified with labels, and in doing so, one can then continually understand more structures that otherwise would’ve been looked past. Fundamentally, structures are a means to the functioning of a system, and these systems can range from simple to complex, all with their own little nuances. These nuances add up, and then create the whole structure, which is many different parts working together to create the cohesive thing that we’ve labelled. By perceiving structures in nature, we have been able to take what is natural to us and then use it for our own means, even in the most rudimentary things. There won’t be any end to these structures, nor our investigations, yet we must be wary that sometimes, it’s better to think about how these fundamentals apply to our own lives, and where they can be used to better them, rather than endlessly searching in the same of understanding.