Snow is a relatively new experience for me. During 20 years of my life, I only had notions of what snow was from childhood books, movies, and natural science textbooks. I always wished that it would snow in Guatemala, so I could go out and make snowmen, play snowball fights with my neighbors, and leave my footprints and write in a pure, unblemished layer of new snow. Quite naïvely, I had never quite come to realize that snow was actually COLD.
But in December 2004, I visited an aunt in Pennsylvania, and had my first physical contact with snow. And when I first grabbed a handful, my hand was instantly chilled. For a person who can't stand ice cream on his teeth or ice cubes in his drink, I have to admit it was a bad idea. My hand went numb, and my fingers got all red and swollen. Since that instant, snow was never quite the same to me.
By chance and fate, I also came into contact with snow in both Winter 2005 and Winter 2006. By then, snow was little more than pretty falling flakes and annoying sludge I was sometimes asked to shovel and sweep. No more playing in the snow for me. However, merely 4 days ago, I found some interesting conceptual analogies to snow that I feel urged to write about.
I was then inside the O'Hare Chicago airport, International Terminal, Gate 12, waiting to board my plane, watching dense quantities of snow fall on the runway and airplane from the other side of a huge window. As I distracted my attention with the gently falling snow guided by light wind currents, I came into the perception of several interesting concepts.
If I watched the snowflakes close to the window, they would appear to fall down faster, only because they were closer, than the snowflakes farther away from the window. This should be obvious to any 3D observer. But when I tried to see what it would be like to see both kinds of snowflakes (close and far away) at the same time, I found out it was very hard for me to do. Focusing my brain onto any one of the two kinds of snowflakes forced me to relinquish my attention on the other kind of snowflakes. It was like one of those M.C. Escher paintings - you could either see it one or way or another, but not in both ways at the same time. The brain (or at least my brain) cannot easily fulfill such unusual requests of the curious observer.
After some time of attempting to view both kinds of snowflakes simultaneously, my perception suddenly changed, just as it does when you manage to see the hidden figure in those weird computer-generated dot pictures. I suddenly had perception not only of the close snowflakes or only of the far snowflakes, but of both. But I also, unwillingly, perceived EVERY kind of snowflake in my eyesight's range - the closest ones, the farthest ones, and ALL the ones in between. It was like perceiving not only the tree, but the complete forest, consciously. And this is when the nice perceptions and ideas began.
It appears to me to be so beautiful that all things in nature just happen to be so similar. What is the number of solutions (or intersections) that two lines (in an euclidean space) can represent? The answer is pretty much intuitive: there can be either no solutions, (if the lines do not touch), 1 solution (if the lines intersect at exactly one point), or infinite solutions (if the two lines are one and the same). This same concept seems to apply to the number of entities that a simple observer like me can keep focus on. I could initially only keep one focus, but then suddenly, when I try to calibrate my perception to obtain two focuses, suddenly, naturally, ALL of them fall right into place. Now what do straight lines and eyesight focus have in common? I can think of a few ideas. But the analogy seems unequivocal, marvelous, and quite stunning.
Returning to my "infinite focus" perception, several things seemed especially nice. As a whole, the falling snow seemed like a big waterfall, but bigger, wider, and more complex. In a waterfall, all of the water at a certain level usually falls at a near-average speed, and the water's speed noticeably increases as it falls. But the "snowfall" I was watching was like watching a white super-waterfall. The superposition of all the visible layers of snowflakes suggested a white, water-like material falling down from the sky. But the difference was that, at any level, snow fell AT ALL SPEEDS. From as high to as low as I could see, snow seemed to be falling in the same place slowly, rapidly, and in all the speeds in between, all at the same time. It was a very impressive show, even more so because I had not really seen anything like it before, or had even cared to imagine something like that. But the result was both beautiful and majestic, sort of like something out of "The Never-Ending Story".
After pondering on the "snowfall" for a while, I perceived another nice impression from the snow view. If I imagined snow as coming towards me, again the distinct layers of snow created a marvellous effect. The background of the view, populated by the farthest snowflakes I could see, was constantly populating the closer layers of snowflakes, which in turn seemed to fall faster and faster. Each layer was constantly populating the layer in front of it, but still, the view remained practically the same. The farthest snowflakes were being constantly replenished by invisible sources (invisible to me), and the closest snowflakes seemed to simply disappear from view, without ever really reaching the window. This pattern struck to me a similarity with the human race. (Actually, it is similar with biological populations in general, but the human race allows for a more direct philosophical meaning). My view suggested that people, as we are, come out of nowhere, are inexorably dragged through our lives by time (to the snowflakes, gravity), and no matter how we wiggle and float and are pretty and manage to catch some few air currents to lead us somewhere else, we are anyway subject to time, and this very time which allows us our life, marks our journey to the end.
The farthest layer of snowflakes was the one in which I could perceive the most snowflakes, but it was also where they were smallest. I found this analogous to millions and billions of babies being born all the time, gradually growing up and getting bigger all the time, but always falling.
My last perception, I cannot remember if it was perceived in "infinite focus" or on "single focus" mode. Anyway, I was paying attention to the farthest snowflake layer, and observed the patterns of occurring snowflakes. It was awesome. The snowflakes in that layer, in a massive, statistical way, described some definite patterns in the way their configuration changed. Individual snowflakes came and went from that layer, but the change, as a whole, created a pattern. I somehow changed a "mode" inside my brain, and instead of only snowflakes, I saw patterns of blue and white. Curved lines, which reminded me of the cellular membranes I saw in my Natural Science textbooks, seemed to go in between the most noticeable snowflake configurations, and they readjusted continuously according to the positions of new snowflakes. However, the appearance of new snowflakes is by all means (as we know today) random, chaotic, without order. Even so, these patterns of blue and white were not. These lines changed in a continuous fashion - folding, flexing, stretching, shrinking - continuously. Though my perception is only human, I am quite sure that the patterns I saw were directly related to the snowflakes appearing. This most amazing perception immediately suggested to me that "natural chaos" is probably not completely chaotic, and some order, though not yet discovered, is likely to exist in absolutely every occurrence of Nature. And this is a very comforting thought.
These snow perceptions were very nice, and I suggest to any of you who can: "Try them". But my point here is that beautiful, and sometimes astounding concepts are easy to find in Nature if one is willing and just a little bit curious.
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