Breadth vs. Depth
Our lives are large swathes of events that are of no particular significance and small number of meaningful things. If I ask you to look back from whatever age you are and tell the most important events that brought you to the point where you are right now, you may tell about meeting someone who made a difference in your life or learning something that opened your eyes to an all new world or travelling to a place that changed your perspective on something.
You will always have such one or two things that you count as prime movers. But beyond that life is a vast desert dotted with sand particles that all look the same. You would have gone in circles just to find a few oasis.
At a meta level, you are just covering breadth all the time and depth sometimes. You may be immersed reading a book. You may be absent to the happenings around you. That’s when you are deeply within you. A book can do that. A point where you are absorbed in looking at a waterfall can do that. A good movie can do that. A beautiful painting can do that.
Anything beautiful has this characteristic of absorbing you fully into it. You lose yourself. A thing of beauty makes you go deep within you. You are no longer scattered across things. Your entire attention is brought to a point or a singularity.
All beautiful things are like blackholes. They suck you to a point of singularity within you. They put you in a meditative state and transport you to a point that is so deep within you. You exist as a point or not even that. You have simply lost yourself or you don’t exist in your usual self. Your usual self is the breadth you cover.
That is why, invariably humans value beauty more than anything else. We are beings that strive to find beauty in what we do. Beauty addresses the deeper part of you. You feel the oneness when you witness something beautiful.
When you think, you traverse breadth. You are no longer absorbed. You are scattered all over. You are normally like this. Our living does this. Relentless pursuit of meaning, of happiness. Constantly covering breadth, accumulating things, your self.
Breadth makes you cover space. Time is a by-product of covering breadth. You age by going places, meeting people, doing stuff. Time ceases, just like the singularity in the fabric of space-time when you go deep into something.
Depth is a totally different dimension than breadth. It is not like the cartesian coordinates of space or even the fourth dimension of time. It is about being in a higher dimension where these four dimensions become a point.
The universe must be a place of breadth appearing as space-time. Matter in it are blips caused by constant movement. They are flotsams. The blackholes causes singularity or the depth. They belong to a dimension where space-time is reduced to a singularity.
The constant dance of breadth and depth governs our lives, our universe. You need to move around to create this world. You need to stay in one place to escape it. You cannot be just one or the other. You are both.