You have a canvas with a dot on it.
This dot can travel one space up, down, left, or right. A direction is chosen randomly, and the dot moves one space and is shown in its new location.
If you do this over and over again, you have a picture of the dot’s random path over the canvas.
There are many different types and shapes of random walk, and this is just one of them (the most basic one). They’re essentially just visual representations of randomness (here’s a random walk in action).
After looking at and thinking about random walks for a while, they start to look like other things to me — like paths travelled, and empty space, repetition, routine, decisions and erratic behaviour. Which makes me think, what would my life look like as a random walk?
So — life is a canvas, and I am the dot on it. Each movement of the dot is a moment of my time. Each time my dot moves in a different direction on to a white space, I have done something new, seen something new, or learned something new (well done, me). Each time my dot goes over an area already travelled, I’ve repeated an action (not necessarily a bad thing — habits are important, and not everything new is good). If my life were presented to me in the form of a random walk, how would I feel looking at my movement through time?
Something that struck me when thinking about this is that even if your dot is in a position that is really far away from where it started, its distance and direction aren’t surprising things because we can see the history of its travel. While each movement might be programmed randomly, we can understand where it came from and what led up to it. We can know that a dot ended up somewhere because it took a certain 500 steps first. We understand the most recent ten steps by looking at the ten steps that came before. Looking at random walks are a reminder that movements are made up of tiny decisions and layers of behaviour, and by watching them we can get to know our selves and lives better. We can predict the general direction of things, and have gut feelings (even if we don’t understand them at the time). Partners aren’t violent out of nowhere. We can’t gain ten kilos of muscle overnight. Our dot isn’t going to move fifty spaces in one go. Things escalate and fizzle out in processes that are observable* (whether we are in a position to actually see and understand these is another matter — which is why the phenomenon of overnight successes is so widely believed, because we aren’t exposed to all of the legwork and failure that led up to it).
So, back to canvases. Right now, I can’t really feel positively or negatively about my hypothetical canvas, because I don’t know what the ideal end canvas would look like — and that’s probably because this whole analogy actually really sucks. Intention is important, and on a canvas, there are no intentions because dots don’t have desires or personalities, and don’t suffer from trauma or oppression. Dots don’t have to make decisions, and don’t suffer from ethical dilemmas (hello, Chidi Anagonye). Here are more things (among many, many others) that ruin my analogy:
- When I made the random walk in the link above, I didn’t give the dot the option to stay in the same place. It’s impossible for the dot to not move, in other words. People and lives are not like this. It’s totally possible to spend time repeating damaging behaviours or doing nothing at all.
- Each movement and moment of time for the dot is the same size, whereas for us growth might feel like nothing for a very long time before expressing itself in an enormous, gratifying leap.
- Moving takes effort. Dots do not know or appreciate this.
- There’s only one dot on the canvas. If it were more accurate to life, there would be thousands of dots bumping around and into each other, changing each others trajectories.
So here are two ways to (maybe) make this analogy suck a little less:
- Restrict the analogy to the general concept of movement only. We aren’t gonna use dots to be judgy about micro-decisions round here
- Bring a little systems theory up in here and explode the one canvas out into many — one for work, one for family, one for relationships, etc. You decide how many canvases there are and what they’re labeled.
Now that you have a bunch of canvases, how would you manage movement across them?
That depends on what your priorities are. I relate to Chidi a lot — I want to live an ethical life, I don’t want to make breakfast decisions, and I’d like stable relationships so I can feel supported in other things I’d like to do. So my ideal love, food, friend and family canvases would be pretty peaceful. The exciting one for me is the learning canvas. For this one, I don’t just want to travel around it, I want to (channel Eleanor) cheat and break the analogy again. I’d like to multiply my dots, make them bigger, see if I can turn the canvas into a 3D space, etc.
Apart from all of these fancy cheaty things I’d like to do, what I want is to not have entropy. When a pattern becomes predictable enough that you can safely say there isn’t and won’t be any new information coming from it, that’s entropy (according to my friend who taught me about entropy. Friend, if I misworded this…my bad). I think this is applicable to all of our canvases, no matter how many we choose to have. It’s important to have habits and repetition and routine. It’s okay to have dots that make repeating patterns. But we need to be moving around enough to let a bit of newness in every now and then.
So. That’s a bunch of thoughts on movement through life and how we can use dots squiggling around a screen as a framework for thinking about life trajectory.** I’m not sure I managed to write anything meaningful, but if you found it useful (or even just interesting) then I’m glad.
* I’m not saying that getting to know people or predicting our lives is easy. Making a new friend is like being introduced to a dot which has a path of undetermined length, pattern, and colour, and more importantly, is invisible. You can’t ask to see the dot’s previous ten steps. You have to respect the dot’s boundaries and wait for the it to show you bits of its pathway as it likes, and even then, it’s not going to be in chronological order. This is hard. But we at least have general knowledge of our own paths, and sometimes we get to share space with another dot for a while. We might not have access to their path histories, but we can see plenty of their little day-to-day movements. This is such a cool and precious thing, and it’s easy to overlook.
**It’s cool that we can relate random walks to general movement through time. But what about the decisions within those movements? Let’s talk about cellular automata next, yay (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
