Noding about
Beauty Overload today, as I have been thinking about
beauty so much. What if
There is Enough For Everyone? What if pleasure steers us where we need to go as forcefully as pain makes us lift our hand from a hot stove?
Thought a lot about this listening to Chloe wire her brain up. She was in bed, and on the baby monitor we could hear her just bubb-bub-da-ba-bobbing to herself happily as she lay in the dark, not quite ready to sleep. She kept babbling for almost an hour before she tired and slept. I looked at her parents and said, "It's amazing: we're listening to Chloe building her brain."
So, she's a natural "practicer". I think it's a deep skill we're hard wired with: how to repeat things until we have wired enough neurons to store knowledge of them. Hmmm. And of course, play couples practice and pleasure.
It's a cliche'd observation that the sense of pain teaches an animal, human or otherwise, not to eat certain plants or sit too close to the campfire. It's a mechanism for reinforcing some lesson about the fit of one's body into this world: Of course your legs hurt. We're hippos, son; we don't leap from rock to rock. I am interested in observing the role of pleasure. How and what does pleasure teach?