Life is more this and that, rather than this or that.

In the end, life is “all of these things,” though we draw copious lines around different dynamics, elements and aspects of life, separating this from that and these from those.  Then we ask people to choose which side of the line they want to stand on, or worse, tell people which side they’re on.

Eugene Peterson imagines the time when a piece of pottery – an incredible invention – was both necessary and beautiful.

As it is for clay, so it is for people:

‘Everywhere.  Functionally necessary and artistically elegant at one and the same time with no thought that the two elements could be separated.’*

Everyone is necessary and beautiful.

This is where we can choose to live, where in ordinary lives there exists the beauty of everything:

‘The ordinary moments of life – from grocery shopping to games of squash – are shown to contain all of life.’**

We may draw our lines, but, in the end, everything is one.  Mind and body.  Me and you.  One.   Perhaps we are on our way to discovering this.

Jonah Lehrer, contemplates a fourth culture in which relationships between humanities and science will be sought and explored, which will ‘ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate.’^

Sometimes we find ourselves in this fourth space, which is neither mine nor yours, but ours; perhaps one day we will stay and live there?

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist. Lehrer is referring to Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday.)
(^Froom Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.  Science and humanities form the first two culture; the third culture being attempts to bridge the gap between science and the general public, although, originally, it was intended to be a space both scientists and artists inhabited.)