Thinking

In my previous post (‘Wandering’) I tried to give you some idea of what I think of as wandering. Naturally I did this in the context of walking, using posts that are directly walk-related. There is, however, a second side to wandering. It’s important too.

I wrote some time ago that the most wonderful thing about walking, especially long distance walking and especially when you’re alone, is that you have so much time with so little distraction. You have time to see, you have time to hear, you have time to sense, and above all you have time to think. Sometimes – perhaps usually – you’ll be thinking about the area you’re walking through; sometimes you’ll be thinking about the people you’ve met or the plants and the animals and the landscape; sometimes you’ll be looking back to what’s just happened; sometimes you’ll be wondering what’s waiting over the next crest. Sometimes, however, you’ll be thinking about something else entirely. A question comes to you, or an idea, triggered by chance perhaps, by something you’ve just seen or by something you’ve remembered; you turn it over repeatedly in your mind; it won’t go away; you argue with yourself; paths of thought open up and link with others you can remember following before; some of these are dead ends; others lead to bridges you cannot cross or gates you cannot open, at least not immediately; others lead into mires through which there are no tracks; some bring answers you are satisfied with or solutions you can accept; others you store away in your mind for another day. This is that second side to wandering. It too is neither aimless nor random.

I’ve got four examples of this second side to wandering: three are from previous posts and one is new.

The first two of these examples concern lines from the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us” (‘Trespass!’ 13 January 2018) and “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (‘Anything but!’ 24 January 2018). Each of these posts was a product of me walking along and thinking about something else entirely. I was questioning the wording that Tyndale used in his translation of the New Testament, which was later taken as a basis for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Why did he use ‘trespasses’ instead of ‘sins’ or ‘debts’, and why ‘but’ instead of ‘and’ or ‘however’ or ‘rather’? Simple questions that puzzled me for kilometres. In the end, pleasingly, I came to some very satisfying answers.

The third example (‘The Bourne Question’ 13 June 2019) concerns landform development, a topic that is of considerable interest to me as a geologist. It’s hardly surprising that something as unexpected as The Bourne should have got me thinking. You remember the problem?

‘…how can it be possible for a gully of the size and shape of The Bourne to remain in existence in its close-to-original state for more than four hundred thousand years? Surely it should by now have been filled up with a mixture of sediment slumping down from its sides and sediment washed in from the adjacent higher land. More importantly, surely it should by now contain thick deposits of decomposed plant material – the remains of all the trees and other plants that must have grown in the gully and by now would have been converted mostly to peat. But The Bourne hasn’t been filled up, nor, apparently, does it contain peat deposits. Why not? I’m still puzzling this out!’

Almost one year on and that’s still the state of play. So in this field I’m still out there wandering. If any of you want to join me in it, please feel free!

The fourth example of this second side to wandering – the new example – is based on another topic that interests me as a geologist, namely what are termed spatial processes. Stop! Don’t switch off! Let me explain!

Look down from above onto a part of the Earth’s surface – we’ll assume the area concerned is a rural one. You see the farmhouses there? Draw a diagram of their positions, representing each house by a point. Now do the same for the roads. Draw out their positions, representing each road by a line. Finally draw out the positions of the fields: use lines to represent the boundaries and give each enclosed field a distinct colour. Each of these diagrams shows a pattern – the pattern of the farmhouse positions, the pattern of the road positions, and the pattern of the field positions. These patterns are examples of what are termed spatial patterns. (For completeness we term them two-dimensional spatial patterns.)

Now look back at the history of that area. The pattern of the farmhouse positions will certainly have changed in time as farms were subdivided or amalgamated and new houses were built. There will also have been changes in the patterns of the road positions and field positions. The processes by which spatial patterns such as these develop and change in time are termed spatial processes. There, that wasn’t too unpleasant, was it?

The reason that geologists are interested in spatial processes is that geology is a spatial science. It is, moreover, a science that is concerned with time. When a geologist like me walks through an area and sees the landforms and the outcrops and the rocks of which they are composed, he looks immediately for any spatial patterns that are there. When he finds one he tries to work out how it formed in time. He looks therefore for one or more spatial processes that could have produced that pattern. What are the thought processes involved in doing this? Hmm, they sound to me suspiciously like the second side to wandering!

Next time I’ll go further with this example. Those of you who’d like a little background reading beforehand might care to get hold of Peter Medawar’s Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (American Philosophical Society, Memoir 75, 1969, 62 pp).

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