Reason, Or Whatever You Call This Craziness
I was thinking about the Stoics again.
About their quiet confidence that reason holds the world together.
Logos.
Order.
Some hidden intelligence humming under everything.
It sounded noble enough in the morning.
Then I looked out the window.
A delivery van blocking half the street.
A man shouting into his phone as if the poor thing owed him money.
A woman dragging a kid who looked so done with everything it could have asked Jean Piaget for an emergency upgrade to adult age.
A cyclist weaving through traffic with the kind of confidence only fools and drunks have.
Reason.
What in God’s name were they talking about?
From where I sat, it looked less like a world held together by cosmic intelligence and more like a loose collection of accidents that somehow still managed to show up on time.
One thing happening after another with no regard for dignity or sense.
I watched the street longer.
Nobody out there seemed governed by reason.
They were governed by habit, fear, noise, and whatever impulse happened to hit them that second.
The only real logic was momentum.
For a moment I thought the Stoics were wrong.
Then I remembered they lived in a world worse than this one.
Plagues. Slavery. Nero.
Half their emperors were mad, and the other half were dead before they turned fifty.
They were not talking about what I was looking at.
The Stoics never said people were rational.
They said nature had a structure, even if people stumbled through it like sleepwalkers.
They meant that the bones of the world held their shape, even when the flesh behaved like nonsense.
I leaned back and let the thought settle.
Maybe that is the divide:
On the street level everything looks chaotic, ridiculous, unfair.
You only see the noise.
You see the van, the shouting, the tired child, the cyclist flirting with death.
It feels like fate is drunk and nobody wants to take its keys.
But zoom out and the patterns return.
Weather, seasons, growth, decay.
Life emerging, life collapsing, life emerging again.
Not neat, not pretty, but coherent in a way that human behavior never is.
Nature has order.
Humans have chaos.
Maybe life is what happens when the two run into each other.
That is why the Stoics sound wise in a book and insane when you are stuck in traffic.
They were speaking from a different rung of the ladder.
On the ground you get mess, noise, impulse, stupidity.
From a distance you get structure, cycles, things rising and falling for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Both views are true.
Both can be held without lying to yourself.
So I looked out the window again.
The van had moved.
The cyclist had vanished.
The child was laughing at something only it could see.
Nothing had made sense.
And yet everything was still standing.
Nature held its ground.
People did what people do.
And somewhere between those two layers, the world kept going.
Reason enough for one day.