It is the day again. But I am no longer in the suburb of Washington D.C. , where I used to weave C++ code into a piece of software, and would take off from work on this day. I would buy flowers, lots of them, from the farmer's market in the early morning and arrange them carefully on my balcony. I would sit on the balcony looking into the lush woods and feel spring springing in the air. I would watch squirrels chase around cheerfully under the sun. I would let my thoughts drift, wondering about the perpetual questions of "being" - a human is born to this world without his/her own choice, is there a purpose? What is the purpose? And what is it to live? Now I am in school. I am reading Mitchell Waldrop's book, Complexity - Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. What beautiful minds they have, John Holland, Chris Langton, Stuart Kauffman, Brian Arthur!  Complex Adaptive System (CAS), it is such a beautiful idea!  "a dynamic network of agents," "interacting with and adapting to each other and the changing environment locally," "coherent behaviors or global properties of the system arise only from micro-level actions and interactions in a bottom-up fashion," "no central control," "no equilibrium," "non-linearity ,"  "perpetual novelty," "the whole is larger than the sum of its parts." The stock market, social insect colonies, the biosphere and the ecosystem, the cell, the brain and the immune system, any human cultural and social societies all are complex adaptive systems! Suddenly Physics, Biology, Ecology, Economics all come together under a much larger science. It seems as if the whole world had changed, but what has changed was just a view of looking at the world. "...A point of view? One with the twister in vista glide ..." John Holland quoted the poet Alice Fulton in his book Hidden Order, illustrating CAS to a general audience. I was amazed, thrilled, overwhelmed. In the afternoon I take a long walk along the Huron River. All the way my spirits are soaring high above the clouds. Thoughts hit upon me from here and there. All those questions that I have been asking myself for so many years, to which I have tried to look for answers from Socrates, Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, I realize, can be explained by science too, by this new science of complexity. If the edge of chaos is where the complexity lies, where the system can do things, hence where the system is alive, it can well be all the system is about. The more complex it is, perhaps there is more meaning to it. Could this be true for being? Is being nothing but experiences? The richer the experience, the more meaningful a life is? Fate is nothing but a path a human being makes for one's life.  There could be infinite number of paths for a life, but at the end only one is walked. It is not because this one is the optimal, but this is what the individual can make based on his/her "internal models" interacting with others and the changing environments where accidents are ubiquitous. This path may be comprised by many short lines with one connected to another. Where the path has begun and how the earlier ones have gone might well shape how the later ones go ("path-dependence"). While the path of an easy life may appear as a simple straight line, the struggling of a lofty mind can write a very irregular curve. The complexity of the path, not where the path ends, tells the richness of the experience.             We human beings are proud of ourselves being thinking Homo sapiens, rationally following social customs, political orders and economic rules.  We have evolved into such a highly ordered society that all one does is to find a position in the big production machine, stay there, keep running. The mass are performing everyday this way. Stability, as John Holland said, is death, so the mass are dead.  Isn't it ironical that we are becoming dead because of our intelligence? Fortunately there are a few people, artists and the like, still struggling for being at the edge of chaos. They make the human landscape a bit interesting and alive. Even though human societies have evolved into a highly ordered state, it doesn't ensure we are going to have this security forever. As one of many complex adaptive systems in a much larger complex system, the universe, we have to co-live and co-evolve with many others. Will global environmental change alter human destiny? James Lovelock has claimed that the world has passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilization is unlikely to survive. Will the energy crisis transform the human landscape into chaos? Gasoline price has been rising, oil production has reached the peak, it seems the time is coming that there won't be enough energy supply for those big suburban houses and SUVs. If this happens, will another "self-organization" start again? Will it be a better world after self-reorganization? Who will be the new world power? Will there be humans at all? Nothing seems impossible in a vast space of possibilities. Nature is beautiful because it is not completely settled into order, neither is it in total chaos. At the edge of chaos, new lives keep emerging while the old die out. That's where the loveliness comes from. It is constantly changing, and full of surprises.             Nature is beautiful, but we are destroying our beautiful home at an ever increasing speed. Urbanization has taken up more and more forests and precious croplands; wild life species go extinct faster due to habitat loss associated with human activities; fisheries have collapsed in many oceans because of over fishing; water resources have been contaminated by pollutions; severe natural hazards occur more frequently as a result of man-made climate change. What is sustainability then? Sustainability or unsustainability is but a global property of coupled human-environment systems emergent from the actions of humans and the laws of nature, the interactions between humans and nature and the long term feedbacks. Does sustainability mean that humanity and nature get to a state of equilibrium? Is it possible to achieve such a state? The new science of complexity tells us it's meaningless to talk about equilibrium in a complex adaptive system as the system is constantly in flux, and in "perpetual novelty". Then what can we do? Can we really do anything? Maybe the best we can try is to better understand ourselves and our partners and the interactions, respect each other as equals, so the game can at least continue even if we can't play together happily.  ... When I finish up the last chapter lifting my eyes from the book, right outside the window, the sun is setting, with a wholly new color palette and cloud pattern, just as any complex systems, always surprising. I run downstairs to replace my old car license plate with the Michigan one - I am so glad that I have chosen to come back to school. It's the first time in my life I have become excited about a science. It's the first time on this day things seem to have become a little clear. I even forget to eat my long-life noodles, the ritual I usually perform on my day. Guess it doesn't matter, if being is not about how long a life lasts, but "hanging on at the edge of chaos, be alive." I feel alive.
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